Surrender Dorothy (Law & Order episode)

"Surrender Dorothy" is the 224th episode of NBC's legal drama Law & Order, and the 19th episode of tenth season.

Plot

When a woman is found dead in the trunk of a car, detectives Ed Green and Lenny Briscoe follow a series of street art tags to a college student with whom the woman was having an affair. The victim's husband's father, also her therapist, hired a private investigator to follow her and take incriminating photographs when he began to learn of the affair. The father was a proponent of surrendered wives as a form of couples therapy, and was concerned that the affair would hurt his professional image and sales of his book, which featured his son and the victim as an example. Jack McCoy and Abbie Carmichael determine that the father used his influence as a therapist to convince the victim to commit suicide, complete with a suicide note, then covered it up to look like a murder. For this, McCoy and Schiff decide to try him for second degree manslaughter. At trial, the father testifies that he did not influence her to commit suicide, but in fact murdered her. Because the state already rested its case, it was too late to charge him with murder using the confession. McCoy used his closing to successfully convince the jury that the father was lying to protect himself, and won the manslaughter conviction. Afterwords, Schiff notes that the father either walked into a conviction on the stand, or bought a relatively light sentence (three years) for a murder.