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| “ | You want me that bad for Nurse Davis, you'd better dig deeper. | „ |
| ~ Pawl making a deal to serve less prison time for murder. |
James "Jimmy" Lee Pawl is the secondary antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Jurisdiction". He is drug dealer and addict who brutally murders two nurses.
He was portrayed by Paul McCrane, who also played Emil Antonowsky in RoboCop.
Early life[]
Pawl was a lifelong criminal and drug addict, with a long arrest record for dealing and possessing heroin, as well as burglary and robbery from stealing to finance his addiction. He was also a violent sociopath who took sadistic pleasure in cutting and mutilating women; a few years before the events of the episode, he was arrested and imprisoned for mutilating a woman in Florida.
After being released from prison, he moved to New York City, where he was quickly arrested for dealing heroin, but sentenced to probation and methadone treatment in lieu of prison. He resided in a group home, where he made the acquaintance of mentally handicapped sex offender Davy Zifrin and became obsessed with nurses Victoria Hemmings and Mary Davis, who administered methadone to the addicts in the facility and who occasionally sold stolen Percodan to make ends meet.
He stalked Davis to her home and raped and murdered her, stabbing her to death and then mutilating the corpse. The murder was investigated by NYPD Homicide Detective Brian Torelli, who coached Zifrin to give a false confession to a sexual assault charge when he was a patrol officer years earlier in a successful bid to be promoted to detective.
"Jurisdiction"[]
His bloodlust unsatisfied, Pawl began stalking Hemmings a month later, and broke into her apartment, sexually assaulted her, and stabbed and mutilated her to death, at one point severing her ring finger to take her wedding band. He also sexually assaulted and stabbed Hemmings' roommate, but she survived. NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Mike Logan investigate the murder and briefly interrogate the addicts at the group home, including Pawl, but the detectives rule them out as suspects and let them go.
Briscoe and Logan talk to Torelli, Briscoe's former partner who is investigating the Davis murder, to see if his case and theirs are related. Once again seeing a chance to advance his career, Torelli arrests Zifrin on a trumped-up charge and coaches him to give a false confession to the murders of Davis and Hemmings, promising him that he would finally get the respect he craved if people thought he was smart enough to kill someone and get away with it. Briscoe and Logan arrest Zifrin, and Executive Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone and Assistant District Attorney Paul Robinette charge him with second-degree murder.
Zifrin's lawyer, Shambala Green, gets Zifrin's confession excluded as evidence by convincing the trial judge that it was coerced. Stone and Robinette investigate further and find out that both Hemmings and Davis had sold Percodan to drug dealer Marty Lake. They talk to Lake, who is now facing a hefty prison sentence for dealing and possessing heroin and other opiates, and who tells them that Pawl had bragged about committing the murders, even offering to sell him Hemmings' severed finger along with the ring she had worn it on. He offers to testify against Pawl and Torelli, whom he knows framed Zifrin, in return for having the charges against him dropped, a deal that Stone reluctantly accepts.
Briscoe and Logan arrest Pawl for murder in the middle of a drug deal, while also finding in his possession several bottles of Percodan stolen from the victims' apartment. Stone offers a plea bargain in which Pawl pleads guilty to the murders in return for being sentenced to 25 years in prison for second-degree murder instead of a life sentence. In response, Pawl says that he will testify against Torelli in return for pleading guilty to first-degree manslaughter and spending 15 years in prison. Stone ultimately strong-arms Pawl into accepting his original offer by threatening to raise the charge to first-degree murder and add consecutive sentences for his many drug-related felonies. Cornered, Pawl accepts the deal and informs on Torelli, who also goes to prison.
Trivia[]
- Pawl is based on the late Richard Speck, who murdered eight student nurses on June 13, 1966.
External links[]
- James Lee Pawl on the Law & Order Wiki
