MHA's Blog: Chiming In

The debate over whether people with mental illnesses are a threat to society has gone on for an extraordinarily long time. Despite the overwhelming evidence that having a mental illness does not make you violent, there has always been a group of people who feel that locking them away from “normal” society will make the world a better place.  Being sick allows society to refuse them their Constitutional rights to a fair trial because their actions make people uncomfortable. This fight is often fought on the ground, as it were, with the police and in the court system.

Because of that, Law and Order is in a unique place to comment on the issue. The original Law and Order (the mother ship as fans call it) ran for 20 seasons, spun off 5 other shows and addressed issues in a more topical way than many shows since have been able to do. Starting in 1990, the show was a bridge from the traditional police procedural shows of the late 1980s, like Hill Street Blues, to the complicated crime shows of today, like Southland. The show took pains to present many different aspects of any issue through the characters, all of whom had different views of life (just like actual life). That sense of everyone’s voice is being heard is one of the reasons it so beloved-it never advocated a side of any issue.

In Season 6, the show took on the issue of mental illness head on, with the episode “Pro Se.” Opening with the murder of four people in a clothing store, Detectives Briscoe and Curtis follow the evidence to a homeless man with a stolen army surplus bayonet. They catch him flipping through books in the library, talking to himself. Jimmy Smith (played the excellent Denis O’Hare) spends his time in interrogation telling Briscoe and Curtis that he knows that they work for the CIA and won’t talk. But when the case goes to the courts, Jimmy requests to defend himself (the “pro se” of the title). ADA Claire Kincaid tells ADA Jack McCoy that there’s no way he can defend himself, and DA Adam Schiff pushes for a plea agreement that puts Smith in jail. When McCoy gets to the courtroom, Smith is well-dressed, articulate and a good lawyer, having graduated law school with honors (“Just like you,” he tells McCoy). Granted the right to defend himself, he puts together a fantastic argument that he was not responsible for his actions since he was on medication, but that ADA Kincaid, who gave him a plea bargain for an earlier crime, was responsible for putting him back on the streets. When his sister testifies that she tried to contact the DA’s office to tell them to put her brother into a hospital for the earlier offense and that she convinced he can’t be trusted, Smith stops taking his medication again and pleads out. At the end of the trial, he seen having a hard time reading the plea his court appointed lawyer gives him. The last scene of the episode is McCoy telling Kincaid that Smith sent him his original closing argument, and they are lucky that he did give it-he would have won easily.

This episode is dated, but it one of the episodes that stuck with me from my many hours of Law and Order watching. The way Smith goes from being delusion to lucid, and then back to delusion was something I’d never seen before. It is one of the few (perhaps the only) instances where someone with a mental illness is more than just a mental illness. Smith is a terrific lawyer, but little tics show that his illness is still there. He articulates that drugs for mental illnesses have terrible side effects, which contributed to his ceasing to take them. He talks about the fact that most cases are plea bargained out, so most people do get trials, let alone people with mental illnesses, who often have overworked, court appointed lawyers who need to get cases off their desks quickly. He speaks with court psychiatrist Elizabeth Olivet, a recurring character, reminding the audience how prevalent mental health truly is in the criminal justice system. The 10.9 million viewers the show had at the time probably did know those facts.

At the same time, Kincaid says that people want to hang him, and his illness shouldn’t stop them. His court appointed lawyer calls him a fruitcake, and Detective Briscoe says he looks like he a “few credits shy of a degree.” At another point, his sister says “he looked like who belonged in a mental hospital.” The amount of stigma on display is probably on par with what the average person with a mental illness (and homeless people in general) face in the criminal justice system every day. This goes back to the show not advocating one side of any issue. Instead, the whole episode functions as a debate about whether this man, who murdered four people without medication for his illness but was a functioning trial lawyer with it, is truly a threat to society, and what role the courts should play in deciding that. It an effective episode, one certainly worth watching, even with it a bit dated. It certainly still effective 16 years after the fact.

In an interesting side note, this episode was remade for Law and Order: UK as part of its third season in 2010. The issues are very similar, but the influence of universal health care and no death penalty shape the story more. The ever wonderful Rupert Graves (Sherlock’s Lestrade) played Smith, and the impact is just as strong. Worth watching as well (both episodes are on Netflix).

Next week, we’re visiting the classics with Three Faces of Eve, and how the Hays Code affected mental health in movies.