The Family Hour

"The Family Hour" is the 393rd episode of NBC's legal drama Law & Order, and the season finale of 17th season.

Plot

The ex-wife of a former senator, a prominent New York socialite, is found dead in the rooftop garden of her apartment. A bloody fire poker is lying near her, and a wooden spoon is found inserted in her vagina. Detectives Green and Cassidy discover that both the son and daughter were abused by their parents, and that the daughter was frequently struck with a wooden spoon. When the detectives go to question the daughter, they find the senator leaning over his dead, bloody daughter, grasping a knife. Detective Cassidy then witnessed him poking himself in the stomach to make himself bleed. The senator claims that he killed her in self-defense when she stabbed him, and that she killed her mother. Physical evidence appears to confirm that the daughter did kill her mother.

During pretrial motions, an extremely emotional and erratic judge is extremely deferential to the defense in order to prevent the family any further trauma. Jack McCoy asks for the judge to recuse himself, but he refuses.

At trial, assistant chief medical examiner Elizabeth Rodgers testifies that the wounds on the senator are most likely self-inflicted. When challenged about the positioning of the wounds, she testifies that the senator could have stabbed himself in such a way to concoct a self-defense story. As she is an avid fan of crime fiction, she happens to know that a very similar situation occurred in a novel, and names a book that happens to be by an author the senator (himself a fan) collects.

After her testimony, Rodgers realizes that she has confused the novel with another one by a similar author and tells McCoy she has written a letter to the judge to clarify her error. District Attorney Arthur Branch, afraid that the judge is a publicity seeker, decides that the new information is not exculpatory and decides that it should not be revealed. McCoy disagrees and refuses to do the closing, so Connie Rubirosa does it instead.

At closing, Rubirosa makes reference to "a novel" during closing, but not the specific one referenced by Rogers. She mainly concentrates, though, on the physical disparity between the senator and his daughter, and notes that she was stabbed 13 times, punctuating her closing with 13 stabs of the knife into a law book.

The jury seems to be swayed by this, and return a guilty verdict.