This episode appears to be based on several different cases/incidents:
- The 1980-1985 Martha Sunny von Bulow murder case. On December 21, 1980, Sunny slipped into a coma. Her friends and family have never known for certain if Sunny attempted suicide, or if her husband, Claus von Bülow, had tried to kill her by injecting her with insulin. Claus was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to thirty years in prison, but the conviction was reversed in 1984. Von Bulow was granted a second trial in 1985 and was acquitted. The case was also famously portrayed in the book and the film Reversal of Fortune (1990). Both the real-life case and this episode involve insulin injections and family interference with the investigation.
- The 1889 Florence Maybrick case. Maybrick was an American woman convicted in the United Kingdom of murdering her husband, cotton merchant James Maybrick.
- The 1955 Ann Woodward case. Woodward became a prominent and controversial figure in New York high society after her marriage to banking heir William Woodward Jr. Although never convicted, she was suspected of murder after she shot and killed her husband in 1955, claiming that she had mistaken him for a burglar. The circumstances surrounding her husband's death led to Woodward becoming a cause célèbre and, later, being banished from high society. Life called the event "The Shooting of the Century". In 1975, Truman Capote published excerpts from an unfinished novel Answered Prayers, which accused Woodward of murdering her husband. Just before the stories were to be published in Esquire, she killed herself by taking cyanide.
Jeffrey DeMunn's character "Prof. Norman Rothenberg" is clearly based on Prof. Alan Dershowitz, who defended Claus Von Bulow, on whose case this episode is inspired by.
This episode and The Torrents of Greed: Part 2 (1991) are the only episodes that do not have the following statement appearing at the beginning of each episode: "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."
Chris Noth (Detective Mike Logan) & Jeffrey DeMunn (Norman Rothenberg) also worked together on two episodes of The Good Wife (2009), as Peter Florrick & Chief Justice Virgil Ryvlan respectively.
Chris Noth (Detective Mike Logan) & Malcolm Gets (Lance Keys) also worked together on A Defense of Marriage (2012) (episode 4.9), as Peter Florrick & Dale Lamborn respectively.