“Ben Stone once said I’d have to decide if I was a lawyer who was Black or a Black man who was a lawyer. All those years I thought I was the former. All those years I was wrong.”
Paul Robinette’s (Richard Brooks) parting words to Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) in “Custody,” the 14th episode of Law & Order season six, are more than just a callback to a heated exchange from an earlier episode. They’re a declaration of purpose, a Black man rejecting a system he once faithfully served. “Custody” is revelatory, and throughout, Robinette is defiantly, unapologetically Black. He wasn’t always.
When Law & Order debuted on NBC in September 1990, Robinette was the young ADA under Executive ADA Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty). I admired Robinette’s flat-top fade. I also envied his bad-ass baritone, especially when he instructed the detectives to “pick ’em up.” The network had several popular series with predominantly Black casts: The Cosby Show, whose star would eventually appear in a real-life courtroom, A Different World, and The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, the latter of which premiered the same week as Law & Order. But Robinette was the lone Black representative in the criminal justice system. This isn’t to say that Law & Order was anything like Friends or Seinfeld. Black people existed in this New York. We were put-upon secretaries, seen-it-all cabbies, and, yes, junkies, dealers, sex workers, and scary guys on the subway. We provided the show’s urban reality.
Compared to future cast changes, Brooks left the series without ceremony. In 1993, NBC noticed women existed and asked producer Dick Wolf to include a couple in the season four cast. Captain Donald Cragen (Dann Florek, who would later star on the spin-off Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) made way for Lieutenant Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson), and Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy) replaced Robinette as the A.D.A. Van Buren, a Black woman, overseeing the detectives in the 27th Precinct was a refreshing change, but a Black prosecutor would never again work in the show’s D.A. office. Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), the daughter of a Spanish immigrant father and Mexican mother, was second-chair A.D.A. for the final four seasons.
No reason is given for Robinette’s departure. In a deleted scene, Van Buren asks to see him and Stone tells her to take a “cab uptown… Park Avenue. Woodward, Martin, and Schwartz.” I’m glad this never aired, as the scene would’ve left the impression that Robinette pursued a more lucrative career in private practice—understandable but not necessarily noble or the result of any great inner conflict.
Law & Order rarely showed us the personal lives of its characters, but there were often clever, subtle hints of who they were off the job: McCoy’s motorcycle helmet and Kincaid’s fly as fuck leather jacket, for instance. Detective Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) had a solid standup set about his ex-wives. Robinette was more elusive. He was reserved, stoic, prosecuting offenders without an obvious agenda. He never mentioned going home to a wife or girlfriend (this was 1990, so those were the network-approved options). We never even saw him leaving to meet up with friends for drinks.
“Custody” tells us more about Robinette in one episode than we’d learned over three seasons, and it actually makes his previous appearances richer upon rewatch. He returns as a defense attorney, a courtroom adversary to McCoy and his own replacement, Kincaid. But he’s not some slick hired gun representing whoever can afford his fee. He’s defending Jenny Mays, a Black former crack addict who tried to kidnap her child from his white adoptive parents. She’s not a clichéd “perfect victim,” and a man died as a result of her actions. It’s what Stone would’ve considered clear-cut felony murder, but his former ADA now passionately declares it “justice.”
There’s an interesting parallel to the first season’s “Subterranean Homeboy Blues” (yeah, I know). Laura Di Biasi (Cynthia Nixon) is charged with shooting two Black men on a subway. She claims it was self-defense, but compelling evidence exists that she’d targeted random Black guys in revenge after an unrelated assault. There’s a cringe-worthy moment when she appeals to Robinette, who she accuses of “hating” her. She insists, “I wouldn’t shoot you.” She seeks absolution from a Black man for her crime against Black men. She “reassures” Robinette that she considers him “different” from the men who apparently terrified her so much she had no choice but to open fire (even though one of the men was seated). The “compliment” she offers Robinette is one “presentable” Black men often receive from the back of a white hand, but “Custody” shows that Paul doesn’t want to spend his life as “the good one.” He wants to use his talents to help his entire community, not just himself.
This is a major change. When Stone asked Robinette if he was a “lawyer who was Black or a Black man who was a lawyer,” it was a loaded question, as Stone likely considered only one option honorable. Robinette admits that he’d defined himself as the former, as someone who saw his race as separate from his identity. He was the great white moderate hope. He even opposed affirmative action. In “Out Of The Half-Light,” an episode ripped from then-recent headlines surrounding the Tawana Brawley case, Robinette naively informs Black congressman Ronald Eaton (an obvious Al Sharpton stand-in) that “we’re past the separate drinking-fountain stage. We’re past legal discrimination. We’re at the hearts and minds stage.” Almost 30 years later, current events reveal how absurd that sentiment is.
Robinette rejected Eaton’s belief that the “ends justify the means” when seeking racial equality. But as opposing counsel in “Custody,” he argues that transracial adoption is a form of racial genocide; because the entire welfare system is racist, his client was justified in using whatever means were necessary to take back her child.
Ironically, Robinette is now more like McCoy than the fiercely principled Stone. He’s willing to bend the rules to force a potentially hostile judge to recuse himself. When McCoy accuses him of “bullying” the judge, Robinette points out how much power the D.A.’s office wields: “I’m a bully? I don’t have 500 attorneys in my office or a $200 million war chest, the power to investigate and arrest any citizen and a well-armed police force to back it up. That’s you, Jack. You’re the biggest badass on the block.”
Wolf considered Kincaid “the most politically left character” in the show’s history at that point, but that assistant A.D.A.’s (white) feminism goes only so far. She’s not moved to identify with Mays despite their common gender. She suggests that Robinette is using bigotry, which she views as simply individual bad actors, as an “excuse” for “any Black criminal” to avoid accountability. Robinette counters that true justice would consider the institutional racism that Black defendants endure a “mitigating factor.”
McCoy isn’t pleased when he’s forced to offer Robinette’s client a plea deal after the case ends in a mistrial. He tells Robinette that he’s a “long way from the District Attorney’s office,” and it’s obvious that the door to this office has slammed shut behind Paul. Earlier, District Attorney Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) had compared Robinette with no shortage of contempt to a member of the Nation of Islam, effectively equating his overt “pro-blackness” with Louis Farrakhan’s anti-semitism.
Robinette would return to Law & Order two more times: In season 17’s “Fear America,” he defends a Muslim man, Ben Faoud, who he argues the prosecution has unjustly painted as “a terrorist and a murderer” or, bluntly, “one of them.” However, his client in season 16’s “Birthright” is a white woman, Gloria Rhodes, who has sterilized dozens of young Black and Hispanic women without their consent. One of her victims—Traci Sands, a murder suspect with a history of child neglect—dies as a result.
McCoy and Robinette’s relationship has grown more cordial over the past decade, and after the case has ended, the two men share drinks. McCoy asks Paul how he could defend someone like Gloria Rhodes, and his response is fascinating. “I could give you reasons—the good she’s done with the clinic, innocent until proven guilty — but tell me your job wouldn’t be easier if people like Traci were never born, that the world wouldn’t be a better place.” McCoy “won’t say that,” but Robinette counters that he already had when he conceded that Rhodes wasn’t Auschwitz “Angel Of Death” doctor “Josef Mengele.” He continues: “Nobody wants to admit they think [Rhodes] did the right thing, but if they look for it—you look for it—deep down, it’s there. That deserves a defense.”
How does this square with the Robinette who’d defended Jenny Mays? He sounds shockingly similar to the judge in “Custody” who supported forced sterilizations, but I don’t think he’s suddenly more conservative than McCoy. His closing statement from “Custody” still stands: He’s a Black man who is also a lawyer, and that will forever alter how he views the system and the methods necessary to achieve true justice in and out of the courtroom.
63 Comments
A terrific actor, check out To Sleep with Anger, it’s a terrific indie with Danny Glover and he has some great scenes with him. It’s funny that SVU has lasted as long as it had because I always felt it was the weakest of the Law and Order series
The gulf between Law & Order and SVU is massive. SVU is such trash, and it’s success definitely pulled L&O down into the gutter during those last 2 seasons. Law & Order was so perfect, plenty of character without the personal melodrama.
All the seasons through the Abby Carmichael years (yes, I know), are stellar. The show started going downhill once Elisabeth Rohm joined (just a bad actress, although she’s been good in other things). And none of the other DAs could ever measure up to Steven Hill.
Rohm was a bit dead-eyed, but believable as a young ADA (her infamously tone deaf resignation convo aside). But Brisco & Green are my favorite detective duo, those were some classic episodes.
I thought it started to dip when they brought in Farina. Nothing against Farina, he was always an entertaining actor and can clearly play a cop, but his Chicago drawl always made me think of Sippowitz.
Jeremy Sisto’s first season the quality dropped like a lead balloon. Not Sisto’s fault, he was fine, that just happens to be the season they actually showed the set up of the crime rather than the iconic body discovery cold open. Blasphemy! After that the stories became more tawdry, the court room scenes looked cheap, and Anthony Anderson was on the wrong show.
Agree, no one tops Steven Hill as DA. Diane Weist and Fred Thompson had their moments, but you can’t top Adam “make a deal!” Schiff.
The Law & Order universe ceased to exist to me the second Lenny left. Jerry Orbach made that show.
I’ve never really understood the hate for Rohm, well, other than that ridiculously awful send-off she had with Fred Thompson’s DA.Only one-upped by what happened to Parisse’s character.
Se was poorly written, even at the time. They basically created her a straw man so the mostly conservative writing staff could then let the older and wiser men explain why her silly ‘maybe defendants have rights to’views were wrong’Not really her fault, that’s just a thankless position to be in
I think that was a reflection of NYC’s crackdown on crime at the time. I don’t think Southerlyn was meant to educated by McCoy and Branch, just that her views were in the minority in the room she was in. She has an actual arc of being jaded by the direction of the office and fired for not being on board. She was the opposite of Carmichael’s Texas justice. It worked for me.
But then, maybe it’s because I love License to Kill but Jamie Ross was always my favorite ADA and I loved whenever she came back. She was just a working lawyer who left for private practice and better pay, no intense politics.
Gotta disagree there about Rohm. She was the best part of the show during its fall into fascist values. Jack McCoy was seriously the most bug-fucking insane excuse for a prosecutor I’ve ever seen on television. You could make an entirely new show called Law & Order: The Innocence Project, and make it about getting people out of jail that he railroaded for offending his delicate sensibilities. Dude was nuts.
make sure it features defendants Stabler beat the shit out of!
Holy shit, I just died lol.
It’s shocking when Elisabeth Rohm turns up in other shows/movies as a perfectly good actress. I blame L&O for never wanting anything out of Southerlyn but a strawwoman for Fred Thompson to pontificate against.
I thought it was great for Jack McCoy’s character than he finally became the D.A., but the show diminished in quality when he became just the cranky overseer and not the guy in the trenches.
Still, I’m sure Dann Florek feels like he hit the lottery after being replaced on the original L&O only to ride its inferior spinoff into ungodly riches after twenty seasons.
He was also amazing on the series G vs E.
Loved that show!
Came for the obligatory G&E shoutout!
Robinette naively informs Black congressman Ronald Eaton (an obvious Al Sharpton stand-in) that “we’re past the separate drinking-fountain stage. We’re past legal discrimination. We’re at the hearts and minds stage.” most likely words written by a white male.
Probably Michael Moriarty, knowing what we know about him now
Law & Order in the early ‘90s? Almost certainly written by a white male.
To be fair, I always liked how Brooks was a bit elitist — he knew how far he’d gotten and, in that way, he knew how alone he stood. He had that mentality: ‘If no one can get where I am, they’re weaker than I am.’ In that way, I always loved Brooks complicated identity.
I just got done doing an entire series rewatch, and Brooks was so good as Robinette. I’m glad that the character got a little more fleshed out in the guest appearances after leaving the D.A.’s office, because he got stuck with a lot of the white writers’ early 90s takes about race and it always involved Robinette having some race neutral bootstraps dialogue. Any time an episode had a racial angle during his time on the show, I found myself groaning and waiting for the show to get back to its other pet topics, like the priest–penitent privilege or the treatment of Irish-Americans in New York…Also, so many episodes in the early years of the show were just Law & Order: Blacks vs. Jews. It’s wild.
To be fair, based on the news coverage of New York at the time, you’d get the impression the city would have been more properly called New York: Blacks vs. Jews from the POV of someone across the country.
Man did this show change when Stone and Robinette left. Shame we never got Stone back and he died off camera
I had no idea since it was on SVU. That’s dumb.
Stone was mentioned once or twice in the main show but never shown again. In one episode Robinette (as a defense attorney) says that they should go ask Stone something and I think McCoy mentions that he’s in Africa doing some charity work or some such. Then he’s referenced a few times in Chicago Law as well prior to them bringing his son onto SVU after that shows cancellation, with the premise being that Ben died (of a heart attack I think?) and his son moved back to NYC as a result.
No epithet ever uttered on TV was more cutting than Ben Stone calling someone “Sir”.
Yeah, I liked Claire, but it’s a shame that Robinette (and Stone, for that matter) didn’t get the benefit of the way the show loosened up on showing more of the leads’ lives outside of the case of the week. This is particularly so in light of the shift in his character this article celebrates. I honestly would have preferred to have some more backstory on how he went from being a black Rockefeller Republican prosecutor to the more radical defense attorney he becomes in his subsequent appearances. Maybe he goes to that law firm on Park Avenue and has a crisis of conscience defending all those white white collar clients. Maybe he’s embittered by whatever unnamed event got him to leave the DA’s office.
If memory serves, Robinette smacked McCoy around in the courtroom in one of those subsequent appearances.
I thought L&O’s strength was sticking to the procedural. After George Dzundza departed, they managed to get some nice character beats in without shoving typical cop melodrama in your face. I recently watched some of the final season again and there are scenes of Van Buren’s home life – who cares!?
I kinda agree about the Van Buren lawsuit and cancer storylines, although they made Ernie Hudson Van Buren’s boyfriend in those last seasons, and I, for one, cannot ever begrudge Ernie Hudson a paycheck.
Hold on, just remembering the one-season show 10-8.
Deep pull!
Sidebar: If I had grown up in a more enlightened time, I would have realized my tingly feelings for Brooks and Kincaid could co-exist. But now I can happily admit to being fully sexually attracted to both of them. And also wanting Robinette to be the narrator of every audiobook ever, because, really —- his voice was just lovely.
I suspect that if Michael Moriarty hadn’t gone off the deep end, he would have been brought back at some point.
over Janet Reno of all things
Yeah, he wrote himself out of in front of the camera with his wacky conspiracy theories.
The funny thing about how Moriarty played it was that he was a total bureaucrat — like he was almost too real and too depressing. Now, living in the law as I do, I can see why he did but I still will happily skip pass his acting for Waterston.
Well, Michael Moriarty was kind of a whack job, so maybe good that he never actually came back.
“reassures” Robinette that she considers him “different” from the men who apparently terrified her so much she had no choice but to open fire (even though one of the men was seated). The “compliment” she offers Robinette is one “presentable”“Ease” up on the “quotes”, “Stephen”.
“So I don’t (air quotes) wash the area between my leg and groin”LMAO
“I’m a bully? I don’t have 500 attorneys in my office or a $200 million war chest, the power to investigate and arrest any citizen and a well-armed police force to back it up. That’s you, Jack. You’re the biggest badass on the block.”Maybe this is just my memory cheating on me or maybe they reused this line in some way, but I could have sworn that this was the argument used by the lawyer played by Gregory Hines in the episode where he defends a Black kid who shot a police officer in revenge for the shooting of his brother.
IMDB backs Stephen. The thing that’s surprising to me is that the Hines guest shot doesn’t happen until season 13, well after Robinette’s first defense attorney return. I now wonder if that episode was written as a Robinette episode, but the prospect of a Gregory Hines guest shot got them to repurpose it.
On the Hines episode Green sarcastically tells the kid, who is being fresh with him, that he gets toaster every time he busts a black guy (I may not have that exactly right). Hines then turns it around on him in court.
Oh, just to be clear, I had no doubt that Stephen was right (if for no other reason than he probably at least watched the episode before writing the article, whereas I haven’t seen either of them in years). I just could have sworn that Gregory Hines made a similar argument about the police in his episode, and assumed it might have been another case of a long-runner repeating itself.
Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), the daughter of a Spanish immigrant father and Mexican mother, was second-chair A.D.A. for the final four seasons.Thing that always got me is that she starts out as McCoy’s second chair, and the series has always made it clear that this position is more like being the Executive ADA’s right hand than a raw rookie apprenticing with a veteran trial attorney. Then McCoy becomes the DA after Fred Thompson leaves the show, and instead of getting promoted, Rubirosa stays on as second chair to another white guy, who’s a friggin’ hot mess, and the fact that the woman of color got passed over for a British guy doing a bizarre pan-Outer Boroughs accent is never mentioned.
OMG! THIS! I never understood why they didn’t just movie the woman up to the lead ADA position. She was established. It made no sense for her to have to play second fiddle to a brand new character.
Detective Green is the only one who ever moved up from “sidekick” to “lead” in any of the show’s duos.
I think most likely it was an attempt to replace aging McCoy with a younger McCoy.There were a lot of similarities between Cutter’s mannerisms and McCoy in the early seasons, and they were the same kind of gung-ho attorney unlike Stone’s more buttoned-up, serious character.
Yes! Cutter was just McCoy turned up to 11 with a baseball bat. They tried so hard to go in different directions when replacing other cast, I never understood why they dropped a McCoy clone.
That was totally what they wanted, replacing McCoy with an even more reckless McCoy-type, so that McCoy would be basically pushing back against the type of tactics that made him famous. However, that made it clear that Rubirosa’s role was to just be “the woman” in between them. Part of what made McCoy work was that Waterston always had a lot of charisma to go with his character’s seat-of-the-pants lawyering. I’ve seen Roache be good in a lot of roles, but I think he’s like a lot of UK actors whose affect really flattens out when they’re doing their American accents. So Cutter wound up having no real redeeming features—he was reckless but he didn’t look brilliant (because we were more likely to side with McCoy than the DAs played by Fred Thompson and Diane Wiest), and he didn’t have the kind of charm or humanity that would make you forgive him for being such a damn prick. Just by not being a screw up, Rubirosa clearly showed herself to be the superior lawyer, and it was crazy that the topic was never, “Jack, why the hell is this guy my boss, and not the other way around?” By the time Cutter’s getting sanctioned for lying on his bar application it seems like something that should’ve come up.
I thought he was pretty good in Homeland, but just about everything else i’ve ever seen him in has been with either his native accent or some other one.
Roache is is pretty great in Mandy with Nick Cage, which is pretty batshit crazy awesome.And he is Batman’s dad, the most noble business man-philanthropist-doctor-urban developer ever.
It’s always hard to compare Roache’s Thomas Wayne in Batman Begins, who’s pretty much kindness personified and spends the fateful mugging trying to de-escalate things, with Batman’s dad in Snyder’s Batman v. Superman, who tries to punch his way out of an armed robbery.
I ended up really liking the way the cast gelled in the last few years, and I especially enjoyed watching McCoy spar with a younger version of himself, but Cutter didn’t need to be promoted over Connie for that to happen.
It may have been the pilot but I remember there was scene where Robinette came to realize a childhood idol/hero was a corrupt police (chief/commissioner?) was common knowledge in the DA’s office and the emotional roller coaster that showed up on his face when he saw it for himself hooked me as a fan.
Everybody’s Favorite Bagman I believe. Love the early season episodes when I can catch them on cable.
The first 2 seasons are interesting. The procedural formula is there, but then you forget about George Dzundza and Paul Sorvino, both of whom get shot at some point. Seriously, how many detectives actually get shot?There is a really early episode where Dzundza goes into some revealing soliloquy about himself (“when I was a kid, my old man…”), immediately followed by Noth doing the same. It’s really hackneyed and out of character for the show, glad they stopped doing that.
I always liked Brooks’s Robinette. Brooks himself is a guy that I feel should of had a much bigger career. Only at NBC is replacing a black man with a white woman considered diversifying. You’re pretty nail on the head about how they treated racial issues with him. Merkerson’s Van Buren got a better shot with that. I also want to point out how important Van Buren was. I was in college in the late 90’s, and I’d always heard Buffy the Vampire Slayer put up as a big step forward for showing strong women on TV. Fuck that. Van Buren was a strong woman without the need of supernatural powers. Even though I’m white, I empathized a lot with her character because she reminded me of my own mother. They were both women raising two sons and fighting through the shit of the good ole boy system. Watching some of those later seasons when she gets cancer pushes it even harder after my mother was diagnosed a few years after those aired. L&O did a lot of things bad over the years; but I think Van Buren was, overall, a great success story for them.
Still remember him in the last episode of FIREFLY. Pretty good for a one and done guest spot. I also just realized he was the baddie in THE CROW:CITY OF ANGELS and yeah- I won’t blame him for that.
I never put together that that was him in Firefly. Loved that performance.
but a Black prosecutor would never again work in the show’s D.A. office. Maybe not on the mothership but let’s not forget the awesome, if a bit superfluous, A.D.A. Ron Carver on Criminal Intent (second longest serving A.D.A. in franchise history).