Judge: Hold on here….
Bobby: Scott Simpson was the only one to help his wife. The doctors weren’t there in the end.
Judge: This witness is not relevant to the issue before this court.
Bobby: I will show relevance.
Judge. You are shut down here. (Looks toward the witness) Step down doctor. Call your next witness.
Bobby: The defense calls Dr. Alan Price.
Helen: Objection.
Judge: Step up.
Bobby, Helen and Lindsay walk up to the judge’s bench:
Judge: Offer of proof.
Bobby: Dr. Price is the surgeon who did the debulking procedures.
Judge: Denied. This witness is not relevant.
Bobby: Your honor.
Judge: I would remind counsel that it is your client that is on trial here, not the doctors who treated his wife
Bobby: My client should be allowed to put on a defense
Judge: You are not putting on this one. Who else have you got?
Lindsay: Defense rests your honor. (Bobby looks at Lindsay annoyed and she looks at him back with a stern look) Defense rests. (Helen looks at Lindsay in surprise)
Back in Pennsylvania, Eleanor and Mrs. Donovan are speaking to the District Attorney.
DA: As I told Mrs. Donovan, we don’t know what became of the rape kit.
Mrs. Donovan: Oh please.
Eleanor: Do you know where it could have become loss?
DA: It should be in the police’s evidence room if not there, I’d try the lab, barring that….(interrupted by Donavan) Donovan: Why aren’t you trying? Why are you so blasé about this?
DA: Mrs. Donovan, I was kind enough to grant you this meeting.
Donovan: You were kind enough to prosecute and convict my son of a crime he didn’t commit.
DA: I’m not going to entertain this.
Eleanor: All right, all right, all right! Would you support me in my efforts in trying to determine where the rape kit could have gone.
D.A. Of course, we are not trying to hide anything here.
Eleanor: Thank you.
DA: But Ms. Frutt, lets be clear, while I support your efforts to retrieve lost evidence I totally oppose the idea of this case being reopened. Mr. Donovan was rightly convicted of a double homicide. (interrupted)
Mrs. Donovan: He did not commit that crime!!
Eleanor: All right…(looking at DA) I appreciate you making the call. (Gets up with Mrs. Donovan)
Next scene is outside the DA’s office, near a parking lot. Mrs. Donovan and Eleanor are walking toward the car.
Eleanor: Look, Mary, here is the deal. If we are going to make any progress on this, we are going to need a modicum of cooperation from the police and that is not going to happen with you antagonizing them. Donovan: That man is never going to help and I’ll tell you why. His boss is running on a death penalty platform. Stuart’s execution is the first one scheduled in a year. Politics-wise they need this to happen They very well could have knowingly destroyed that rape kit. And forgive my French, but that man is an ass who is capable of concealing evidence.
Eleanor: Mary, I don’t want you to antagonize them.
(Mrs. Donovan shakes her head and gets in the car. Eleanor looks frustrated.)
Back in Boston, Lindsay and Bobby head back to the office. As they open the door, Bobby looks upset, followed by a quiet Lindsay. Lucy, Eugene and Rebecca are in the office.
Rebecca: How’s it going?
Bobby passes right by Rebecca and Eugene straight to his office and doesn’t say anything. He closes his door.
Eugene: That well.
Lindsay: He tried calling the woman’s doctors.
Eugene: Why?
Lindsay: Good question. (She heads into Bobby’s office)
Inside the office:
Lindsay: Since I’m second chair, I thought maybe you’d let me in on the strategy.
Bobby: That strategy is simple. Scott Simpson endured two years of watching his wife suffer.
Lindsay: What does that have to do with the doctors that treated her.
Bobby: I was bringing them in to establish the suffering.
Lindsay: No, you weren’t Bobby, you put Dr. Shields up their to attack him. Helen isn’t the only one personalizing this. What is going on with you?
Bobby: Lindsay, we have no defense, okay. I have to convey whatever Scott Simpson went through, what his wife went through. It’s all about building up enough sympathy so that the jury feel compelled to ignore the law.
Lindsay: If that is what you were trying to do then you went way off course. (Bobby looks down at his briefcase). Look at me. (Bobby looks up). You were saying how the doctor’s weren’t there at the end. (Bobby looks down again and she sighs). Now, I know that you had to turn the respirator off on your mother.
Bobby: It isn’t about that.
Lindsay: Why did it happen like that? How was it that you had to turn it off?
Bobby: The hospitals wouldn’t do it back then. At least the hospital that she was in, it was a Catholic hospital. And they just left the family alone with the patient. They showed us the button and the doctors, nurses they all left the room, leaving just me and my dad with...
Lindsay: Why didn’t your dad do it?
Bobby: He couldn’t. My father couldn’t bring himself to hit that button, even though he knew. So, he asked me if I would do it, while those doctors were outside comparing notes on how well the patient tolerated this chemical versus that one, a fifteen year old kid was left inside to turn off his mother’s respirator…(tears roll down his face)
Lindsay: (almost in tears) Now, you hate them.
Bobby: Yeah, yeah I do.
Lindsay: Okay, but we have a murder trial here and our client he needs you to try this case and this case alone.
Bobby: I’m doing that
Lindsay: No, you are not Bobby. Maybe, I should close.
Bobby: I’ll close.
COMMERCIAL:
Back in Boston.
Lindsay (opening Helen’s office door). Hey.
Helen: Oh, Don’t you start.
Lindsay: Saying “hey’’ is starting?
Helen: Well it depends. Have you come to pick out bridesmaid dresses? What, have you come to distract me from working on my closing?
Lindsay: Helen, this case can’t be a situation where your office is pressuring you to get a murder two. Why not take the manslaughter?
Helen: I don’t know.
Lindsay: What do you mean ‘you don’t know? That’s not really an answer. You could just plead out if you want. Why not do it, really?
Helen: I don’t know.
Back in Pennsylvania at a evidence warehouse.
Eleanor: This is where you keep the rape kits?
Police Worker: yes, ma’am. Some of the old ones.
Eleanor: Going back how far?
Police Worker: That I couldn’t tell you. (Worker climbs a ladder) Donovan,
Stuart, this should be it. (Looking inside a box) It’s not in there.
Eleanor: Well, we figured it wouldn’t be in there. That would have been a little too easy. So if it’s not here, where else might it possibly be? How many different people handle these things?
Police worker: This is just storage. Chained up custody is all documented went to the lab in 92 and there is no documentation that it ever came back.
Eleanor: Well, could it still be at the lab?
Police worker: They really don’t have storage capacity, plus we called and they say they don’t have it, that means it is most likely destroyed
Eleanor: Where is this lab?
Police worker: The address is on the paper
Eleanor: Thank you very much officer.
Back in the Boston courtroom: Bobby starts his closing argument.
Bobby: It’s the hypocrisy of it all that gets me. We are already helping patients die. We make these morphine valium cocktails and in the end it causes them to go into a coma and die. Forget the crap about pain management that is just a politically correct euphemism. It’s to hasten the patient’s death. So, what are we talking about. The so-called victim in this crime was going to die within 48 hours. The so-called victim’s death was already being hastened medically and my client hastened it further and he’s on trial for murder, that’s a joke. We can’t give them a quick acting drug, because that would seem to much like we are killing them, so we give them a slow acting drug, let it take a day or so and we call it pain management. That is a joke. It would be funny, if it weren’t for the fact that the patient often suffers excruciating agony in the meantime, which is exactly what was happening in this case. Everybody in this room knows if the doctor’s could have ended Sally Simpson’s pain quickly and mercifully, Scott Simpson would have never picked up that gun. But here we are trying to take away his life, trying to take him from his children, trying to brand him a murderer. More than anything the law is suppose to protect the weakest members of our society. The law wasn’t there in the end for Sally Simpson, the doctors weren’t there in the end after they cut out half her insides, pumping her full of drugs, prolonging her pain, causing it, they weren’t there in the end - only I - (realizing he made a mistake and Lindsay looks at him in surprise he quickly says) - only my client, Scott Simpson, only he was there in the end and he ended his wife’s suffering. He didn’t stop a life, he stopped pain and they are asking you to call him a murderer.
Helen: First, there is a difference ladies and gentlemen between controlling pain with a dosage of medicine that could forseeably cause death and simply killing someone. Maybe in the end it amounts to a small distinction, but it is one. Doctors do not kill to kill. Even if they did, as Mr. Donnell contends, it is still illegal. Second, patient was already dying, Mr. Simpson just hastened it further. Please, where do we draw the line? When do we say death is so close it becomes okay to kill? Certainly if a prisoner on death row was murdered the day before his scheduled execution, we would hold the killer accountable. Third, Mrs. Simpson was suffering, I certainly don’t dispute that, but I definitely take issue with the suggestion that when a person is in enough misery it becomes permissible to take out a gun and shoot her in the head. Fourth, the law: When a person intentionally takes the life of another human being it’s murder. He can be loving, sympathetic, even heroic if you are so inclined to find him that way, but if he intentionally takes the life of another human being acts in self defense, or diminished mental capacity, it is murder. That is what we have here. Now the arguments about the extenuating circumstances, take that up at sentencing when it is time for leniency. But here, the question is did he commit a crime. I suppose you can choose to ignore your duty. You can do here exactly what Mr. Simpson did and take the law into your hands. Would I understand, yes. Would it make you popular in the public’s eye, I bet it would. Would it make you right? You know the answer to that. This isn’t a forum for policy, but since Mr. Donnell argued it, I agree. The law is designed to protect its weakest member, that would include the sick, the aged, the dying. Just consider the potential for abuse if we let ourselves become open to the idea that sometimes its okay to take out a gun and put somebody down. (walks back to her seat)