Paranoia (Law & Order episode)

"Paranoia" is the 117th episode of NBC's legal drama Law & Order, and the sixth episode of sixth season.

Plot

Detectives Lenny Briscoe and Rey Curtis investigate the stabbing murder of a college woman.

The victim was in a course called "Sex, Violence and 20th Century Literature", which assigned "Literature in Cyberspace" readings from an internet bulletin board. One of the postings, revealed by the victim's boyfriend, describes the murder in explicit detail. Briscoe and Curtis use the board to lure the author into an interrogation. Briscoe, already angered by the investigation, pushes the interrogation too hard and makes the poster urinate himself.

A search of the internet poster's dorm room uncovers a pair of woman's panties. Although the victim's roommate is not able to confirm who they belong to, she does remember that the poster was hanging around her dormitory around the time of the murder. Under further interrogation, he confirms that he did take the panties from the victim's room, but still denies killing her.

An inconsistency in the roommate's story causes the detectives to check her whereabouts on the night of the murder. When the detectives return to the dorm to question her, they find her disoriented from an overdose of prescription drugs at the murder scene, where she offered a confession to the murder. While searching in her violin case for the drugs she had taken, they find a knife, later confirmed to be the murder weapon.

Jack McCoy and Claire Kincaid discover that the suspect had previously killed her sister, also by stabbing, while she was a minor. Dr. Elizabeth Olivet evaluated the roommate and determined that she suffered from paranoid delusions. McCoy offers defense attorney Shelley Cates (played by Sandy Duncan) a plea to hospitalize the suspect, but she declines.

When Cates's case is derailed by testimony elicited by a fraud charge, McCoy and Cates conspire to permit the defendant to testify in a way that would clearly demonstrate her delusions, against the best interests of the defendant. This is somewhat dangerous for both attorneys, since this is a violation of legal ethics. In the end, the lawyers are able to obtain testimony sufficient to secure an insanity plea.