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TV REVIEW : Death Penalty Drama Echoes the Headlines

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

The ongoing uproars over the death penalty and police brutality have conspired to make NBC’s “In the Shadow of a Killer” a remarkably timely TV movie that effectively balances weighty issues with action (at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

A tough New York cop (Scott Bakula), in a suspenseful rooftop rundown, subdues a suspect by cracking his jaw with the butt of his gun. The public defender cries brutality, but the cop quietly defends his action on the grounds of “necessary force.”

The lawman’s violence is dramatized sympathetically because he easily and justifiably could have shot his knife-wielding quarry. But this cop doesn’t believe in killing.

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It’s clear that other cops do. The year is 1968, in a story inspired by a real-life policeman’s ordeal, and the New York Police Department is campaigning heavily to overthrow state restrictions on capital punishment. The D.A. (Miguel Ferrer, who looks and talks like the late Jack Webb) hungers for the days when killers went to the chair, or what he blithely calls “ol’ Smokey.”

So it’s with considerable shock to the department that our protagonist, after being publicly honored for his rooftop heroics, refuses a seemingly simple request by the top brass: to deliver on TV a prepared public-service commercial on behalf of the death penalty.

The cop is immediately ostracized by his buddies in blue, and his superiors reassign him to lowly duties on the night beat. Fate strikes when, on undercover at a trendy disco, he captures one of two mob enforcers after they shoot and kill a young policeman in a street brawl (dynamically staged by director Alan Metzger). The thugs (the brutally credible James Russo and Steve Pickering) are strong candidates for the chair, with the D.A. banking heavily on a death sentence that will revive New York’s long-dormant execution statute.

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Bakula nicely mirrors the moral dilemma of a cop who opposes capital punishment and whose testimony is crucial to putting the killers to death. “I believe in being a cop. I don’t believe in executing people,” he says. “Can you do both these things?”

The courtroom showdown, featuring a sharp performance by Tony Lo Bianco as the killers’ attorney, is a mild surprise heightened by the taut writing of scenarist Philip Rosenberg.

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