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Public Servants

The season finale of The Practice ended with a bang, bang, bang. Unfortunately, the firepower was of the conventional sort and not in the dialogue or the plot.

The first storyline concerns the defense of Wendell Forcly by Rebecca Washington and Jimmy Berluti. Forcly is accused of strangling his wife and dumping her body in a pool. Forcly denies the allegations and the prosecution's case seems weak. By all accounts, Forcly cared deeply for his wife. There was no history of abuse, no large insurance policy, no extramarital affairs, and no apparent motive for murder. The physical evidence supporting a murder allegation is also scant. The bruises around his wife's neck could have been innocently caused by Forcly when he dragged her up from the bottom of the pool. The only inculpatory evidence is Forcly's statement to the police that he had arrived home "shortly before" finding his wife unconscious in the pool. In fact, he had been home for more than one hour. At trial, Rebecca explains this simply as a misstatement made by a husband in shock.

In the middle of the trial, however, Rebecca learns that things have changed. Like, for instance, her client's name. Forcly used to be known as Peter Bryant. In his former life, Forcly/Bryant had been charged, but not convicted, with strangling his first wife to death. As a teenager, he also had strangled two young girls to death - not to mention hundreds of chickens. After the prosecution's case has closed, it files a motion to introduce this newly found evidence of these past events in Forcly's current trial to show that Forcly (otherwise known as the "Boston Chicken Strangler") has engaged in a pattern of peculiar criminal behavior. Judge Kittleson denies the motion. The Judge reasons that, since Forcly's juvenile convictions cannot be used, evidence of an arrest for a single strangulation is not really a pattern. Behind closed doors, however, everyone, including the Judge, Rebecca, and even Forcly, tacitly acknowledge Forcly's guilt. However, without knowledge of Forcly's prior activities, the jury returns a verdict of "not guilty."

As Rebecca herself notes, the point of this storyline is to show again that defense attorneys often defend guilty people and, sometimes, those guilty people go free. Is there anyone watching television who does not realize this? The rest of the storyline could have hung together better. It somewhat unbelievable that the police who investigated the crime would not have uncovered Forcly's prior life. Rebecca certainly would have known about it. A forensic investigation would have determined whether Forcly's wife was unconscious before she entered the pool (which is the defense's scenario) or was strangled first and them placed into the pool (which is the prosecution's version).

The most unbelievable aspect relates to the "mistatement" that Forcly supposedly made regarding the timing of his return to his house. He twice told the police that he came home around nine o'clock and found his wife at the bottom of the pool shortly thereafter. In fact, he came home an hour before that time. After the police told him that a neighbor saw him enter the house shortly before eight, Forcly then claims to have realized that he had mispoken, because of the shock, and concedes that he came home around eight. In their investigation, the police would not have simply asked Forcly what time he came home that evening. They would have asked what he did when he came home. Did he open the mail, walk around the various rooms, take off his jacket, get something to eat? They certainly would have pursued this line of questioning when they learned that a neighbor had seen Forcely enter the house an hour before he claimed to have done so. They would have locked Forcly into an elaborate description of his activities so that changing his story was not simply just a matter of changing the time he got home.

Still, the most annoying moment in this story was the neighbor's explanation of how she recalled the precise time that Forcly had come home. She testified that knew it was just before eight because she had been out walking her dog and was anxious to return to her living room to watch David Kelley's "Boston Public," which was just about to start. I love insider jokes - but this was simply self-promotion at its flattest.

These annoyances in Forcly's trial were nothing compared to the absurdities in the second story concerning Helen Gamble's revenge for the hit that convicted drug dealer Jackie Cahill put on Richard Bay.

Gamble marches herself down to Cahill's cell and threatens, first, to falsely tell the press that Cahill has given the police information on all of his druggie acquaintances and, then, to release him into the prison's general population. Members of the prison's general population would presumably be so mad at Cahill for his indiscretion that they would kill him. Cahill can avoid this fate only by telling Gamble who shot Bay, which he does. Gamble then tells the police of the identity of Bay's murderer and requests that he be arrested. She also falsely tells the police that this suspect is extremely dangerous and always armed. A large number of heavily armed police, somewhat reminiscent of the final scene in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," or visions of the Diallo shooting in the Bronx by the N.Y.P.D.,, are waiting for the suspect as he comes out of his apartment. They are him to raise his hands, which he does. He has a cellular telephone in one hand. The police mistake the telephone for a gun and shoot him. The woman (his mother) who emerges from the apartment looks sort of like the woman who was at the wheel when Bay was shot, but I was not sure.

After having carried out her own hit, Gamble reneges on the deal that had been offered to Cahill. The deal itself was improbable. Although Cahill had already been convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, Gamble agrees that the conviction will be set aside (by a Judge) and that Cahill can plead to two lesser sentences. Still, Cahill wants to enforce the deal (a deal is a deal) and goes to court to do so. The overly clever Judge rules that the deal is enforceable, so that the old conviction is thrown out, and Cahill is allowed to plea to two lesser offenses. However, the Judge still has the power to sentence Cahill on these lesser offenses. Essentially (though I did not closely follow the Judge's explanation) the Judge gives Cahill two 75-year sentences to run concurrently - for a total of 150 years.

Gamble acted in a way that no ethical prosecutor ever would. She communicated with Cahill outside the presence of his attorney, after he had asked for one. She threatened Cahill's life. Once Cahill identified Bruce Manning as the person who had shot Bay, Gamble essentially made up facts about Manning so that the police would shoot him as he came out of the apartment building. She apparently did not apply for either a search warrant or an arrest warrant at any time. The list goes on and on.

Still, I thought the funeral and Gamble's eulogy of Bay was even worse. Although there was a nice montage of various clips of Bay, the funeral dodges the pressing question of where Bay's family and Boston politicos were when a slain A.D.A. was laid to rest. The eulogy by Gamble seemed focused on Donnell and crew instead. Bay hated - he hated - defense attorneys. Why, then, are the members of Donnell, Young, Dole & Frutt in the front pew? They don't belong there. Why did Gamble refer to them as the "people he considered his friends?" Huh? How unfair to the memory of Bay.

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The show did a pretty good job of leading up to Bay's murder. There was the thirty- second scene of Bay sitting contemplatively on his bed, before strapping on his six-shooters and leaving his home. Bay's closing, while pretty bad legally, was effective at building up the tension between him and Cahill. The suspense leading to Bay's murder was pretty intense. First, he shrugs off his police protection (hasn't he ever watched any TV? If he did, he would know not to do this). Then, a car drives by, causing Bay to flinch. Another car drives up to his parking space and stops. Bay tenses, and then relaxes when a grandmotherly woman sticks her head out the window. When Bay turns the key - I expected the car to explode. Finally, a muzzle pokes itself out of the back of grandma's car and riddles Bay with lead. Bay convulses violently from the impact of the bullets and then slumps lifeless against the steering wheel. He will be missed.

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