Separation of church and state may be the bedrock of our society, but Price found it inconvenient when trying to prosecute a pastor for murder.
He faced a classic dilemma: the pastor who won’t break the seal of confession to help bring a murderer to justice. McCoy didn’t like it, and neither did one of the witnesses, but Price pushed forward anyway — was he right?
Law & Order Season 22 Episode 13 didn’t answer this question; as is often typical of this franchise, it ended the hour on a dramatic note and left viewers to draw their own conclusions.
The murder mystery was one of the more interesting ones, though its solution left something to be desired.
Shaw: Cell phone’s still here, wallet, credit cards, money.
Cosgrove: Doesn’t look like anyone tossed the place inside. Jewelry’s still on the nightstand.
Shaw: So it’s not a robbery, not an assault. Double taps to the chest. Starting to feel like an execution. The question is, why?
Cosgrove: Sad. Seems like she was going places, too.
Shaw: Too bad she’ll never get there now.
Whenever a college student dies unexpectedly on a Law & Order franchise show, there are always questions about what she was involved in and why someone killed her.
This one could have gone in several different directions.
The flowers on the stoop could have pointed to a stalker and not the bartender who got his anger out of his system after one confrontation. The student was talking to a professor right before her death, so someone could have been disturbed by her research or her career success so far.
Instead, she became the victim of a convoluted murder-for-hire plot. While Reverend Sherman explained that Pastor Mike didn’t want Emily to tell the cops that he took large donations from his parishioners, that felt like a weak motive.
Emily believed that Pastor Mike had defrauded Lonnie, but Lonnie refused to believe it even when confronted with evidence that Pastor Mike killed his sister. So if Emily had gone to the police, Lonnie and other parishioners would have defended Mike, and that would have been that.
If Mike wanted Emily permanently silenced, why would he be stupid enough to ask his vice-pastor to do the deed? And why would Reverend Sherman agree to it, convicted felon or not?
Let me get this straight. You want to go after a pillar of the community, a clergyman, on the word of a convicted felon who has every reason to lie?
McCoy
It’s not unheard of for pastors at prosperity gospel churches to ask for large donations, but murder is very different than potential fraud. Pastor Mike wasn’t an organized crime boss; he was a pastor using church donations to line his pockets.
It felt like the murder plot was an excuse for the story the writers really wanted to tell: Price’s determination to go after Pastor Mike for fraud.
While Reverend Sherman hurt the case against Pastor Mike by lying on the stand, Price could have gotten around that without forcing a senior pastor to break confidentiality.
He had the wire transfer of $50,000, Sherman’s original statement, the security footage, and the fact that the van had been donated to the church.
It wasn’t clear whether Lonnie would testify to the argument with Emily, but the cops could have testified about their knowledge of that argument. Even if the contents of it had been hearsay, the fact that there was an argument shortly before the murder would be evidence of bad blood between Emily and Pastor Mike.
So while challenging, it wouldn’t have been impossible to make a case against Pastor Mike without turning it into a fraud trial.
McCoy: He’s a clergyman. He’s right about the law. His conversation with the defendant is privileged.
Price: Unless that privilege is in service of a crime or fraud.
McCoy: You’re on dangerous ground, Nolan. To prove that, you’ll have to attack the church. I thought we agreed that you’d make the case about the man, not the religion.
Price: I’m not going after the religion. I’m going after a single, corrupt preacher.
McCoy was right to try to warn Price off of this line of argument. There was a thin line between fraud and religious belief here.
While Price successfully argued that Pastor Mike manipulated people into giving him all their money, the people involved claimed that he deserved his riches and was doing God’s work.
This fraud trial, especially since it was for the sole purpose of getting a senior pastor to testify about his conversation with the defendant, looked like denying people the right to religious beliefs around prosperity.
Of course, fraud is a crime with a clear definition. A pastor or other religious figure who engages in it shouldn’t be able to get away with it simply by claiming that taking church donations for themselves is a tenet of their religion.
Still, Pastor Mike wasn’t being charged with fraud; it was a cover for wanting the judge to rule that clergy privilege didn’t apply to whatever Mike said to the senior pastor.
That seemed problematic.
Lonnie’s unsurprising OD at the end of the hour was supposed to show that the church was so crucial that not being able to give all his money to it made him give up the will to live.
He didn’t seem to grieve his sister’s death very much; he was more concerned about Pastor Mike’s well-being now that she was gone. When he begged Price to leave Pastor Mike alone, was anyone expecting him to confess to killing Emily himself?
That would have been a perfect twist. Instead, Lonnie was a pathetic figure whose plea fell on deaf ears, only for Price to find him near death later.
What did you think, Law & Order fanatics? Was I too hard on this episode, or did it also feel to you like it was missing something?
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Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.