After Jack McCoy is forced to settle the prosecution of a shooter who killed 15 people in Central Park, he decides to prosecute the gun manufacturer. Debut episode of Jesse L. Martin as Detective Ed Green.
This episode contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Dennis' now-absent father was violent toward him, and his mother was a Useless Bystander Parent who did nothing about it.
- Brand X: The fictional "Rolf Firearms" plays a prominent part.
- Break Them by Talking: Dennis Trope actually starts crying when Green asks him to explain why he was so angry at the female medical students.
- Caretaking is Feminine: Dennis believes so, and he finally snapped when his Hudson rejection letter suggested he apply for nursing instead - something he views as beneath him and a woman's job.
- Emotions vs. Stoicism: Judge William Wright's reasoning for overturning the verdict at the end of the episode. The anger against Rolf's Firearms could not override that the state's burden of proof wasn’t met.
- Foreshadowing: Green mentions spending some time in Atlantic City. His gambling problem becomes a plot point later on.
- Hollywood Law: Once arrested, Dennis Trope confesses to the police. The judge in the case excludes the confession on the grounds that the suspect's mother had told Lt. van Buren that she was calling a lawyer for her son, and that the police therefore had no right to continue the interview, since the suspect's right to counsel had been invoked. The problem is that Trope was not a minor, and, as such, his mother could not invoke his right to counsel for him.
- Interrupted Intimacy: The episode opens with cops giving a couple a fine for trying to have sex in the park in full view of others.
- Karma Houdini: Dennis Trope only gets 15 years for killing 15 people, angering the victims' families. Also Rolf Firearms, since they intentionally made their semiautomatic weapons easy to retool.
- Outliving One's Offspring:
- The mother of one of the dead comes to the scene of the murder and cries, hugging her daughter.
- At the hearing where the settlement with Dennis is approved, one of the people protesting against it is the father of one of the murdered people.
- Patched Together from the Headlines: The episode imagines if the Ecole Polytechnique murders had taken place in the US, with a US-specific gun culture. The 1993 101 California Street shooting, in San Francisco, is also an element.
- Straw Misogynist: Dennis Trope appears to be this, at least towards female doctors.
- Villain-by-Proxy Fallacy: The episode was based on the real life Intratec TEC-9, and it involved McCoy pursuing a gun manufacturer because the company intentionally made their semiautomatic weapons easy to retool; five times as many bullets fired in a minute. The piece of evidence which directly proved the company's greedy motivations, an e-mail correspondence, was thrown out due to confidentiality agreements. The jury convicts the manufacturers for depraved indifference. The verdict is then thrown out by the judge, who disagreed with McCoy's tactics in pursuing this case.
