FindLaw | Legal News & Information

Law and Order's depiction of a school shooting raises several intriguing issues: reminders of the Columbine Colorado shootings and similar assaults and slayings across the country, the adequacy of the juvenile system to handle such offenders and whether teenagers should face life sentences or have the option of psychiatric treatment.

After a masked student dressed in a black "Ninja"-like costume kills four students in a cafeteria and wounds eleven others, Detectives Briscoe and Green question several students. However, none of them are able to identify the student due to the mask, and the best they are able to come up with is a student's speculation that it may have been a student by the name of Howard Earl. One of the students tells Green that Howard was obsessed with guns and the Columbine shooting, although she then states that this doesn't make sense because Howard is Black.

When the detectives arrive at Howard's house to question him, he runs and is captured by Detective Green. However, they soon learn Howard has an alibi; threatening the city and detectives with a multi-million dollar lawsuit, his lawyer angrily informs the police that he was visiting his mother in prison at the time of the shooting. This leads them back to the school again, where a guidance counselor suggests that Colleen Jacobs could be a viable suspect since she was harassed at her old school and stated that she'd "like to kill everybody who teased her." This lead also comes to a dead end when Colleen's mother tells the detectives that she had just transferred to a private school and that she was in therapy at the time of the shooting.

The investigation takes on added urgency when the student council president receives an email from a user calling himself "Ninja Nightmare," which warned that the shooter was coming back to finish what he had started. The detectives meet with the school psychologist, who asks about the possibility of a court order. Green starts to make the call, but Briscoe says to wait. He convinces the school psychologist not to wait for a court order, and she opines that the email could have been written by a new student, Henry Semple, stating that he had been expelled from three private schools.

Briscoe and Green discuss whether to go directly to Henry's home or apply for a warrant first. Briscoe opts to bypass the warrant, telling Green, "It's called hot pursuit." Briscoe needs to brush up on the lessons from his police academy days; hot pursuit allows police to continue an active pursuit into another jurisdiction. The email's threat suggests exigent circumstances may exist, but the detectives believe Henry is at home, so the school cannot be in immediate danger. Briscoe's sense of urgency needlessly leads him to cut corners.

Henry makes a very foolish move when the detectives arrive; he runs to his bedroom for a gun. He is arrested, and the ballistics testing confirms that Henry's firearm is the murder weapon. At arraignment, Henry's attorney requests placement in a psychiatric facility in lieu of bail, but the judge denies the request. Henry's family then hires a new attorney: Jack McCoy's former assistant Jamie Ross.

Jamie immediately files a motion to suppress the gun and other evidence as fruits of the poisonous tree, the tree being the school psychologist's breach of privilege. Jack argues that exigent circumstances justifies the detective's conduct, but the judge rules against him and dismisses the charges when Jamie points out that the computer crime division had traced the email to New Orleans an hour before Henry's arrest.

However, given that students have a lower expectation of privacy in school, combined with the fact that Henry was not actually undergoing therapy with the psychologist, it seems questionable whether any privilege applies at all.

Frustrated by this development, Abbie Carmichael makes a very provocative - and dangerous - suggestion when she wishes for a federal standard allowing teachers and psychologists to release information without a court order. Such a statute would do great damage to the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, there is currently a bill pending in Congress that would permit the disclosure of privileged medical records to law enforcement agencies without a warrant or court order when exigent circumstances are present. See section 210(d) of HR 1215, the Medical Information Protection and Research Enhancement Act of 2001.

Other Reviews  West Wing  The Practice  Ally McBeal  Ed

In another interrogation of Kevin, the student with the camera, the detectives finally get him to admit that he had received a phone call advising him to bring his camera because something would happen with Henry. The murder charges against Henry are reinstated. Unfortunately for Henry, his father decides he can't take the risk that his son will be found not guilty and thus be released without treatment, so he informs Jack McCoy that Henry confessed to him on the day of the shooting.

The father is the only witness shown at trial, and the jury convicts on four counts of second degree murder. With four life sentences, Henry will have plenty of time to consider how he should have dealt with his classmates.

Past Law & Order Reviews | Message Boards