law & order: svu
careless (18/25)

The Law & Order spin-off following New York’s elite special victims unit continues its fifth season. Tonight, the investigation into the death of a young boy puts the whole foster-care system on trial – but who is really to blame?

When six-year-old Jamie is brought into casualty having stopped breathing, his foster father, Sam Dufoy (Cress Williams, ‘ER’, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’), tells hospital staff that he had taken the boy to church for a midnight prayer service. He and his wife, Lori-Ann, explain that Jamie had all kinds of problems, including epilepsy and ADHD, which made him extremely difficult to control. Despite the best efforts of the doctors, Jamie dies.

Sam Dufoy had hoped that taking Jamie to the church would help him, but it may have actually caused his death. The SVU detectives wonder if the priest, Father Lucas Hendry, killed the child when they discover the impression of his ring on Jamie’s chest. “God forgive me,” weeps the distraught priest when he is accused of the murder. “I was only trying to help the boy.” However, Hendry is cleared when it transpires that the boy was dead before he was brought to the church – he had been smothered with a pillow.

The detectives then question the social worker who was responsible for Jamie’s case, Mariel Plummer (Julie Hagerty, ‘Airplane!’). She acknowledges that Jamie had a lot of behavioural problems but insists that she thought he was making progress. Sam eventually admits to smothering Jamie because he couldn’t cope with his behavioural issues ,but claims that he had desperately tried to contact Mariel before the incident to explain that things were out of control.

Jamie’s birth mother, Tamara, blames Mariel and the social services for placing her son with the Dufoys, claiming that Jamie regularly complained that the couple were hurting him. “My son’s poor, dead little body is at her door,” she says. “And she’s going to pay for it.” Even though Tamara is not the most reliable witness – her other child died in her care and the detectives wonder if she may have financial motives for complaining – her claims put a new angle on the case.

Fin and ADA Novak go to visit Mariel at her office and discover that she has tampered with the official records. When it emerges that she did not visit the Dufoys as often as she should have done, she is arrested for tampering with public records and child endangerment. In court, Mariel admits that she made “a terrible mistake”, while her lawyer, Carolyn Maddox (CCH Pounder, ‘The Shield’, ‘ER’), insists that her client is only guilty of being overworked and underpaid: she should not be made a scapegoat. “Jamie slipped through a crack in the system,” she declares. “Blame the system.”

Mariel Plummer is found guilty of the tampering charge and not guilty on the endangerment charge, but she is so depressed at losing her job and reputation that she commits suicide. “I’ve saved thousands of children,” she tells Fin before she shoots herself in the chest. “And now I’ll only be remembered for one.”

The case takes another twist when blood found on Jamie’s sheets is discovered to be that of a young girl. It turns out that Lori-Ann Dufoy was continuing to receive payments from the social services for children who had run away from her care. One of these runaways was a girl called Megan who is now at a psychiatric facility. Staff at the centre inform Fin that Megan is delusional and has been raving about children being killed at the Dufoys’ – but Fin knows that Megan is telling the truth. Could the testimony of a young girl under psychiatric care shed new light on Jamie’s death?