Casey Novak
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| Law & Order character | |
| Casey Novak | |
|---|---|
| Time on show | 2003-2008 |
| Preceded by | Alexandra Cabot |
| Succeeded by | TBA |
| First appearance | "Serendipity" |
| Last appearance | "Cold" |
| Portrayed by | Diane Neal |
Casey Novak is a fictional character on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, portrayed by Diane Neal from 2003-2008, seasons five through nine.
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[edit] Character
Novak is a young, tough, fierce and focused Senior Assistant District Attorney who, while sometimes deeply affected by the horrific situations she deals with on the job, does not often reveal her emotions. Novak can sometimes see the world in black and white and follows the law strictly without sympathy for the suspects and their situation, unless she is convinced otherwise by the detectives in SVU, or by extreme mitigating circumstances. Her idealism becomes especially clear in situations involving abuse of power. Although she quickly loses her innocence when dealing with sex crimes, she still shows uneasiness when dealing with the gray areas of human involvement, preferring the letter of the law to the messiness of each individual reality. Nonetheless, Novak has a 71 percent success rate in the cases she prosecutes, whereas the average for prosecutors is 44 percent, as stated in season eight episode, Haystack.
The season 7 episode Influence revealed that, in her final year of law school, Novak was engaged to a man, Charlie, who suffered from schizophrenia. She ended the relationship when his symptoms became so severe she felt she could no longer be intimate with him. Later, in the season nine episode Blinded, it is revealed that in 2002 Charlie attacked her in her home because of his schizophrenia. She convinced the police not to press charges but then ended the relationship. He eventually became homeless, and was found dead as a 'John Doe' in the spring of 2007 with only her business card on him. While she developed a deep compassion for the mentally ill afterward, she still feels guilty for not being able to help him, and partially blames herself for his death.
In the episode "Goliath", she states that she is a big supporter of the U.S Military (explaining the "Support Our Troops" sticker on her car). She says that her father was an M60 Door Gunner on a Huey during the Vietnam War. His helicopter crashed 3 times and he received a Purple Heart.
She lives in a apartment in the Upper West Side of New York City.
Novak is Catholic (as noted in Haystack).
[edit] As the SVU Prosecutor
Novak prosecuted white collar crimes before being assigned full-time to the 16th Precinct (also known as the Special VIctims Unit) in 2003, after Alexandra Cabot transferred into the Witness Protection Program. Following her first case, Novak asks District Attorney Arthur Branch (played by Fred Dalton Thompson), to reassign her because she feels she could not handle the intensity of prosecuting sex crimes, especially those committed against children. Branch refuses, saying that he had been eyeing her for the job for some time, and thinks she is a perfect choice for the position. She stays on, and after four years in the position she has become more at ease, even as the acts of sexual abuse she sees daily still repulse her.
Novak arrives on the scene with guns blazing, intent on leaving her mark on the bureau, and immediately approaches detectives Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) by taking a hands-on approach, second-guessing their detective work and interfering with their interrogation of a suspect. It takes a few months and a candid conversation with Capt. Don Cragen (Dann Florek) to understand the necessity of working as a team. Not until spring of 2004 does Novak connect on a personal/professional level with Detectives Benson, Stabler, and John Munch (Richard Belzer). By September 2004, her relationship with Stabler in particular develops into a level of professional respect and friendship.
In May 2004, she goes after Judge Oliver Taft (Tom Skerritt), an arrogant egotist, after becoming convinced that he is biased in the cases he presides over. She succeeds in removing Taft from his position and ruining his reputation after proving that he communicated ex parte with and then acquitted a wealthy woman guilty of murdering her child, and had wrongfully convicted another, poorer woman of infanticide 10 years earlier, effectively proving his bias.
Novak has a mentor-student relationship with former judge Mary Conway Clark (Marlo Thomas), for whom she worked for as a Judicial Clerk after law school. In "Poison", Novak helps Clark win freedom for the woman wrongly convicted of poisoning her daughter, and Novak and Clark then team up to remove Judge Taft from the bench.
Like Cabot, Novak also becomes a crime victim while on the job. In early 2005, the brother of a Bosnian rape victim that Novak is helping assaults her in her office, sneaking into Novak's office while Benson goes down the street for coffee. Though not fatal, the attack is apparently meant as a form of honor killing because the sister, an undocumented immigrant, is required to disclose her rape in order to qualify for a "U visa" under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. The brother, a fundamentalist Muslim, believes the assault was a disgrace upon his family. Novak helps the rape victim earn a permanent visa, but is forced off of the case by Branch in favor of Tracey Kibre (Bebe Neuwirth), who wins conviction of the rapist, Gabriel Duval (Alfred Molina).
Novak has a snarkily adversarial relationship with her former supervisor, Elizabeth Donnelly (Judith Light), who has since been appointed a judge. Novak often finds herself at odds with Judge Donnelly, and in one case ("Rockabye"), Novak forces her (acting upon a directive from Branch) to recuse herself from a case. Occasionally, she finds herself opposing attorneys with whom she has worked before.
In the Season 8 finale "Screwed", Novak fails to convict murderer Darius Parker (Ludacris) and is almost immediately summoned to Branch's office. However, she was ultimately allowed to stay in her job. She worked under new District Attorney Jack McCoy since Fred Thompson, who plays Branch, departed the Law and Order franchise to campaign for the 2008 presidential nomination.
In the episode "Impulsive", Novak assaults the manager of a halfway house medical facility after a convicted 15-year-old rapist is himself raped and the man does nothing to stop it. The manager also destroys evidence by cleaning the room where the rape occurred.
In the season nine episode "Blinded", Novak convinces Stabler to take the stand against a child rapist who attacked him while being arrested and leaving him temporarily blind. She catches him off guard with hostile questioning to prevent the state of Louisiana from extraditing the defendant (Louisiana, where the defendant also committed a similar crime, classifies child rape as a capital offense). When new DA Jack McCoy hears what she has done, he threatens not only to fire her if she ever does it again, but to have her disbarred.
Novak plays softball in a law enforcement league on the ADA team and likes to visit the batting cage. Stabler first recognized her from having played her in a game (which her team apparently beat Stabler's team of police officers), and Cragen finds "Casey at the bat" in the batting cages to discuss a case. Surprisingly, she has never been shown on screen making contact with the ball.
Novak made her last appearance in the season finale of season nine, "Cold",[1] after using questionable methods to prosecute a police officer accused of rape and murder. Novak withholds documents in violation of the Brady Rules after being informed that DNA samples from a rape suspect were too degraded to provide anything more than a partial profile, resulting in Judge Donnelly having her called before the Bar association. When Novak asks what will happen, Donnelly tells her she'll likely be publicly censured and suspended from practicing law for at least one year. Novak tearfully asks what she should do now, and Donnelly firmly but sympathetically says "Something else". She then goes to the scene where Chester Lake is being arrested for the presumed murder of the acquitted rape suspect.
[edit] Behind the scenes
- Novak's photograph of herself with her ex-fiancé, shown in "Influence", then again in "Blinded", is actually a photo of Neal and her husband, Marcus Fitzgerald.
- Novak is currently the third-longest running ADA in the history of all the Law & Order series, only surpassed by Jack McCoy and Ron Carver.
- Diane Neal also played the character Amelia Chase on the episode "Ridicule" (Episode 10, Season 3).
[edit] References
- ^ Exclusive: Diane Neal Bails on Law & Order: SVU" TV Guide. April 15, 2008. Retrieved on April 15, 2008.
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