A mentally ill homeless woman is found dead, and all signs point to a mentally ill homeless man as the culprit. The case seems like a slam dunk, but accused refuses to take his medication, which then leads to a conundrum. How can he participate in his own defense if he is not functioning with enough mental acuity to be considered competent?
Of course, as the police and legal team dig deeper, they discover not all is what it seems.
This is one of many episodes that remind us Jack McCoy is a particularly nasty piece of work. There's a lot of public-facing performative rhetoric from him, as though he's still fighting the good fight from the 1960s, but if you binge Law and Order, you'll see he's particularly hard on People of Color and the mentally ill. Episodes that feature one or the other always have those moments where McCoy acknowledge that society treats both poorly and unequally, and yet this seems only to serve paradoxically as a rationale for McCoy to be even harsher on them. His logic seems to be he can never let sentiment or good works occupy a space higher than the law. Never mind that in the next episode he will, oh, take on the gun lobby for promoting bump stocks or something, arguing that new law must be created to deal with an evolving threat.
That's the only reason this episode doesn't get a 10. At the end, when justice is meted out, it doesn't seem so just, especially when we've seen McCoy go easier in situations where he is personally moved. The character was always written to be something of a privileged, self-righteous jerk, but there's a lot of inconsistency to his moral boundaries. And that's not including his predilection toward making his subordinates sleep with him.
