I'm a big fan of the Law & Order series on NBC. I like it so much that I have a hard time sitting through the marathons becuase I've seen almost all of the episodes. As with any program, though, there's the occasional story that's poorly written - an unavoidable reality, especially with a program as long running as Law & Order. But last night's episode was particularly bad, and I think it deserves comment.

Here's a synopsis:

A man's daughter is kidnapped, so he helps rob a bank to get the ransom. The robbery is botched and the man is arrested. The police go looking for the kidnapped girl and the kidnappers. A detective locates the kidnapper - a professional con man, but the girl is not with him. The detective shoves his gun in the kidnapper's face and threatens to kill him, then forces him into the bathroom where he violently dunks the kidnapper's head in the toilet, threatening to drown him if he doesn't give the location of the girl. The kidnapper talks, the girl is saved.

The rest of the episode, and really the meat of the story, is a conversation about the morality of torture. All of the attorneys are just torn about what to do about the fact that the detective tortured a confession out of the kidnapper. In the end, a convenient end-run is made around the problem and everyone goes home undecided about the merits of torture.

What a bunch of rubbish.

It was pretty clear that the writers wanted to take up a serious topic that has popped up in public discourse ever since evidence was revealed that the present administration has been complicit in torturing detainees at various facilities around the world. Unfortunately, the writers did not have a good grasp of the issue, and passed off shallow sophistry as serious reflection.

To begin with, the show presents an unrealistic situation. The kidnapper was a professional criminal. The detective tortured him while they were alone in a private residence, away from other detectives, in order to force him to talk. This is where things start to go wrong - the kidnapper would not have told the truth. Sure, he may have said something to stop the torture, but why would he tell the truth?

To be realistic, the kidnapper should have told the detective that the girl was stashed somewhere in the city, preferably where there would be a lot of other people. This would buy him time and get him out of the private situation in which he was being abused. It would also present an opportunity for him to contact an attorney and to preserve the one piece of leverage he had - the girl. After all, he had to know that the detective wouldn't really kill him - he's the only one that knows the location of the girl.

The incident was later discussed by the attorneys in the frame of the "ticking time bomb" scenario. This hypothetical has been shown to be unrealistic much more eloquently in other places already, but for those that are not familiar with it, allow me to explain.

The "ticking time bomb" scenario goes something like this:

Suppose the police find out that there's a nuclear bomb in New York set to go off in one hour. They have a terrorist in custody who knows where it is, but he won't talk. Should the police be allowed to torture the suspect to get the information needed to save millions of lives?

This scenario is meant to scare you into saying "yes"; after all, who would not torture the one to save the many? But in reality the hypothetical is fallacious. It presumes that the torture would not only be successful, but be successful quickly. That is simply not the way torture works. A more appropriate question would be:

Should the police be allowed to torture the suspect to get the information needed to save millions of lives even though it won't work?

The sad thing about the episode is that there was a lot in the story that could have added something meaningful. For example, the kidnapper was ultimately convicted because an attorney discovered that they would have found the girl even if the detective had not coerced the confession.

Even granting their false premise, the torture acts were completely unnecessary.

This was only mentioned in the course of getting around the legal problem of evidence gained from a coerced confession. Nobody pointed out that this completely undermined the justification for the detective's violent acts. Furthermore, there was no talk of consequences for the detective. Even if one wanted to argue that saving the girl was an affirmative defense to the charges of torture, that should still be determined through the procedure of a trial. Instead, the issue was left untouched and the detective was treated as a sort of macho "hero" - the only guy willing to do what was necessary to save the girl. Bologna.

The episode ends with two attorneys revisiting the flawed "ticking time bomb" scenario and expanding on it. What if it's not New York? What if it's a rural state and there are only a few thousand potential victims, not millions? What if they could get the information by torturing, not the suspect, but his family members? Their answer: I don't know.

And there's the real problem. The people at Law & Order wanted to leave the viewer thinking that questions of torture are much more difficult than they really are. The question of morality is headed off quickly by the fact that torture doesn't work. It's simply too unreliable a method for gathering information. All questions of whether or not torture can be morally justifiable are based on the false premise that torture can be used successfully.

In order to put together a provocative show that asks whether or not torture can ever be justified, the folks at Law & Order had to base their show on a false premise. They used a completely unrealistic hypothetical in which the torture not only worked, but worked fast. Take away the false premise, and the rest of the argument falls apart.

I felt that this deserved comment not only because the show did a poor job of explaining the issue, but because it did a poor job of explaining the issue in the midst of a deadly serious debate. In doing so, Law & Order actually did the public a disservice by potentially confusing the issue in the minds of unknowing viewers.

In the future, I hope the people at Law & Order will go back to what they do best - interesting crime drama. Leave the philosophical debate to someone else.