Law & Order: Did Briscoe ever express remorse/regret?

Cafe Society
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BTW, this is a major spoiler, so consider yourself warned
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Recently my wife and I saw the L&O episode where the main characters witness an execution by injection. Each of the witnesses (Briscoe, Kincaid, McCoy, and Rey) have to deal with what they saw in their own way:

Claire gets all remorseful and has a Meaningful Talk with Van Buren
Jack gets drunk in a bar
Rey cheats on his wife (with Jennifer Garner!)
Briscoe bets on horses, meets up with his daughter, then ends up in the same bar as McCoy, drinking club and soda (he’s a recovering alcoholic)

McCoy stumbles out, getting a cab to go home. Lennie, seeing Jack off*, decides to get drunk, which he does.

Claire comes to the bar looking for Jack. Finding a drunk Lennie, she offers to drive him home. Apparently heading off in a random direction (we know this because she asks him where he lives while they are driving), their car is T-boned by another vehicle, killing Claire and leaving Lennie stumbling around in drunken shock.

End of episode, probably end of season.

Now I watch this show a lot, but have only seen it in reruns, meaning that I surely haven’t seen every episode, and definitely not in order. But I have never, ever seen an episode where Lennie expresses regret over his role in Claire’s death: Never said “I should have never picked up the booze again”, never said “I’m sorry I got the latest in a long line of assistant ADA’s that you’ve been sleeping with killed, Jack”, no, “I gotta leave the force because it drives me to drink and we see what happens when Lennie Briscoe drinks” type quotes, nothing. At least, nothing that I can place in context of the accident.

As far as I know.

So, my question is the same as in the title: Did Briscoe ever express remorse/regret over Claire’s death?

After all, had he not started drinking that very night, he wouldn’t have needed a lift home, she would have left earlier, the accident very likely wouldn’t have occurred. And if it did occur, it wouldn’t have occurred because she was driving his sorry drunk ass home.

Not saying he didn’t express remorse… I just never caught an episode where he does so.

*Yes, I do see what I did there, thanks. :wink:

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It was Lauren Graham, actually. Briscoe shared a moment of regret with McCoy at the end of one episode, saying (as best I can recall) “I didn’t have to get into that car.”

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Wiki sez Jennifer Garner. So does IMDB.

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Fair enough, I was thinking about a later episode featuring Graham.

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Bryan Ekers is thinking of an entirely different affair that actually was with Lauren Graham. As I recall he never actually slept with her but that it was an improper relationship. In any event his wife found out about all of it on the national news thanks to his testimony in a high profile case.

Jennifer Garner was the graduate student in the episode your thread is about.

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This is such a good question, I had to reply. I loved LO from 1990 to 2000 or thereabouts, never had much use for the revolving door that happened after Benjamin Bratt left. I still think Sam Waterston is the iconic LO actor.

About the Aftershock episode. IIRC there is some debate about whether it is an essential or typical LO episode as the series exemplified. The series always came across, to me anyway, as light on character and personal drama and heavier on the procedural aspects. So Aftershock goes against that grain. Some folks love that epi. And some hate it unreservedly. It gets a low rating overall.

I love it because it shows glimpses of what might have been if we had seen Claire and Jack get together, as their relationship was teased but never consummated, or so we are led to believe. Was it ever consummated? Will we ever know? There are also glimpses,of what made Jack Jack, and why Rey strayed, and how Claire became who she was. Oh, that Len Cariou was her father!

So, to the OP’s question did Lennie ever show remorse, I ask, why is that necessary to show the audience? When LO operated so well in showing us character by subtext, and inference and teased meaning, why would an overt apology be necessary?

Except, that in an episode in the following season, and I cannot remember which one, dammit, Jack says to Lennie,‘I miss her too’. This speaks volumes to me about the depth and complexity of both men’s feelings for Claire, and with that, I don’t need Lennie’s apology or other expression of remorse. He already did it.

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I haven’t watched much Law & Order, so I don’t really know who these characters are, so just going by your description of the episode, I’m a little confused.

How was this Briscoe guy at fault? He wasn’t driving either car was he?

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There are a couple references to Claire’s death in following episodes. In one, McCoy prosecutes a drunk driver; going so far as to withhold some exculpatory evidence. It’s strongly suggested that he’s being extra hard on that driver because of what happened. Someone asks Lennie about it, and he says (referring to McCoy) “has he said ‘this one’s for Claire’? No.”

I just saw the episode you’re referring to a couple days ago. Lennie’s on his way out of Jack’s office. Jack says something about Claire wanting to quit a few weeks (or months) before her death, but he talked her out of it. Lennie says “I didn’t have to go into that bar.”

Ah, here’s the

[quote page]
("Law & Order" Causa Mortis (TV Episode 1996) - Quotes - IMDb) on IMDb; I was close. Looks like it’s the first Jamie episode.

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He might feel some responsibility for her death because if he hadn’t gotten drunk, she wouldn’t have needed to drive him home and wouldn’t have been killed in the accident.

So he didn’t directly kill her but he caused the circumstances that led to her death.

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There’s also projection. While Briscoe wasn’t driving that night, he was drinking. The person who was driving the car that killed Kincaid was also drunk. So while Briscoe wasn’t driving the car that killed Kincaid, he probably also realized there had been nights when he had been driving drunk and could have killed somebody. So he was as morally wrong as the actual killer even if he had been lucky enough to never have hit anybody.

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Yes Briscoe says something remorseful to Jack that he should have taken that drink. I think it is one of the first few episodes on season 7, but I can’t find definitive proof.
It could have been in the episode Under the Influence.

Its the episode where a drunk guy kills some small kids after getting served a bunch of drinks on airline flight from South America. Jamie and Jack argue over the ethics. Something about giving a witness statement to the defense attorney.

But Kincaid dies on season finale of season 6 and this episode was in season 8, and I think it happened in the first few episodes.

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That’s the episode I was referring to. McCoy tries to prosecute the driver for murder; the defense attorney wants to argue that the defendant was too drunk to form the intent necessary for a murder conviction. McCoy hides a statement taken from the flight attendant about how many drinks the defendant was served; he also tells the airline that the FA can’t be subpoenaed if she’s transferred to flights that don’t operate in the U.S.

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I’ve seen every episode of that show numerous times, except for the one I don’t like, “Rage,” and “Aftershock,” but I have seen the one where Lennie expresses regret.

McCoy says to Briscoe as they are leaving the office, “You know, she wanted to resign. I talked her out of it.” Meaning, I suppose, that she wouldn’t have been involved in the execution at all, even though it was for a prior incident*, and Briscoe replies “I could have kept walking past that bar.”

What’s more though, if you compare the helpless way he looks at her in the car at the end of “Aftershock,” he’s showing real grief. It’s not as great as when his daughter dies, but it’s qualitatively similar (and shows what a great actor Orbach was that he communicates so much without words, and in a short period of time). Something to remember is that we don’t see everything that happens off-camera; for example, we don’t find out until a couple of years after the fact that Briscoe and ME Rodgers used to go to the opera together. So, Briscoe had a personal life. Maybe he expressed lots of guilt and regret to his AA sponsor. Maybe he expressed it over dinner to Dr. Rodgers before they went to Rigoletto. Maybe he expressed it to his daughter. I think that it’s pretty clear he felt it.
*I don’t remember how they handwaved that execution, since New York did not have the death penalty, and the closest place for a federal execution at the time was Indiana, where Timothy McVeigh was executed. It can’t be someone who was sentenced before the moratorium, because aside from the fact that that was decades earlier, everyone sentenced to death (eg, the Manson “family”) before the moratorium got commutation to life.

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Do people even read threads anymore before they reply?

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Kind of. He can’t form the intent necessary for FIRST DEGREE murder, and therefore face the newly reinstated death penalty. The flight attendant is not a US citizen, and the US has no power of subpoena over non-citizens outside the borders. McCoy doesn’t actually say “Stay out of the US,” but he explains the rule, and let’s the airline admin come to its own conclusion about the inconvenience of having someone subpoenaed, and whether they’d like to avoid it.

The guy (the character’s name is Bernard Dressler)'s lawyer wants to plea bargain, but McCoy won’t allow it, insisting on going to trial and not having any lesser included charges.

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What? I read your reply. I added some thoughts.

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No more than this Jack guy did though, right? He was also in the bar getting drunk, and she wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

I don’t see how anyone is at fault besides the drunk driver though. You’re no more likely to get hit by a drunk while driving one home, than if you going to the store to buy some milk or something.

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I don’t think you understand how guilt works for some of us. You don’t have to be actually, literally to blame for something to feel guilty about it.

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Oh, they consummated it all the time. We the audience were not privy to it.

It was finally made canon several seasons later when Jack was talking with someone and mentioned it.

He never slept with Jaime, and I don’t think “Hang em high” Abby would ever have touched him. Serena, of course, wouldn’t either, for different reason. Can’t say about Alex Boriga.

And Stone runs rings around Jack! :slight_smile:

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There’s an episode where Claire is having lunch with one of Jack’s earlier assistants, another woman, when the woman asks Claire if she’s sleeping with Jack, saying something along the lines of “Oh, don’t be shocked - Jack sleeps with all his assistants.”