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Our legal system is overworked. It is too often called upon to resolve irresolvable political issues, social dilemmas and personal spats. Instead of meeting their neighbors halfway, people insist on asserting their "rights" and thrashing the matter out in court. While litigating is preferable to dueling, it is expensive, inefficient, time-consuming and tends to bring out the worst in people. Still, the trend is undeniable. For instance, this weekend, my six-year old son Brian got winged in the right ear with a snowball. His ear started to bleed profusely. You would be surprised how much an ear - which I have always thought of as funny looking cartilage without much blood circulating through it - can bleed. Brian's jacket and his shirt were covered in blood. Although he didn't seem to be hurt too badly, my wife insisted on having a doctor see him. At 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, our doctor insisted that we drive to the inaptly named emergency room at Children's Hospital in Boston, a mere fifty minutes away. Four hours later, Brian emerged with a rolled up piece of gauze stitched on the front and the back of his ear, funny looking but healthy as ever.

When we got home, my eldest son Greg looked his brother over and promptly asked, "Can't we sue someone for this?"

In this week's episode of The Practice, it seems that the law lacks common sense. Scott Lopes, the son of a Boston police detective, is being interrogated in connection with the death of his girlfriend's father. He refuses to cooperate and asks for a lawyer. Things seem to be getting out of hand, and Helen Gamble calls Scott's father as a courtesy to allow the father to meet with the son. The father/police detective requests a private meeting with his son. After the meeting, Scott is very cooperative. He explains that his girlfriend's father was abusive towards her. Scott went to the home to scare him into leaving his daughter alone. He pointed a gun at the girlfriend's father to make his point. Sufficiently scared, the father fell down the stairs and expired. The son left out the part about shooting in the general direction of the girlfriend's father to ensure that he was really scared. After this little detail comes to light, murder two charges are filed. The police detective father hires Bobby Donnell.

Donnell moves to suppress the confession. Grounds, you ask? After Scott had explicitly requested to see an attorney, the investigating officers did not provide him with an attorney but sent in a police detective who obtained a confession. Wait a minute, you think, it was his father for chrissakes. Sure, he was also a police detective but it's absurd to equate a father talking with his son to the state's police force coercing reluctant defendants into confessions. Isn't it?

I thought this episode handled the nuances of this area of the law fairly adroitly. The Superior Court judge throws out Scott's confession. Though it at first might appear that this was an overly legalistic decision, the Court is on solid ground. Once a defendant under interrogation requests an attorney, the investigators can do nothing until that attorney is located. Nothing. Even if the defendant states that he has changed his mind and now, of his free will, would like to confess his role in the crime, the investigators cannot speak with him until the attorney arrives. The Superior Court judge determined that the police, after being stymied in their effort to obtain a confession, intentionally sent in the boy's father with the express purpose of using him to obtain a confession. The Commonwealth cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly.

The easy criticism of the Court's decision is that it inappropriately thrusts an attorney between a father and his son and contributes to the over-legalization of society. What this week's episode only hinted at is that prosecutors contribute to this problem as well, by overcharging defendants and seeking wildly inappropriate sentences.

There are a number of lawyers, judges and legal scholars advocating for restorative justice, an entirely new way of looking at the purpose of the criminal legal system. Instead of punishing wrongdoers, a system based on restorative justice seeks to mend the tears in the social fabric caused by crime. For instance, a person convicted of a property crime would be expected to learn to understand and appreciate the harm he has caused his victim and restore to his victim the lost property. The defense lawyer would have responsibility in part for deciding what was in the best interests of the accused - which for some defendants might be to plead guilty and enter a drug treatment program. But I digress.

The other story line in The Practice is too clever by half. Ellenor represents a mentally challenged defendant accused of killing an eight-year-old boy in an empty building. The circumstantial evidence points to the defendant's guilt. However, a prospective witness tells Ellenor that he would be willing to testify that the defendant was not at the scene when the killing occurred. When it is clear that this witness is lying, Ellenor properly refuses to call him as a witness. In fact, Ellenor is absolutely correct that it would have been unethical for her to put the witness on the stand knowing that he would lie.

However, the assistant district attorney, Richard Bay, learns that Ellenor has decided not to call this particular witness and interviews him. The witness tells Bay that when he heard the victim scream, another boy, Kenny, had just left the building and the defendant had just entered it. Bay calls the witness as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution. However, on the stand, the witness double-crosses Bay and testifies that Kenny and not the defendant was in the building at the time the victim was heard screaming. Based on this testimony, the mentally challenged defendant is acquitted.

The O. Henry twist comes after the jury's verdict, when the mentally challenged defendant discloses that it was his idea to have the lying friend testify for the prosecution rather than for the defense. Again, this is clever, but it simply another example of stuffing the rabbit into the hat (see last week's review) and it doesn't hang together. There was no way, even if the defendant had Stephen Hawking's IQ, for him to have anticipated that Bay would fortuitously overhear the conversation between Ellenor and the witness after which Ellenor sends him packing, and that Bay would act on his hunch and subpoena the witness. In addition, once he learned about Kenny, Bay certainly would have subpoenaed him. Presumably, Kenny would have testified that when he was in the building the victim was alive. But hey, it's TV.

Demoralized as Richard Bay and Helen Gamble are, Gamble requests that Bay give her what she needs. It turns out that she needs "The Speech" which goes something like this:

There are heroes in this world. They are called district attorneys. They don't get to have clients, people who smile at them at the end of the trial, who look them in the eye and say "thank you." Nobody's there to appreciate the district attorney because we work for the state and our gratitude comes from knowing there's a tide out there, a tide the size of a tsunami coming out of a bottomless cess pool. A tide called crime, which if left unchecked will rob every American of his freedom. A tide which strips individuals of the privilege of being able to walk down a dark street or to take $20 out of an ATM machine without fear of being mugged. All Congress does is talk, but it's the district attorney who grabs his sword, who digs into the trenches and fights the fight, who dogs justice day after day after day without thanks, without so much as a simple pat on the back. But we do it, we do it, we do it because we are the crusaders, the last frontier of American justice, knowing if a man cannot feel safe he can never, never feel free.

So much for this week's show. I am anxiously awaiting next week's episode in which Jimmy seeks to free Henry Winkler, the innocent bug-squishing dentist, from his wrongful conviction. What was with that grape jelly?

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