This episode marks Joanna Merlin's first appearance in the "Law & Order" franchise. In this episode, she plays defense attorney Carla Bowman, a character who also appears in Virus (1993). She then made a few other appearances in later seasons as defense attorney Deirdre Powell. She is best known for playing Judge Lena Petrovsky in 43 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999).
Joanna Merlin has portrayed two different characters during the course of the series:
- Episode 3.19 Virus (1993) - Carla Bowman.
- Episode 2.21 Silence (1992) - Carla Bowman.
- Episode 5.08 Virtue (1994) - Deirdre Powell.
- Episode 6.18 Atonement (1996) - Deirdre Powell.
- Episode 8.12 Expert (1998) - Deirdre Powell
Reed Birney played three different characters over the course of the series:
- Episode 2.21 Silence (1992) - Malcolm Barclay.
- Episode 8.01 Thrill (1997) - Attorney for Archdiocese.
- Episode 20.18 Brazil (2010) - Dr. Everett Brown.
This episode appears to be based on several separate cases/incidents:
- The 1991 John C. Chenoweth case. Chenoweth was a Minnesota politician, executive director of the Minneapolis Municipal Employees Retirement Fund, and a victim of an anti-gay hate crime. Chenoweth was murdered by gunshot on the beach (a gay hangout area at the time) in Minneapolis, on August 10, 1991. 19-year-old Cord Draszt was seriously wounded in the same shooting. The murderer, Jay Thomas Johnson, who was also gay, had shot and killed another gay man in Loring Park 11 days earlier, on July 31, 1991. The victim of that crime was 21-year-old Joel Larson.
- The 1991 Victor Chang case. Chang was a Chinese-born Australian cardiac surgeon and a pioneer of modern heart transplantation in Australia. In 1991, Chang was murdered by two young men, Chew Seng (Ah Sung) Liew and Choon Tee (Phillip) Lim, in a failed extortion attempt.
- Partially ripped from the 1961 British neo-noir film Victim (1961).