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Naive mother who struggled to feed her newborn, or heartless woman who drowned out her baby's cries of hunger with loud music? This week's Law and Order presents a genuinely difficult question of guilt or innocence.

A young couple and their newborn have disappeared from their apartment, leaving a bloody bassinet. The couple is James and Amy Beltran, and their super has not seen them in several weeks. Detectives Briscoe and Palmer track them down, discover the baby's body, and leave the hard part for the prosecutors and judge.

It's lucky for Detectives Briscoe and Palmer that their police work on this case is just window dressing for tough moral issues and good lawyering, because they make a few moves that would not survive a judge's scrutiny. For example, the detectives track down James and take him into custody without probable cause to arrest him. A short chase precedes James's trip to the station house (giving Lennie the opportunity to do his best Dirty Harry imitation: "I've got a gun, you've got sneakers. Figure the odds.") While the Supreme Court recently ruled that the police are justified in stopping someone briefly on the street because that someone tried to flee (Illinois v. Wardlow, 98-1036, decided Jan 12, 2000,) flight from the police does not alone constitute probable cause. More importantly, the detectives don't even know whether a crime has been committed. This trespass on James's rights goes unnoticed, however, because he holds his own under questioning. The cops plug away a little, but James only says that his wife Amy split with the baby, leaving him to move in with his parents.

The detectives make their second legal blunder while pursuing Amy. Amy, it turns out, was not very excited to become a mother and had been seeking solace with a local ruffian, named Mitch. The detectives follow Mitch to his apartment, where they go through his garbage. (Though there could be some argument, this is probably legal. Whether you have a right not to have your trash picked through by the cops depends on where it is and how you store it, and Mitch's refuse ended up in a large public dumpster on the street.) Since Mitch has been throwing away feminine products, the detectives go to his apartment in search of Amy. When Mitch refuses the detectives entry without a search warrant, Briscoe pretends to hear a baby crying. Then, in their second trespass of the episode, the detectives brush past Mitch, claiming "exigent circumstances." Though police may be able to dispense with a warrant if they believe that a crime is in progress or that evidence is about to be destroyed, the reason for moving quickly here is invented. There was no baby crying; in fact, Lennie and Ed are at Mitch's door only because they think a baby is already dead. The cops get away with it, though, as they find Amy in the apartment but nothing that would be important at trial. Anyway, Amy throws suspicion back on James, saying that he took the baby.

The detectives get a warrant to search James's parents' house (inside and out) and find a freshly dug grave. The baby is buried in James's tool bag. At first it looks, gruesomely, like the baby was buried alive, but an autopsy reveals he starved to death.

ADAs Jack McCoy and Abbie Carmichael have a dilemma. They don't know which parent is responsible for the child's death, and if they put both James and Amy on trial, each will blame the other. Jack and Abbie fall back on the "prisoner's dilemma" strategy: whoever rats first gets the good deal. They go to James and suggest that they could go easy on him if he testifies against Amy. (Since a prosecutor never wants to give the sweetheart deal to the real murderer, James must take a lie detector test first. All the lawyers correctly acknowledge that the results would not be admissible in court - most courts do not consider the science reliable enough - but the test gives Jack and Abbie some comfort that they're not about to make a pact with the devil.) James then explains that Amy had trouble breast-feeding. She went to see a lactation counselor (who was evangelical about breast-feeding) and a Medicaid clinic, but the baby eventually died.

Abbie is incensed because unopened baby food and formula is found in the Beltrans' apartment. Even though James didn't step in to take care of the baby, Abbie wants to go after Amy. Amy is arrested and charged with second-degree murder (the intentional killing of her child) -- a pretty stiff charge for what looks like criminal neglect at most.

The first legal skirmish occurs during jury selection when Amy's defense lawyer passes out autopsy photos of the baby to the potential jurors -- who collectively gasp. This is a risky move, but a smart one. The photos will be shown to the jury at some point, and Amy should know in advance if they will sink her ship. After seeing the photos, every one of the potential jurors admit that they think Amy is guilty.

Since Amy won't have a chance before a jury, her lawyer takes another risk and waives a jury trial. Smart again. The facts look bad, and Amy is not a sympathetic defendant. While horrid pictures may cut short a jury's deliberations, a judge is much more likely to analyze the evidence as it relates to the elements of the crime charged.

The next good clash occurs when Abbie calls the lactation counselor as a witness. The counselor says she encouraged - Amy's lawyer says threatened - Amy to breast-feed, telling Amy that she would be failing her child if she did anything else. Indeed, she even told Amy not to feed the child a bottle because of the danger of "nipple confusion." The defense theory is now clear: Amy was young and inexperienced and thought she was doing what she was told. It's awful that the baby died, but the death was the result of a mistake, not intentional murder.

Amy's lawyer then takes the biggest gamble of all and has Amy testify. Most criminal lawyers agree that all bets are off when a defendant testifies, as the focus shifts from all of the other evidence to whether the defendant is believable. Amy tells her story, and Abbie cross-examines vigorously, pressing Amy to admit that she knew the baby was not okay. The writers handle Amy's testimony skillfully. She seems credible, but the facts are ambiguous enough that, even looking at all the evidence, the judge (and the viewer) have a lot to think about. In closing, both lawyers pound their best evidence: for Abbie, it's the autopsy photos; for Amy's lawyer, it's Amy's inexperience and the pressure from the lactation counselor.

The judge rules that Amy acted with "depraved indifference." She should have known that there was something wrong with the baby before he died and was careless to the point of callousness. Amy is convicted of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years in prison. Given the original charge of intentional murder, this is a compromise verdict and shows that even the judge cannot decide exactly what happened (or what Amy was thinking when she decided not to open that formula). If the judge believed Amy without reservation, the judge would have found Amy innocent. If the judge thought that Amy knew her baby was dying and did not feed him, there is little justification for not finding her guilty of intentional murder.

Kudos to the writers, however, because the verdict correctly captures the situation's ambiguity. My criminal law professor always said that criminal punishments are meant to express the public's outrage for breaking societal rules. To the extent there is outrage here, it is targeted at Amy for not doing enough--but also at James and the lactation counselor. While it is hard to believe a woman could watch her baby starve to death, James did not intervene and the lactation counselor insisted single-mindedly on breast-feeding to the exclusion of other nourishment. Indeed, the verdict and sentence show more confusion than outrage--confusion about the responsibilities of a young mother.

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