L&O DOES IT AGAIN: Last night's "Law & Order" episode told a fascinating, even-handed story that handled the terrorism/civil liberties conundrum as well as any fictional treatment I've seen since 9/11. Using a version of the James Davis City Hall shooting as a starting point, the episode concerned a murderer who was put on trial using evidence that had been obtained by a military tribunal-like "secret court," and provoked all sorts of great questions: is it right to allow the federal government to search a man's house without telling him? But doesn't it not matter, when the man is clearly guilty of murder and the search was for the murder weapon? The episode didn't take sides, and handled everything fairly and tastefully.
Contrast that with a recent episode of the ridiculous lawyer show "The Practice," which began with a group of cops torturing an alleged cop-killer in his hospital bed and withholding treatment until he confessed- and the show, predictably, somehow shoehorned this into a particularly wrongheaded anti-Patriot Act argument, as though John Ashcroft were going into American cities and torturing people in hospitals. There's a reason "Law & Order" has lasted 14 years on the air, and "The Practice" is unlikely to run for half that time.