Law & Order1990

Jack McCoy:
Mr. Dworkin is a first-rate attorney. Hell, he's a magician. He put the facts into a box, sawed the box in half, and out popped thousands of years of the most despicable hatred known to man. Like any good magician, he kept you busy with what he was saying, hoping you wouldn't notice what he was doing with his hands; hoping you wouldn't catch him trying to hide a corpse, trying to make a murdered man disappear. I'm betting you saw through the trick. So the only question is will you pretend it worked, or will you make this illusion disappear? One bookie killed another bookie; that's it. Period. The defense hardly bothers to say otherwise. Mr. Dworkin just now all but said his client killed Mr. Meeks. Not once did he claim Mr. Strelzik was innocent. Like I say, he's a good attorney. He knows no one would believe him. Instead he had the deeply offensive idea to use your sympathy for Israel to put a killer back on the street. Mr. Dworkin wants you to choose culture over citizenship. Visceral hatred over codified laws; he's counting on at least one of you saying to himself "I'm a Jew first, and only after that an American." I asked you back when you were selected for this job whether you could look at the facts presented without passion or prejudice, and each one of you swore under oath that you could. I know it's hard, but if you don't, all of this is meaningless.