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This week's episode of Law & Order tells my favorite kind of story -- a good old fashioned homicide case. In the same vein as Dial M for Murder, Walter Groban, an architect, pays a hit man to kill his wife, Denise. She is a Civil Court Judge and a soon-to-be Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Justice Department (some artistic license is used here since there has been no permanent head of the Civil Rights Division in real life for quite some time). Both are fifty-something. The motive is somewhat bizarre; Walter feels eclipsed by his wife's career. He had previously moved from California to New York to accommodate her professional life. His own career, which showed early promise in the form of a prestigious architecture award, has taken a nosedive. He makes less than the paltry salary of a Civil Court Judge. In contrast, her career continues to skyrocket.

Walter's resentment comes to a head. As one of his Sag Harbor neighbors tells it -- without a trace of humor -- "he didn't want to move to DC, but who would?" So Walter hires a man who had worked with him on a mall he designed several years before to do the dirty deed. On returning to their Manhattan apartment from a short vacation at their cottage in Sag Harbor, Walter asks Denise to drive the car into the garage. The killer is waiting there and shoots her, taking her Jaguar to make it look like a robbery. The twist is that she is armed and shoots her assailant, inflicting wounds that eventually kill him. Denise survives, but is permanently paralyzed from a spinal injury. She also suffers permanent kidney damage requiring a lifetime of dialysis.

The difficulty arises when Denise refuses to accept the reality of some very fine police work and insists upon her husband's innocence. She serves as his alibi witness, claiming he was with her continuously in Sag Harbor on the day they left for the City. She thus undermines the prosecution theory that he called the shooter from Sag Harbor that fateful morning.

The investigative part of the episode is quite good and showcases the skill of both the detectives and the prosecutors in connecting Walter to the killer. By tracking car registration records, a credit card slip, phone and business records, and conducting numerous interviews, the police establish that Walter paid the shooter and then called him from Sag Harbor to alert him to Denise's unexpected return to Manhattan several days earlier than planned.

As is often true in real life, the investigation turns on phone records both from the Sag Harbor cottage and a Sag Harbor pay phone. As unsexy as they are, phone records are often damning evidence against a defendant. Here, the phone records from the cottage lead the prosecution to a neighbor who saw Walter hosing himself off after his daily jog on the morning he and his wife left for Manhattan. This witness powerfully contradicts Denise, who had told the prosecutors she was with her husband that entire morning. The information provided by this witness inspires the police to check the phone records for every pay phone along the path of Walter's jog. Sure enough, they find a phone call made from a pay phone to the shooter that same morning. Somewhat comically, the police also check the pads of this public pay phone for Walter's fingerprints. Although they probably didn't expect to find a match, at least they closed to door to any argument by the defense that they failed to try.

Another realistic touch is the use of a photo array by Detectives Green and Briscoe in seeking an identification of the seller of the stolen car. I took these same guys to task just last week for showing single photos of a suspect to witnesses in another episode. So it was heartwarming to see them get it right this week. The witness to whom the photo array is shown is a young doctor who bought Denise's Jaguar from a used car lot. Here the writers couldn't resist taking a shot at the medical profession. The doctor tells Green and Briscoe he bought the car under suspicious circumstances because he had medical school debt and couldn't afford a decent car. When Briscoe tells him he could have bought a legal car for half the price of the Jaguar, the doctor exclaims indignantly, "What, a Ford Escort? I'm a doctor for God's sake!"

While the investigation portion of this episode was very good, the portrayal of the actual prosecution of the case by Assistant District Attorney McCoy departs from reality in several significant ways. The most glaring error concerns the issue of Denise's competency to testify as an alibi witness for Walter at his criminal trial.

Depressed over the prospects of lifelong paralysis and dialysis treatment, Denise makes a civil court application to terminate her treatment. Walter's lawyers seek a temporary restraining order (TRO) from the judge assigned to Walter's criminal case. They wish to block Denise's application to terminate treatment in order to preserve her as an alibi witness. In reality, that request for a TRO would be made in civil, not criminal court. Here, the judge in the criminal case grants the TRO, only to extinguish it when the parties agree to a conditional examination of Denise. This means Denise's testimony will be preserved on videotape for the time of trial, complete with direct and cross examination by the parties with the judge present. The show does a very good job of portraying Denise's conditional exam in her hospital room.

Armed with an affidavit from Denise's adult daughter confirming that Denise is too depressed to think straight and the results of a psychiatric exam concluding she isn't capable of a rational decision, McCoy seeks a ruling from the judge assigned to Walter's case that Denise is incompetent to testify as an alibi witness on her husband's behalf at trial. He is unmoved by the prospect that such a ruling could adversely affect Denise's application to terminate her treatment, arguing that his job is to "convict this narcissistic son of a bitch."

The judge -- a friend and colleague of Denise -- conducts the competency hearing at which Denise testifies. Denise testifies clearly and rationally, although she continues to protect her husband by falsely insisting he was with her continuously on the morning of the murder. At this point, the show departs from reality again. During her cross examination by McCoy, Denise turns to the judge and says "Lisa, make them stop." This would never happen in real life. A judge with this close a relationship to a key witness would have to recuse herself from the case.

The show really goes off track when the judge finds that Denise is not competent to testify at trial. Such a ruling is well outside the realm of probabilities. In New York, anyone can be a witness if she is able to understand an oath and give a reasonably accurate account of what she has seen and heard concerning the events at issue. People with mental illness, even schizophrenics, have passed this test. With Denise, the question isn't even close. Although she was clearly depressed about her medical condition, she was a competent witness to testify at her husband's trial.

At the conclusion, the show loses touch with reality in another significant way. In a meeting with Walter and his lawyer, McCoy asks Walter a series of confrontational questions without his lawyer's permission. Walter's lawyer remarkably doesn't try to stop McCoy, and the end result is a rather melodramatic confession by Walter, after which his lawyer finally gets around to telling him to "shut up." This would not happen. In doing this, McCoy could become a witness to a confession -- running the risk that he will be removed as prosecutor from the case. Moreover, out of deference to the attorney-client relationship and a sense of fairness, no D.A. would ever try to get a defendant to blurt out a confession after he is represented by counsel.

On the other hand, no defense attorney would sit still for such a thing.

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