After an armed jewellery robbery, the culprit Tim Conroy (Skip Homeier)
shoots a cop (Vernon Rich), who is incidently the best friend of deputy
public defender Jim Prentice (Patrick O'Neal) ... and what does Prentice's
boss Matthews (Reed Hadley) do? He gives Prentice the assignement to
defend Conroy in court, just to teach prentice what it means to be a good
public defender. Now excuse me, this is the first time this
episode went over my head. Prentice is clearly in a conflict of interests
here and probably would have been excluded from the case in real life by
law, but in this episode of Public Defender, a court case
that decides over life and death of a culprit is little more than a
testing ground for young public defenders. If the public defender fails,
and Prentice has every reason to, so what, let the poor devil fry. And of
course, Prentice wants to see him on the electric chair, wants to see him
killed, which brings us to the next problem of the episode: Prentice wants
to see a man killed for killing another man, and he has this man's life in
his hands - yet he doesn't see that to have this man killed for whatever
reason would make himself a killer, too - not in front of the law maybe,
but morally so. Ok, on with the story: Of course, Prentice
wants to see Conroy killed on the electric chair, but then he learns that
Conroy might not have shot the cop intentionally but was hit by a bullet
of the cop which made his own gun go off accidently - for which Conroy
would get a life sentence but not the death penalty. Eventually, Prentice
tracks down a witness (Mary Young) who supoprts that claim - yet he
doesn't know what to do until the wife (Emlen Davies) - apparently the
only sensible person in the whole story - persuades him to do the right
thing and grant the guy a fair trial. Let's face it, the whole
series The Public Defender is rather bad, in a preachy,
right-wing, law-and-order sort of way, but this episode is almost
despicable, with its main characters engaging in an immoral game with a
young man's life, which is then presented as the right thing to do. What
were these people thinking?
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