Date of airing: November 9, 1999 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 15.91 million viewers, 11.0/18 in Households 4.8/13 with Adults 18-49
written by: Angel Dean Lopez
directed by: Kevin Dowling
This was a solid episode filled with drama, emotional tension, and tears, all wrapped into a story arc about gun violence and what it does when people get shot or kids get killed. This hour might make you think about the world we are living in today, and how the United States very much suffers from a gun epidemic that it just cannot get a grip on. But that was not even the only major storyline of the episode, as Amy's major court case – the sentencing of a 15-year-old boy after he was found guilty of manslaughter – became the more important topic to talk about when it comes to the American judicial system: whether or not to sentence a child like they are an adult.
I always wonder why it is even possible to convict juveniles with an adult sentencing, to throw them in prison where all the hardened criminals sit, to allow a minor to be locked behind bars with people who are all older than them. There is a reason why we call children children, and why we call adults adults. It should not matter how serious or dark the crime is – if the juvenile is younger than 18 years old, they should simply not be judged and sentenced like they are older than 18 years of age. And if you are unhappy about 16-year-old rapists and sadists going to a military school instead of going to prison, then lobby to lower the juvenile age to 16 years of age.
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| This is the face of a traumatized survivor of gun violence. |
In this case, Robert Chetwind was 15 years old, and the case should have never landed in Amy’s court in the first place (not to mention that I have no idea why a case that was already and successfully tried in a different court needed to get on her desk just for sentencing purposes – was the original Judge unable to do so?). In addition, the writers never really went into the manslaughter case: How old were the other drive-by shooters Robert sat in the car with, and who was the intended victim of the drive-by? If they were all minors, it would have been an interesting case because of the notion of children killing children, and that by itself would have made it Amy's case from the beginning (and potentially for another episode).
The writers made it themselves too easy to focus on the victim, to make sure that the audience knows Amy wants to rip the head off of the 15-year-old kid, and that special circumstances (Robert's life was very much that: He had no proper life and was never allowed to just be a child) do not count. This would have been a story worthy of more attention, but, for some reason, the episode also needed that one comedic plot of the two divorced parents arguing about circumcision and breastfeeding.
The rest of the episode was okay. I did not quite like the cold open of this hour, because it seemed a bit absurd that the shooting would transpire this way. "Wrong place at the wrong time" is being defined here, although Vincent did save a life, so he was at the right place at the right time? What I liked about the story was the potential for a bit of PTSD for Vincent, who simply cannot just move on from this, no matter how often he said everyone had to, as the shooting was too traumatizing for him in this episode for the writers to just forget about it in the next. Not to mention that Lisa Matthews, the other survivor, was very much written to be more than just the random woman Vincent saves.
Nevertheless, Vincent did annoy me a bit here, even if I would file his behavior under "traumatized." But he is a writer, so he should have expected the shooting to do something more to him than just give him a wound. He got shot, was almost killed, and he did nothing but repeatedly show in his eyes that he was annoyed about being mothered by Maxine. He was so close to talking about the experience to someone when he almost broke down in front of Maxine in the laundry basement, and yet it was Maxine who broke down crying by the end of the scene. Vincent continued to stay calm about it and had nightmares. I always want to say that the story was not finished in this episode, but then again, if this shooting causes PTSD in the man, it means it is a story to be continued in later episodes, meaning it did not need to end here.
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| In some moments, Amy just cannot deal with this job. |
The episode still had some minor storylines to offer to distract from the emotional drama of the hour. There was Maxine talking to a pair of parents who were abducted by aliens, and then there was Amy accidentally using the word "penis" in court and laughing about it, although when she removed herself from the courtroom to laugh about it privately, it almost looked like she was about to cry as well – the stress of her current cases and her brother getting shot getting to her.
By the way, I wonder what court service officers are allowed to do here. Amy told Bruce to get the circumcision and breastfeeding parents out of her courtroom – but was he even able and allowed to do so without a Judge present, or a Judge ruling on the case, even if it is just a dismissal of said case? This episode kind of told me that CSOs like Bruce are allowed to sit on the bench, take the hammer in their hands, and throw a case out of the courtroom.
