It was painful slogging through this badly written episode where a young teen blows his father away in cold blood because he THOUGHT he was going to kill his mother....and Matlock defends the kid saying it was "justifiable homicide"! What??!
Had the father been in the act of attempting to kill his mother, then it's a whole different story and justifiable homicide would rightfully play as a defense.
But this kid merely THOUGHT his Dad was on his way to kill Mom and shot him as soon as he exited his car in the garage....and the Dad was unarmed as well.
There's a ridiculous scene where Ben cross examines a friend of the murderer on the stand. The prosecution has clearly showed with the friend that this kid attacked in the past on the basis of his assumption when he thought his friend stole a pen.
Later, he found out that he just misplaced his pen and wound up attacking the friend for nothing and based solely on his assumption.
Ben stupidly cross examines the friend on the stand by asking if he in turn ever attacked the murderer before. The friend says yes because he saw him make a pass at his girlfriend. Ben is all happy and smug saying "No further questions" and thinking he erased this witnesses credibility....yet he didn't.
Both situations were entirely different scenarios and cannot be compared. One attack was because of something that actually OCCURRED while the other attack was simply because of what someone mistakenly ASSUMED or THOUGHT.
It was very frustrating that the prosecution wasn't written to immediately object to point out the obvious difference between the two scenarios. Ben's cross examination merely reinforced the defendant as being an out of control time bomb who's prone to attack based solely upon his mistaken thoughts and assumptions. What kind of a dangerous world would it be if we all did that?!
When the jury declared him not guilty I laughed at the bad writing because at the very least he would have gotten manslaughter by a jury with any intelligence. And besides, this definitely was a premeditated murder because the boy was waiting in the dark garage with a loaded gun for his Dad to get home to blow him away. If I were on that jury I would have chosen manslaughter for the defendant and made him serve at least 10 years of his life in prison.
If this were a real life case that the defendant would have surely wound up back in court again after physically attacking or killing someone else based solely upon his thoughts and assumptions of someone. It's only a matter of time before he'll blow up again.
This bad writing seemed to say that it's ok to murder someone if you merely THINK they are going to cause harm or murder you or a loved one. If that were the case it would be a very dangerous society out there where simply saying the wrong thing at any time is justifiable cause for getting yourself murdered by someone you tick off and no court would convict your killer. Yikes.
Ben really dropped the ball on this one big time and to make this bad episode even worse there's no Conrad or Julie, but we do have Michelle so that's good. Though I don't like her shorter hair and I think she looks so much better with it longer. I very rarely give one star to this series, but this one episode that deserves it because of the ridiculous and message that it sends and I was hoping Matlock would lose the case.
