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| “ | A man came toward me and I became afraid. I stabbed him with a bayonet I had with me. This paper is full of needles. They cut me and I bleed. You hear those chariots? They stole them from me, they want me to sleep. They like that. That's why I killed her. | „ |
| ~ Smith having a psychotic episode while allocuting to his crimes. |
James Smith is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Pro Se". He is a defense attorney who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and who kills three people during a psychotic episode.
He was portrayed by Denis O'Hare, who also portrayed Harold Morrissey in an earlier Law & Order episode and Stanley, Spalding, and Mr. Van Wirt in the American Horror Story franchise.
Early life[]
James graduated from Princeton University and University of Michigan Law School, graduating summa cum laude from the latter, where he edited the law review and qualified for a postdoctoral associateship. His ultimate ambition was to become a defense attorney.
Unfortunately, he also suffered from schizoaffective disorder, and often stopped taking his medication, either because he felt that he was cured or he couldn't stand the side effects, which often made him feel dead inside. Eventually, he would have violent psychotic episodes, during which he heard voices telling him that people were trying to hurt him. During one such episode when he was 23, he trashed the law school dean's office because he believed the dean was spying on him; in another, he tried to strangle his girlfriend because he believed she was trying to stick needles into his brain. He was hospitalized for six months after the latter offense, but he was let go after he appeared to no longer pose a danger to anyone.
After college, he tried to find work at a law firm, but his illness, worsened by his habit of going off his medication, made it very difficult. He finally found a job as a Bar exam grader for a legal preparatory school, a job far below his abilities. He became depressed, at one point renting a high-rise apartment so he could kill himself by jumping out of the window, although he never went through with it.
He was arrested in 1993 for stalking a woman, but the Assistant District Attorney assigned to the case, Claire Kincaid, was keen to avoid the expense and extra workload of a trial, so she arranged a plea bargain in which he was sentenced to six months of probation and a $500 fine in lieu of prison. He nevertheless lost his job and became homeless, sleeping in Central Park relying on soup kitchens and the occasional help of his sister, Patricia, over the next three years in order to survive.
"Pro Se"[]
In 1996, he became obsessed with Linda Bowers and started stalking her, laboring under the delusion that she was a CIA agent who is trying to put him back on his medication. She calls the police when he shows up at her house shouting threats, but the police merely take him back to Central Park instead of arresting him. He is still convinced that Bowers is trying to hurt him, however, so he steals a bayonet from a street vendor and attacks her with it in a clothing store, stabbing her and two other women to death, as well as critically injuring a third, Joanne Ellis.
NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis investigate the murders and find James after getting a description from the street vendor and showing it around soup kitchens in the area. He is incoherent when they try to question him, claiming to be "a soldier for Jabim" and that his victims were with the CIA. When his surviving victim identifies him as her attacker, Briscoe and Curtis arrest him for murder.
During James' arraignment, he pleads not guilty and asks to represent himself, seeing the trial an opportunity to finally practice law. He also recognizes Kincaid, and her involvement in his previous trial briefly gets her in trouble with District Attorney Adam Schiff, who is smarting from the bad publicity resulting from his office letting James go. Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy manages to persuade Schiff to keep her on the case, however.
James files an omnibus motion to have the case dismissed, but the trial judge rejects it. James then changes his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity. McCoy and Kincaid have him examined by forensic psychiatrist Elizabeth Olivet, to whom he describes the crippling side effects of his medication and declares that he is not responsible for the murders, which he blames on the "creature" created by his illness. Olivet later tells McCoy and Kincaid that James likely knew that he would become dangerous if he stopped taking his medication and stopped taking it anyway, making him responsible for what he did.
During the trial, James cross-examines Olivet and gets her to admit that it was not a certainty that he would kill someone if he stopped taking his medication. While cross-examining Ellis, his surviving victim, he apologizes for hurting her and asks her if she thinks Kincaid is at fault for giving him a plea bargain and keeping him on the street; Ellis says that she is and angrily condemns her.
Seeing that the trial is not going their way, McCoy and Kincaid ask Patricia to persuade her brother to agree to a plea bargain in which he is institutionalized rather than imprisoned, on the condition that he takes his medication. James refuses, however, and gloats that not only is he winning, he is proving to the world that he is a great attorney. In an effort to save James from being sent to prison for life, Patricia offers to testify about his mental illness. James tries to exclude her as a witness, but the judge overrules him. Patricia then testifies that she had once told James that he could hurt people if he went off his medication, and that he had replied that people would just have to stay out of his way.
Beaten, James agrees to the plea bargain, but he secretly stashes away his medication rather than taking it, and he is once again overcome by hallucinations and delusional thinking. At his allocution hearing, he rants at the judge that his victims had been trying to poison him and inject him with needles and that he killed them in self-defense. The judge then sentences him to six to 18 years in a psychiatric facility.
External links[]
- James Smith on the Law & Order Wiki
