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| “ | Your desire to win got the best of you. I was counting on that. See you in court, McCoy. | „ |
| ~ Jensen taunting Jack McCoy. |
Harold Jensen is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Attorney Client". He is a defense attorney who kills his wife to avoid paying a divorce settlement.
He was portrayed by Peter Friedman.
Early life[]
Jensen was a criminal defense attorney who specialized in representing defendants in homicide cases.
He began cheating on his wife, Marjorie, with an exotic dancer and prostitute named Jasmine Blake. Bobby Caldwell, Blake's boyfriend and pimp, found out about the affair and sold pictures of them together to Jensen's wife, Marjorie, who promptly filed for divorce. Not wanting to lose half of his estate, including his law practice, Jensen decided to have Marjorie killed.
He schemed with Blake to frame one of his former clients, Leon Griggs, for the murder. Just in case Griggs was cleared in the police investigation, however, Jensen decided to set up Caldwell as a patsy, as well. To this end, he bought a .22 Smith & Wesson from another former client, Lonnie Stiles. He had Blake find out when Caldwell was meeting with Marjorie to sell the pictures, and then sabotaged Marjorie's car so she would have to take his to meet with Caldwell to make the police think that he, not Marjorie, was the intended target. He arranged to meet with Griggs in an abandoned building at the time of the shooting so Griggs would not have an alibi. Finally, he ambushed Marjorie and shot her three times, killing her, and stole the car's hood ornament to implicate Griggs.
In "Attorney Client"[]
Jensen makes it home before Marjorie's body is discovered and feigns grief when NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Ed Green inform him of her death. Briscoe and Green arrest Griggs after uncovering the "evidence" that Jensen had engineered against him, but they let him go after discovering that he was at a bodega on the other side of town at the time of the shooting.
Briscoe and Green eventually discover Jensen was cheating on his wife and confront him about it at his office. Jensen tells them about Blake in order to set his backup plan to frame Caldwell in motion. Briscoe and Green question Blake, who says that Caldwell threatened to kill her and Jensen. They then arrest Caldwell, who tells them about his arrangement with Marjorie. Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn learns from a friend of Blake's that she and Caldwell were scamming Jensen, making it look like Blake and Caldwell killed Marjorie to scare Jensen into giving them more money.
Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy has both Blake and Caldwell arrested and tries to turn them against each other, but both of them insists that they had no reason to kill Marjorie as long as she was paying for the pictures. District Attorney Nora Lewin tasks McCoy and Southerlyn with taking a harder look at Jensen's alibi, and Southerlyn finds out that he had repeatedly checked on the date Griggs would be released from prison and bought a gun from Stiles. McCoy and Southerlyn make a deal with Blake for a lenient sentence if she tells them what really happened, and she reveals that the murder was Jensen's idea. Briscoe and Green then arrest Jensen for murdering his wife.
During his trial, Jensen testifies that he bought the gun for Blake because Caldwell threatened her, and that she was framing him because he ended their relationship. During cross-examination, however, McCoy confronts Jensen with the fact that the pictures Caldwell took of him and Blake were taken after the date that he says he broke off the relationship.
Jensen fires his lawyer in order to represent himself. He testifies that he lied about the pictures on the bad legal advice of his former counsel. He then calls McCoy as a witness in an attempt to provoke a mistrial - the law does not allow for an attorney to act as a witness in a trial that they are prosecuting - but the trial judge forbids it. During the closing arguments phase of the trial, Jensen accuses McCoy of distorting the facts of the case because he cares more about winning than the truth, citing the fact that McCoy had tried to prosecute three other people for the murder before him. In his argument, McCoy says that the evidence points to Jensen's guilt, and that the only reason that others were initially suspected of the crime is that Jensen planned it that way.
The jury finds Jensen guilty of second-degree murder. Immediately after the sentencing, he tries to make a deal with McCoy and Southerlyn to give them confidential information about his clients, their associates, and the crimes they have committed in return for a lenient sentence. McCoy is briefly tempted to take him up on his offer, but Lewin forbids it, saying that the District Attorney's office cannot be a party to a lawyer violating his clients' rights, especially not in return for information that may be fabricated. McCoy visits Jensen in prison and turns down his offer; in response, Jensen says he will appeal on the grounds that he had the right to call McCoy as a witness and taunts him that they will see each other in court.
Trivia[]
- Jensen is based on Craig Rabinowitz, who in 1997 murdered his wife so he could collect her life insurance and use it to cover up the Ponzi scheme he was running.
External links[]
- Harold Jensen on the Law & Order Wiki
