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“ | What gives you the right to decide how I should live the rest of my life? | „ |
~ Curry challenging Ben Stone. |
John R. "Jack" Curry is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "The Reaper's Helper". He is a gay rights activist who performs mercy killings on gay men who are dying of AIDS.
He was portrayed by Peter Frechette, who also portrayed by Peter Nicodos, Jr. in a later episode of Law & Order.
Early life[]
Curry is a gay rights advocate who is HIV-positive. When two of his friends, who are also HIV-positive, develop full-blown AIDS, they ask him to help them commit suicide so they will be spared further pain, while making the killings look like burglaries so their families won't know. He goes through with it, watching both of them shoot themselves before getting rid of the guns they used and ransacking their apartments to make their deaths look like burglaries gone wrong.
A few months later, Curry's new boyfriend, Bobby Holland, is diagnosed with AIDS, so Curry volunteers to help him end his life. This time, however, Curry pulls the trigger himself, shooting Holland in the back of the head.
In "The Reaper's Helper"[]
NYPD Homicide Sergeant Max Greevey and Detective Mike Logan investigate Holland's death as a murder and interview his former lovers after finding out he was gay. They also discover two similar murders in Los Angeles and San Francisco and look through the victims' datebooks, finding Curry's name in all three. They arrest Curry, who claims that he helped all three men die after they asked him to but denies pulling the trigger himself.
Executive Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone and Assistant District Attorney Paul Robinette charge Curry with second-degree murder, manslaughter, and promoting a suicide. Curry's allies in the gay community rally around him as a hero, claiming that the District Attorney's office is trying to punish him for his sexuality and for honoring Holland's wishes. Stone offers Curry a plea bargain in which he would plead guilty to manslaughter in the first degree in return for a relatively light sentence, but he refuses.
During the trial, Curry announces that his HIV has progressed to full-blown AIDS. Feeling conflicted about putting a dying man in prison, Stone asks Greevey and Logan to re-examine the evidence so as to give him an excuse to drop the prosecution. When they look over the crime scene again, Greevey and Logan find Holland's fingerprints, but not Curry's, on all of the furniture that was knocked over; this proves that Holland wrecked the apartment himself, which proves that he was a willing participant in the suicide. Stone wants to let Curry off with a suspended six-month sentence, but he decides to proceed with the trial following a copycat mercy killing.
Curry testifies in his own defense that he, too, wants someone to end his suffering if his disease becomes unbearable. Curry's lawyer also calls Logan as a witness and asks him to describe his conversation with Stone about prosecuting Curry after he was diagnosed with AIDS; Logan reluctantly reveals that Stone said that doing so "felt like revenge" and asked him and Greevey to give him a reason to drop the case. With this new evidence, which is implied to have been surreptitiously leaked by Stone himself, the jury finds Curry innocent of all but a minor charge of reckless endangerment, which results in a suspended sentence. It is implied that he dies soon afterward.
External links[]
- Jack Curry on the Law & Order Wiki
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