Season 19: “May we live to fight another day.”

[Xeliou66]

49 minutes ago, balmz said:

With jack and the judge in zero, maybe it was jack was scared of his own morality and the judges state was an unpleasant what if that jack may face one day 

Maybe Jack was more sympathetic due to age, plus he knew the judge for a while and maybe he wanted to grant him the benefit of the doubt that he would know if he wasn’t fit anymore. It was a sad situation, and I felt for the judge.     
Fortunately Jack stayed mentally sharp during his entire run as DA, I’m really glad he got such a strong exit this season. 

[andromeda331]

On 3/13/2024 at 8:30 PM, Xeliou66 said:

Maybe Jack was more sympathetic due to age, plus he knew the judge for a while and maybe he wanted to grant him the benefit of the doubt that he would know if he wasn’t fit anymore. It was a sad situation, and I felt for the judge.     
Fortunately Jack stayed mentally sharp during his entire run as DA, I’m really glad he got such a strong exit this season. 

So did I. The poor judge. It would be hard to accept you can't do your job anymore because your no longer fit. I like the twist that it wasn't the clerk controlling things but trying to help the judge. 

[Xeliou66]

6 hours ago, andromeda331 said:

So did I. The poor judge. It would be hard to accept you can't do your job anymore because your no longer fit. I like the twist that it wasn't the clerk controlling things but trying to help the judge. 

The clerk was manipulative though, she seemed to have a crush on Cutter so she was ruling in Cutter’s favor, then she switched gears when Cutter got suspicious. The judge was very sympathetic, his whole life was devoted to practicing law/being a judge and he just couldn’t accept he was no longer fit to do what he loved. It was a sad situation. I liked at the end when the judge came to Jack’s office and remembered Adam being in the office, and how he loved to eat sandwiches there, that was a nice touch as we all know Adam ate sandwiches frequently in his office. It was also realistic that sometimes people with dementia/Alzheimer’s can remember people and things from a while back but can’t recall basic things from the present, as shown when the judge forgot who Jack was moments later. It was a very tough situation, and dementia is a terrible disease, I’ve had a couple of relatives with it and it’s very difficult to watch them decline, so I really felt for the judge.

[andromeda331]

On 3/18/2024 at 7:41 AM, Xeliou66 said:

 It was a very tough situation, and dementia is a terrible disease, I’ve had a couple of relatives with it and it’s very difficult to watch them decline, so I really felt for the judge.

It really is. My grandfather had it and it was really hard. And I'm pretty sure my dad has dementia. It's at the beginning but it's not easy. It's weird how sometimes my brother and I will be talking about him while he's in the room and he doesn't even notice. We all make sure someone is always with him at doctor's appointments because doesn't hear what the doctor's saying or thinks the doctor asked a question and my dad will give a different answer. At first we thought he just had a hearing problem but no. 

[Xeliou66]

Season 19 on today - By Perjury is a fascinating episode, with the psychopath lawyer killing people who were getting in the way of his cases and then he tried to shoot Cutter in the bathroom, that was a wild ending, where did he get that gun from I wonder and how did he smuggle it into the courthouse? It was an interesting case and I liked how Cutter smoked a cigarette in the office of the lawyer to prove the guy perjured himself. It was a creative way for Cutter to proceed and I liked how Jack said if they couldn’t find ways to prosecute murderers what the hell were they doing in the job - I also liked how Jack told the defense attorney he decided who does what with the DAs office. It’s a wild case and a compelling episode.

Pledge is next, this is another rather bizarre case, the killer was nuts, killing 2 innocent people just to get back at a woman who threw him out of a college party. The way the killer talked about his daughter and resented her for not being “beautiful enough” or whatever was disgusting, I felt horrible for the daughter, what a shitty dad and her mom was blind to who he was. It’s a compelling case but it’s another one where Cutter had to use trickery to win, that got kind of tiresome in season 19, and Cutter was fortunate he found a woman with the same name who attended the same school and who married someone from a blue collar background - if he hadn’t found her I’m not sure how Cutter would’ve gotten the defendant to explode and confess. So it felt kind of like a cop out how it ended, even though the killer’s breakdown was memorable.

Lucky Stiff I mostly think of as being the episode without Jack, as he was out of town, made the episode less interesting, and it’s another one where Cutter had to use a trick at the end, I liked Rodgers calling him out for it. Cutter is just not my favorite - he seemed underhanded at times and had a large ego and was a “do anything to win” type. Obviously no one could match Jack as lead prosecutor but Mike wasn’t that likable much of the time, being paired with the awesome Connie helped him. I do like Lupo/Bernard a lot, they made for a good pairing. 

[ICantDoThatDave]

3 hours ago, Xeliou66 said:

...and it’s another one where Cutter had to use a trick at the end, I liked Rodgers calling him out for it.

The Lucky Stiff dirty trick was particularly annoying because the girl only changed her testimony once it would financially benefit her, so her credibility at trial would be virtually 0%. But they acted like it was, by itself, enough to convict.

Plus, I'm pretty sure the falsified ME report would have been brought up by the Defense at trial, which means Cutter would have been in big trouble.

[Xeliou66]

18 minutes ago, ICantDoThatDave said:

The Lucky Stiff dirty trick was particularly annoying because the girl only changed her testimony once it would financially benefit her, so her credibility at trial would be virtually 0%. But they acted like it was, by itself, enough to convict.

Plus, I'm pretty sure the falsified ME report would have been brought up by the Defense at trial, which means Cutter would have been in big trouble.

I got very tired of the trope of Cutter having to use underhanded trickery to win cases - you make good points about the Lucky Stiff trick and like I said he was very fortunate in Pledge. Cutter just rubbed me the wrong way sometimes, he was arrogant and would do anything to win. And Cutter never got in trouble for his tricks. 

[Irlandesa]

This season is airing on POP right now and I've put it on in the background.   It's making me question how much I know of myself.

For the longest time my claim to fame has been that I've seen every episode of this series, most multiple times. 

But there have been numerous episodes this morning (later half of Season 19) that seem wholly unfamiliar to me.  There was only one that I knew I had absolutely seen before (S19.E17-Anchors Away).  Maybe another one or two that became familiar the more it went on (S19.E18-Promote This! maybe and S19.E20-Exchange) and the rest I have no memory of. 

So strange.

[ICantDoThatDave]

I watched By Perjury, the one where the lawyer testified against his own client saying he didn't allow smoking in his office which led to his client getting the death penalty. Cutter's "trick" of smoking in the lawyer's office to show he committed perjury doesn't make any sense.

Think about the amount of time that had to have passed since that incident:

The lawyer testified that he didn't allow smoking because he had recently quit. So this incident would have happened before the client was even arrested. Then a whole murder trial takes place. Numerous appeals happen, then the execution, then several months.

So we're talking years, at a bare minimum let's say 5 years have passed.

"Your Honor, for a couple of years after I quit smoking, I didn't allow it in my office. I do now because it's been so long since I quit that it no longer bothers me."

That simple. Done. He goes home.

[Xeliou66]

On 11/22/2024 at 3:10 PM, ICantDoThatDave said:

I watched By Perjury, the one where the lawyer testified against his own client saying he didn't allow smoking in his office which led to his client getting the death penalty. Cutter's "trick" of smoking in the lawyer's office to show he committed perjury doesn't make any sense.

Think about the amount of time that had to have passed since that incident:

The lawyer testified that he didn't allow smoking because he had recently quit. So this incident would have happened before the client was even arrested. Then a whole murder trial takes place. Numerous appeals happen, then the execution, then several months.

So we're talking years, at a bare minimum let's say 5 years have passed.

"Your Honor, for a couple of years after I quit smoking, I didn't allow it in my office. I do now because it's been so long since I quit that it no longer bothers me."

That simple. Done. He goes home.

 

On 11/22/2024 at 3:10 PM, ICantDoThatDave said:

I watched By Perjury, the one where the lawyer testified against his own client saying he didn't allow smoking in his office which led to his client getting the death penalty. Cutter's "trick" of smoking in the lawyer's office to show he committed perjury doesn't make any sense.

Think about the amount of time that had to have passed since that incident:

The lawyer testified that he didn't allow smoking because he had recently quit. So this incident would have happened before the client was even arrested. Then a whole murder trial takes place. Numerous appeals happen, then the execution, then several months.

So we're talking years, at a bare minimum let's say 5 years have passed.

"Your Honor, for a couple of years after I quit smoking, I didn't allow it in my office. I do now because it's been so long since I quit that it no longer bothers me."

That simple. Done. He goes home.

You are right, that was a flimsy trick Cutter used and it was unlikely it would hold up. Still it was less ridiculous than what happened in the next episode Pledge, when Cutter somehow found a woman with the same first name as the woman the defendant was obsessed with who went to the same school at around the same time and was in the same sorority as the woman the defendant loved and who happened to marry a blue collar guy like the defendant. That felt totally absurd and unbelievable. 
Cutter is just not appealing at all to me between how he often he used tricks and borderline underhanded methods and his very large ego and smugness. When Jack occasionally used a trick or bent the rules, he did so in pursuit of justice, and he sometimes came to realize later he was wrong or had conflicted feelings about it - Cutter was the type who would do anything to win and didn’t care how underhanded and it felt like he was in it to boost his ego, not seek justice, and he used trickery and underhanded methods far more often than anyone else and was just so cocky about it. Cutter benefitted from being paired with the awesome Connie and having a strong cast around him and being a part of plenty of interesting cases, but he’s not a likable guy