From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr)
Subject: "Reasonable Doubts" episode of 12/22/92
Organization: Northeastern Law, Class of '93
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1992 17:09:30 GMT


Just wondering if anyone else caught the December 22nd episode of the
tv series "Reasonable Doubts"... that the episode was made and aired
carries some fascinating implications about the current state of the
War On Drugs with regard to the mainstream American media.

What follows was supposed to be a brief summary, but grew to about 200
lines as I wrote it.  There are spoilers:

Series regulars Tess Kaufman, Dicky Cobb and Maggie Zombro are,
respectively, an assistant D.A. in Chicago, a Chicago cop permanently
assigned to her office as an investigator, and one of the toughest and
best criminal defense attorneys in Chicago.  A murder suspect known as
"Johnny Dee" (they mentioned his full name once or twice, but I forget
it) was arrested while camly cooking hamburgers in the same apartment
with the victim, a drug dealer who'd been tortured to death over a
three-day period.  Johnny Dee asks Maggie to defend him, and after
checking out the list of bank accounts he gives her and determining
that he can indeed afford her fees, she agrees to do so.

To Maggie, Johnny makes no bones about the fact that he did indeed
torture the man to death, but he's supremely confident that he's going
to walk away from all this because his "friends" will make sure that
he never even comes to trial; all he wants Maggie for is to play the
game, file stalling motions, etc. for a while.  Tess and Dicky, on the
other hand, are supremely confident that they can get a murder one,
life imprisonment, no possibility of parole, conviction based on the
evidence.  Their confidence wanes a little, though, when Dicky does
some background checking and discovers that Johnny Dee has been
arrested or suspected in five similar torture-murders of drug dealers
in the past, in five different American cities, and has never been
tried for any of them.

Shortly after Johnny's arraignment, the federal government, in the
form of the Justice Department, steps in and says that it wants to
take Dee from the State of Illinois, right now, to try him on an
outstanding federal drug charge in Utah, a charge which carries a
potential sentence of five-to-fifteen years.  Kaufman is furious,
knowing the difficulties of ever prying Dee loose from the feds in
order to face the Illinois murder charges, but her boss orders her to
forget it, saying, approximately, that (a) if the feds want to
consider a drug charge to be more important than a murder charge,
that's their prerogative, (b) let's keep in mind here that Dee's
victim in Chicago was a major drug dealer himself, not exactly a model
citizen and (c) haven't you got about sixteen other cases going which
the feds aren't being nice enough to take off your hands?

Kaufman has Cobb investigate the matter a bit further anyway, and he
discovers that the impetus within the Justice Dept. for the federal
request came from the Federal Drug Task Force (colloquially, the
"DTF"), and specifically from the head of the Chicago DTF office,
Special Agent Donovan Black.  Black, Cobb discovers, was also the DTF
agent who, some years ago, had made the first arrest of Johnny Dee, on
a drug charge in Black's then-territory of New Mexico.  The first
murder that Dee is associated with occurred shortly thereafter, in
Alamagordo(sp?), N.M., and each of the four other murders took place
in a city where Black was assigned at the time.  Cobb visits Black's
Chicago office to talk to him about the matter.

Cobb's initial encounter is with several of Black's men, in their
office area outside Black's enclosed office.  It doesn't go well: one
of them is playing with a laser-sighted pistol when Cobb enters and he
casually centers the red dot on Cobb's forehead and asks "What can we
do for you?"  Black emerges moments later, tries to sooth the mutually
ruffled feathers (Cobb's response was to ask whether the feds didn't
teach their men not to play with guns, and to inform the guy that if
he didn't put that thing away he'd be using it for a toothpick in a
moment).  Black is friendly but not helpful; he says that his
relationship with Dee began and ended years ago in New Mexico when he
busted Dee and then used him for a while as an informant in exchange
for dropping the charges... standard operating procedure.  Cobb
expresses feigned surprise that Black remembers Dee at all after all
these years, and one of Cobb's men pipes up that "Donovan Black didn't
get to be the DTF's most highly decorated special agent by forgetting
anything, ever."  Cobb compliments Black on how well he has his
followers trained, and exits.

Johnny Dee, meanwhile, is agitated, scared and furious.  "It wasn't
supposed to be this way," he tells Maggie Zombro.  "I was supposed to
walk away clean, not do time in a federal pen.  If I go into prison,
I'm a dead man."  He tells Zombro that he'll cut whatever deal it
takes with the State of Illinois in order to keep out of federal
prison.  Zombro arranges a meeting with Dee, Kaufman, Cobb and
herself.  Dee offers to testify against Black and several of his
underlings.  Kaufman and Cobb are skeptical, but Zombro present them
with a "down payment" on Dee's story: his banking records showing bank
accounts in each of the cities in which a murder took place, each with
a $20,000 deposit made shortly after the murder.  Dee says that he
committed the murders on Black's behalf ("I got nothing against drug
dealers personally; I do some nose candy myself from time to time.")
because each of the victims was too good at his trade -- in each case,
Black knew that the man was a major dealer but couldn't collect enough
evidence to nail him.  "Donovan Black, he's not a guy who likes to
lose," says Dee.

Kaufman believes Dee's story, and his opinion that if he winds up in
federal hands, Black'll have him killed, enough to accede to Cobb's
suggestion that he and another cop (series semi-regular Officer Pam
Elliot, with whom Cobb has a mutual don't-really-like-each-other-but-
do-respect-each-other-as-cops relationship) arrange for Dee to get
temporarily "lost" within the Chicago jail system so that, despite the
feds' habeas corpus warrant for him, they won't be able to get their
hands on him immediately.  Shortly after the court hearing in which
the feds futilely try to obtain possession of Dee ("We can't give you
what we can't seem to find right now," says the judge), Black
confronts Cobb and first tries to schmooze him with a "We're all on
the same side" approach and then, smoothly, threatens him that
unespcified bad things might happen to people who stand in the way of
justice.  Black also at this point makes a short speech about a
"hypothetical" situation in which a small group of "patriots," seeing
their nation being poisoned by drugs and unable to stop it because
they're handcuffed by the laws, decide to fight back by hitting the
drug dealers in the language that they, the evil outlaw dealers, will
have to understand and respect.  "It _is_ a war, after all," he says.

That night, two of Black's men confront Kaufman as she's leaving her
office and about to get into her car on a mostly-deserted street.
Flanking her, they say that it would be really terrible if one of the
many really bad guys that she's put away over the years would happen
to take revenge on her.  As they're talking, a black van, with it's
side doors slid open, comes driving slowly by; the obvious implication
is that if they wanted to the two men could hustle her into the van
and drive off with no trouble.  Cobb emerges from the building at that
moment and shouts at the two men, and they calmly say goodnight to
Kaufman and climb into the van; it's impossible to tell whether that
was all they were ever planning on doing or whether Cobb prevented a
kidnapping.

Later that evening, while a worried Kaufman and Cobb are trying to get
hold of Maggie Zombro to warn her of what seems to be going on, she
goes into her office to pick up some paperwork and surprises two men
going through her files.  One of them pulls out a gun and fires a shot
at her as she runs away, not having seen either of their faces well
enough to identify them.  When she returns to the office with the
police (including Cobb and Elliot), she discovers that only one thing
is missing: her entire file on Johnny Dee.  Shortly thereafter, Cobb
and Kaufman discover that they didn't manage to lose Dee well enough
in the jail system: he's found dead, hanged in a common area.  No
witnesses, no clues, and not even the slightest possibility that it
was suicide -- his hands were tied behind his back.

Cobb decides to move Kaufman and Zombro to a safe house while he tries
to get something, anything, to use against Black.  (Cobb's reasoning
is that Black hasn't been paying his pet hit man twenty thousand
dollars a pop out of the DTF office's petty cash, so he must be
re-selling confiscated drugs on the street to raise his slush funds...
which means that maybe somewhere out there in Chicago is the dealer
who's middlemanning the operation.)  Zombro, who has other, ongoing
cases and business that she can't abandon, leaves the safe house's
phone number with her office manager, instructing him to memorize it
and then destroy the piece of paper it's written on.  At the safe
house, both women are armed, Zombro with her own automatic -- she's
one tough broad -- and Kaufman with a revolver loaned to her by Cobb.

During the night, while Cobb, mostly through the efforts of Elliot and
one of her best street informants, is indeed able to locate the
middleman who can testify against Black in regards to Black's illegal
re-selling of confiscated drugs, Zombro's office manager calls her
about some business.  Unfortunately, Zombro neglected to tell him to
be paranoid enough to use randomly-selected pay phones, so he calls
her from the office.  Two of Black's men have plugged themselves into
the building's phone wiring in the basement, and they learn the safe
house's phone number and pass it on to Black and the fourth member of
his merry band.

While killing time with Kaufman playing gin rummy, Zombro suddenly has
a very bad thought.  She quickly calls her office manager and confirms
that he is indeed still at the office and that that was indeed where
he called her from.  She hangs up and redials, summoning Cobb on his
beeper, just as she sees a car pull up in front of the house and turn
off its headlights.  When Cobb's beeper goes off and its readout
displays the calling number -- the phone number at the safe house --
he and the other cop (with their captured-and-willing-to-testify-in-
exchange-for-a-lenient-sentence dealer in the back seat) drive off to
the safe house.

Meanwhile, Black and one of his men, thinking that they have the
advantage of surprise, sneak into the house.  Black's associate has
the misfortune to be seen first by Maggie Zombro, who gives him time
to turn around face her, but not enough time to raise his gun and get
off a shot, before she shoots him once in the chest, apparently
fatally.  Black then steps up behind Zombro with his gun drawn and
says, "Game, set and match, Counsellor," just as Kaufman pops up
behind _him_ with _her_ gun.  There's a brief three-person freeze
while Black and Kaufman -- both of whom know that Kaufman's never
fired a shot in anger in her life -- both silently try to decide
whether they believe that Kaufman will actually fire if Black shoots
Zombro.  However, the question becomes moot as Officers Cobb and
Elliot burst in, guns drawn, and Black surrenders.

The episode's denouement takes place in the same courtroom where Dee
had initially been arraigned and in which the feds' unsuccessful
attempt to get Dee via habeas corpus had taken place.  The judge
formally announces that he believes that there is sufficient evidence
to try Donovan Black and his two surviving accomplice DTF agents on
charges of attempted murder, drug trafficking, etc., and then makes a
brief speech to Black -- who doesn't look at all well -- about how it
is a sad day for the nation when the people must fear the actions of
their own defenders.  Afterwards, in an empty courtroom, Kaufman and
Cobb discuss whether Kaufman could have pulled the trigger if she'd
had to -- she still isn't sure -- and whether Cobb could ever go as
bad as Black and his men did -- he says that he's scared that he
might, someday, turn vigilante if things got bad enough: "If they'd
killed you or Maggie, yeah, I think I would have killed them."  End of
episode.

    -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -

Well.  As you can tell, this story did _not_ paint the War on Drugs,
or the Drug Enforcement Agency (the "DTF" was clearly meant to be a
fictional stand-in for the DEA in this story, just the way that, say,
s U.S. government spy agency called the "SIA" would obviously be
intended to take the place of the CIA in a secret-agent show) in a
very positive light, and it strongly suggested that we're getting near
the point that the cure is worse than the disease.  As I'd taped it on
Tuesday night and didn't get around to watching it until Thursday
night (Christmas Eve), it made a very nice and unexpected Christmas
present for me, uplifting my spirits greatly.

For the record, the episode was writted by Melinda N. Snodgrass, who
id also the show's regular Story Editor.  Her name may be familiar to
some science fiction fans; she's written about half a dozen sf novels
including a Star Trek novel (_The Tears of the Singers_) and the
three-book "Circuit" series (_Circuit_, _Circuit Breaker_ and _Final
Circuit_) about the adventures of the first Federal Circuit Judge for
the Fifteenth Circuit -- United States outposts and territories in
outer space.

"Reasonable Doubts" is one of those shows that doesn't have episode
titles; it's write-up in TV Guide, for those of you who want to keep
an eye out for in reruns, is as follows:

    Tess, Dicky and Maggie become entangled in a web of crime and
    corruption spun in part by a killer (Kario Salem) Tess and Dicky
    know they have dead to rights, but who's confident of freedom,
    thanks to powerful "friends."

-- William December Starr <wdstarr@athena.mit.edu>