OCTOBER 4, 2007
AMENDS

I got the idea for "Amends" from an episode that aired last season, in which Eames tells Ross that her husband died eight years ago. That Eames was married raised so many interesting questions: What was her marriage like? How long were they married? How did he die? What was he like? It opened up a side of her character we'd never seen. As a writing staff, we'd always talked about doing an episode that involves re-investigating a homicide that one of our detectives had solved when evidence surfaces that appears to clear the person convicted of the crime. We had always thought it might be interesting to explore the impact that has on one of our detectives: the guilt and the second guessing, etc.

I realized that if I made Eames's husband a narcotics detective who is killed in the line of duty, we could use the idea of a Project Innocence type case, where Eames realizes that her husband's killer is actually innocent and she has to investigate her own husband's murder. At the same time, Warren was intrigued by the idea of doing an episode that was a pure tragedy for everyone involved, which is the reason even Eames's husband's real killer, Doctor Beltran, is actually a somewhat sympathetic character. We tried to make each character in the episode have some type of tragic circumstances that led to their misfortune, whether it was Delgado, who spends eight years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, or his son who ends up in prison just as his own father is found innocent.

This episode was entirely fictional, but we did research real cases – reading about people who were wrongly convicted and lost years of their lives in prison, and how that impacted them. The other aspect of this episode was, of course, delving into the cop culture, and how the Department reacts when a fellow officer is killed in the line of duty. My husband, Dan O'Connor, is a detective in real life, so I'm very comfortable writing about cops, but I think most New Yorkers have a sense of the brotherhood that exists in law enforcement. We see it every time a cop is killed – the show of support, the speed with which the perpetrators are caught, the way even outside agencies band together to seek justice for the slain officer. Warren and I were very interested in capturing that aspect of police life for Goren and Eames. We wanted to feel the pressure on them to solve the case.

Both Kate and Vincent were very receptive to this story line. As a writer sometimes you really don't know how a scene will play out until you see it performed. There were so many scenes in which I was truly touched by Kate and Vincent's performances. For instance, the scene where Eames walks into the conference room and discovers for the first time that Goren is now investigating her husband's murder, when she sees the newspaper clippings and crime scene info tacked to a board. He immediately sits down, and accepts her outrage, her pent-up emotion towards him for making her open up these old wounds, as she becomes not the detective investigating a crime, but the victim of it. You could see on Goren's face that Eames's pain effected him, but he was still going to make her see that she needed to do this. This scene in particular made me appreciate how much actors like Kate and Vince bring to the page.

I feel so fortunate to have been given the opportunity to write a story like this, to work with someone as talented as Warren, a Tony award winning playwright. We had worked together once before on a Sidney Lumet series entitled "100 Centre Street." I also had the pleasure of working with Jesus Trevino (the director) before, when I was a producer on Third Watch. So, this was a reunion of sorts for me to work with both of them again. I'm thrilled with how the episode came together, and proud to have been a part of it.