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      Bill Cosby’s Conviction Is Overturned: Read the Court’s Opinion

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      unconditional promise of non-prosecution, and when the defendant relies upon that

      guarantee to the detriment of his constitutional right not to testify, the principle of

      fundamental fairness that undergirds due process of law in our criminal justice system

      demands that the promise be enforced.

      explained in Commonwealth v. Clancy, 192 A.3d 44 (Pa. 2018), prosecutors inhabit three

      distinct and equally critical roles: they are officers of the court, advocates for victims, and

      administrators of justice. Id. at 52. As the Commonwealth’s representatives, prosecutors

      are duty-bound to pursue “equal and impartial justice,” Appeal of Nicely, 18 A. 737, 738

      (Pa. 1889), and “to serve the public interest.” Clancy, 192 A.3d 52. Their obligation is

      “not merely to convict,” but rather to “seek justice within the bounds of the law.”

      Commonwealth v. Starks, 387 A.2d 829, 831 (Pa. 1978).

      For the reasons detailed below, we hold that, when a prosecutor makes an

      Prosecutors are more than mere participants in our criminal justice system. As we

      As an “administrator of justice,” the prosecutor has the power to decide whether to initiate formal criminal proceedings, to select those criminal charges which will be filed against the accused, to negotiate plea bargains, to withdraw charges where appropriate, and, ultimately, to prosecute or dismiss charges at trial. See, e.g., 16 P.S. § 1402(a) (“The district attorney shall sign all bills of indictment and conduct in court all criminal and other prosecutions . . . .”); Pa.R.Crim.P. 507 (establishing the prosecutor’s power to require that police officers seek approval from the district attorney prior to filing criminal complaints); Pa.R.Crim.P. 585 (power to move for nolle prosequi); see also ABA Standards §§ 3-4.2, 3-4.4. The extent of the powers enjoyed by the prosecutor was discussed most eloquently by United States Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson. In his historic address to the nation’s United States Attorneys, gathered in 1940 at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., Jackson observed that “[t]he prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous.” Robert H. Jackson, The Federal Prosecutor, 31 AM. INST. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 3, 3 (1940). In fact, the prosecutor is afforded such great deference that this Court and the Supreme Court of the United States seldom interfere with a prosecutor’s charging decision. See, e.g., United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 693 (1974) (noting that “the Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether

      [J-100-2020] – 52 More

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      Former Disney Star Kyle Massey Charged With Sending Explicit Messages to a Minor

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      Mr. Massey, 29, who starred in “That’s So Raven,” faces a felony charge in connection with accusations that he sent a 13-year-old girl pornographic Snapchat messages.Kyle Massey, a former Disney Channel star best known for his role as Raven-Symoné’s little brother on “That’s So Raven,” has been charged with a felony in Washington State after prosecutors say he sent pornographic messages to a 13-year-old girl in 2018 and 2019.Mr. Massey, 29, was charged on June 14 with one count of communication with a minor for immoral purposes after sending explicit messages, images and videos to the girl via Snapchat from December 2018 to January 2019, according to King County prosecutors.The felony charge stems from accusations made in a lawsuit filed in 2019 against Mr. Massey for $1.5 million by the girl’s mother. This suit was eventually dropped when the girl’s lawyers determined that Mr. Massey did not have enough money for it to make financial sense to pursue the case, according to prosecutors. In 2019, Mr. Massey denied the allegations in the suit, according to a statement obtained by People magazine.In February, the girl’s mother notified the King County Sheriff’s Office that Mr. Massey was sending explicit material to her daughter knowing that she was underage, according to court documents. Prosecutors say that Mr. Massey first met the girl when she was 4 years old, and that in their correspondence during 2018 and 2019 the girl disclosed that she would be in the eighth grade once she went back to school. Mr. Massey was 27 at the time.The mother provided Detective Daniel W. Arvidson of the King County Sheriff’s Office with a thumb drive that she said contained explicit videos and photos sent by Mr. Massey. According to the detective’s written statement, one of the videos on the drive shows a man who looks like Mr. Massey exposing himself to the camera. The girl’s mother also told the police that around the time Mr. Massey started sending the explicit content, he asked the mother if she could send the girl to stay with Mr. Massey and his girlfriend in Los Angeles.Lee A. Hutton III, a lawyer for Mr. Massey, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Mr. Hutton told TMZ that his client became aware of the charges through the media on Tuesday.Mr. Massey played Cory Baxter on all four seasons of “That’s So Raven,” beginning in 2003. He then starred in a spinoff series called “Cory in the House” in 2007.Mr. Massey failed to show up to his arraignment on Monday. A new arraignment date was set for July 12, according to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. More

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      James Corden's Food Bit Draws Ire and a Petition For It to End

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      For years, the late-night TV host has dared celebrities to eat choice foods, but an online petition is calling for it to end.For years, the late-night television host James Corden has played a food-based truth or dare with celebrities called “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts.” Participants choose to either answer personal questions or take a bite of a food deemed disgusting to eat, like ghost pepper hot sauce, a sardine smoothie or dried caterpillars.“Wow, it all looks so terrible,” Jimmy Kimmel, the host of late night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” said as he appeared on Mr. Corden’s segment in 2016. “I know people can’t smell it, but it doesn’t smell good, either.”Mr. Corden responded, “It’s really disgusting, it’s horrific,” as he spun a table with Asian ingredients and snacks like chicken feet, balut, pig’s blood and thousand-year eggs.While the segment has received scrutiny in the past, an online petition posted this month has brought renewed criticism that its portrayal of Asian foods as disgusting is harmful. More than 46,000 people have signed the petition, asking Mr. Corden to change the food options on the segment or end its run.“Everyone is entitled to their opinion on food,” said Kim Saira, 24, a Los Angeles activist who organized the petition and set up a protest last Thursday near Mr. Corden’s studio, posing behind a sign that said “Delicious, Not Disgusting.” “My whole point is that James Corden is a white person and is actively using ingredients from Asian cultures and profiting from it and showing it in such a negative light. There’s a way to not like foods and still be respectful about it.”Ms. Saira said she was confused when she first watched the segment featuring balut about two years ago.Balut, a fertilized duck egg, is a late-night snack Ms. Saira grew up eating when she visited relatives in the Philippines every year. She has memories of sitting around a table with her family during power blackouts, which were common, eating the balut by candlelight while they told stories.“I didn’t know why they were calling a food that was so sentimental ‘disgusting,’” said Ms. Saira, who is Filipina and Chinese American.Mr. Corden has been doing the bit for years. A YouTube playlist created by his program has videos as far back as 2016. Speaking to Howard Stern on his radio show June 16, Mr. Corden addressed the controversy.“The next time we do that bit, we absolutely won’t involve or use any of those foods,” Mr. Corden said. “Our show is a show about joy and light and love. We don’t want to make a show to upset anybody.”Mr. Corden’s staff did not respond to requests for comment for this article.“We’re in a kind of cultural moment where bits like this one exist with this increasing acceptance of cultural foods,” said Alison Alkon, a professor at the University of the Pacific. “We’re kind of in this Ping-Pong dialectic.”Using food to prompt a response of disgust, for entertainment, has a long history, said Merry White, an anthropology professor at Boston University. In the United States, the game show “Fear Factor” challenged contestants to eat foods with ingredients like fish eyes, cow bile and coagulated blood paste. Reactistan, a YouTube reaction channel, has had Pakistani people try foods that were strange to them, like American hamburgers, doughnuts and candies such as Ring Pops and Airheads.Even Mr. Corden, who is British, hosted a segment using foods from his homeland, such as haggis and a smoothie with fish, chips and mushy peas.Lok Siu, an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the practice disrespects people’s cultures. The choice of Asian foods has made Asian Americans feel more vulnerable or marginalized during a time of rising violence against them.The perception of Asians in the United States has historically been defined through food, Professor Siu said.“You use food as a metaphor to describe that distance, the kind of strangeness between a group of people that you don’t understand and their habits, the way they’re eating, the smell that comes with the spices,” she said. “There’s something around the way we discuss food, the way we think about food in our acceptance or rejection of it, it’s a rejection of a culture and the people that’s associated with it.”She added that Mr. Corden’s use of Asian foods on the segment defines which foods are considered mainstream, delicious or disgusting; food is a metaphor for what is considered 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a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Why is this not seen as racist immediately?” Professor Siu said. “If he made fun of any other group, would there be a much more broader understanding that that’s racist? It’s not immediately thought of as being racist and damaging because it’s Asian food. There is such a denial of anti-Asian racism in the U.S., and this is a prime example of it.”In Mr. Corden’s most recent episodes, he has served up blood and pork jelly, scorpion-dusted plantains, a thousand-year egg nog (made with thousand-year eggs), cow tongue, turkey testicles, an ant-covered corn dog and a salmon, tuna and fish-eye milkshake.For some Filipino chefs, who grew up eating some of the ingredients that have been mocked on Mr. Corden’s show, the renewed focus on the segment has stirred up memories.Lou Boquila, the chef and owner of Perla, in Philadelphia, said he remembers questioning why he ate balut — which tastes of duck broth, and other ingredients like intestines, tongues or blood — when he was growing up in the United States.“It’s actually very delicious, nothing out of the ordinary for us, but it put us in a different light,” Mr. Boquila said. “If you look at all the great chefs, they use every part of the animal.”“You try American food, speak American, it made you not proud of what you ate growing up, and I was totally stupid for not standing up for it,” he added. “It steers you toward being more Americanized and turning back on your culture.”Javier Fernandez, the chef and owner at Kuya Ja’s Lechon Belly, in Rockville, Md., said “Spill Your Guts” presents an opportunity for him to educate people about Filipino food, the culture and ingredients like pig’s head and pork blood (also featured on Mr. Corden’s show).“When people talk about Filipino food or these non-American ingredients where they feel it’s gross to see, it does better for the culture,” he said. “It helps promote what the cuisine is like. My job is to promote the cuisine itself.”Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      ‘False Positive’ and the Horror-Filled Truth About Fertility Treatments

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      The new Hulu movie is the rare Hollywood production that portrays the struggles to conceive as women actually experience them.As millions of women know, fertility treatments can be a nightmare. The painful, sterile procedures, the loss of control over your own body, the never-ending blood tests and experiments and strange medications that take over your refrigerator shelves and your life.If so many women have endured this terror in real life, do we really need an exaggerated Hollywood version of our experiences? After seeing the new Hulu movie “False Positive” and other recent screen depictions, I would say, it depends who’s watching.Like so many others, I did not experience the “Knocked Up” version of pregnancy in real life. It took a lot more than one night of drunk sex with Seth Rogen to do the job. Instead of being rom-com cute, my story of becoming a parent was heartbreaking, tedious and dominated by scenes of exhausted women packed into the fertility-clinic waiting room. That might not sound cinematic, but when you’re going through it, the inner turmoil can feel as dramatic and dire as any war story. And audiences love a good war story, right? So why not ours?Watching “False Positive” and the stunning in vitro fertilization episode of Netflix’s “Master of None,” I saw my story, the story of so many others, turned into the main event instead of a subplot or a character’s back story. Surrogacy and adoption and miscarriage and in vitro fertilization have been portrayed onscreen before, from “Friends” and “Sex and the City” to “Fuller House” and Princess Carolyn’s fertility struggles on “BoJack Horseman.” But even if those shows handled the topic with sensitivity and honesty, the stories were still treated as secondary plots.I felt for Charlotte as she tried to get pregnant on “Sex and the City,” but the day-to-day ugliness that infertility can bring was glossed over. To be fair, the show had other stories to tell. Still, Charlotte didn’t need to stress about the mind-boggling price of I.V.F. medications or the cost of adoption.I hadn’t seen the raw truth about infertility onscreen until I watched Tamara Jenkins’s “Private Life” (2018), which focused entirely on the “by any means necessary” fertility quest of a New York couple in their 40s, played by Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti. They tried (and failed) to appear calm in the fertility clinic waiting room. He gave her hormone shots. They fought and they made up. The scenes unfolded as in real life.There was no cutting away to see what Samantha or Carrie or Miranda were up to in an effort to avoid becoming too heavy. In “Private Life,” the story felt familiar — raw, sad, funny and, yes, dramatic.The conception efforts of a couple (Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti) are the primary focus of “Private Life.”Jojo Whilden/NetflixFertility treatments and pregnancy can be terrifying, and “False Positive” takes that fact and runs with it, pushing this narrative into “American Psycho” territory. It opens with a shot of a woman in a crisp white button-down, covered in blood, trudging ominously down the street. Directed by John Lee and co-written by Lee and the film’s star, Ilana Glazer, “False Positive” opts for over-the-top horror and social satire instead of the quietly funny, everyday moments of “Private Life.” But the filmmakers aren’t exploiting a painful experience for the sake of some scares. They’re taking that painful experience, one that is so visceral for so many women, and allowing us to laugh, even as we cringe.Glazer, with her signature wild curls ironed straight, plays Lucy, a “marketing genius” married to a Peloton-loving surgeon named Adrian (Justin Theroux). Without an ounce of irony, Lucy says things like: “Am I going to be one of those women who has it all? My career, my kids, my old man by my side?”In other words, she’s the kind of woman Glazer’s “Broad City” character might literally slap into shape if they ran into each other on a Brooklyn street. More

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      John Langley, a Creator of the TV Series ‘Cops,’ Dies at 78

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      “You can be entertained by it, you can be disgusted,” he said of the popular reality show that embedded film crews with police officers in the streets for 31 years.John Langley, a creator of “Cops,” the stark-looking reality television crime series that followed police officers on drug busts, domestic disputes and high-speed chases for more than 30 years, died on Saturday in Baja, Mexico. He was 78.Mr. Langley apparently had a heart attack while driving with a navigator in the Ensenada San Felipe 250 Coast to Coast off-road race, said Pam Golum, the spokeswoman for Langley Productions.“Cops,” which made its debut on Fox in 1989 and ran until last year, documented misdemeanors and felonies through the lenses of hand-held video cameras, its stories told without narration or music except for its reggae theme song, “Bad Boys.”From the start the show, created with Malcolm Barbour, was supposed to be an unbiased look at law enforcement, and Mr. Langley later saw it as a truer expression of reality TV than series that followed it, like “Survivor.”“You can be entertained by it, you can be disgusted, but it is what happened,” he told The New York Times in 2007. “It wasn’t staged, it wasn’t scripted. I didn’t put anyone on an island and tell them what to do.”Each episode told a different story shot by a crew embedded with one of various police departments. A drug sting at a pain management clinic. A Taser used to subdue a man called Lion. A woman found in a car with warrants for terroristic threats. A car pursuit into the woods. A man arrested in a car with fake license plates while holding 20 grams of crystal meth.Reviewing the first episode for The Times, John J. O’Connor wrote: “For purposes of the show, however, the court of law is the video camera, which is kept running even when the trapped suspect protests its presence. We are reminded several times that ‘this program shows an unpleasant reality’ and that ‘viewer discretion is advised.’ That should keep them from switching to another channel.”“Cops” began in Broward County, Fla., where in 1986 Mr. Langley and Mr. Barbour got the local police to cooperate in a nationally syndicated documentary, “American Vice: The Doping of a Nation,” hosted by Geraldo Rivera, who was also the executive producer.Mr. Langley recalled in a Television Academy interview in 2009 that the Broward County episodes became part of his successful pitch to other police departments.“We’re not the news,” he said he told them. “We’re not here to expose your department or look for dirt, but to show how difficult your job is on an everyday basis.”A scene from a 1998 episode of “Cops.” “We’re not the news,” Mr. Langley said he would tell local police departments. “We’re not here to expose your department or look for dirt, but to show how difficult your job is on an everyday basis.”FoxNick Navarro, the former sheriff of Broward County, said “Cops” had helped make police departments more transparent by combating negative stereotypes about officers.“I was sick and tired of seeing police officers portrayed in TV shows and movies as Dirty Harry and ‘Miami Vice,’ and just out there killing and maiming and doing extravagant things,” Mr. Navarro told The Miami Herald in 1999.In 2013, after Fox had aired several hundred episodes, a civil rights group, Color of Change, mounted a campaign to cancel “Cops.” The group said that the show’s producers and advertisers had built “a model around distorted and dehumanizing portrayals of Black Americans and the criminal justice system” and had created a reality “where the police are always competent, crime-solving heroes and where the bad boys always get caught.”In the Academy interview four years earlier, Mr. Langley addressed criticism about race in “Cops” by saying that while 60 to 70 percent of street crime was “caused by people of color,” he had made sure that most of the criminals seen on the show were white, to avoid “negative stereotyping,” he said, and because most of the show’s audience was white.Fox did cancel “Cops,” but it was swiftly resuscitated by Spike TV (now the Paramount Network). Last year, however, amid protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and calls for criminal justice reform and police accountability, Paramount dropped the show.John Russell Langley Jr. was born on June 1, 1943, in Oklahoma City and moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was a baby. His father was an oil wildcatter. His mother, Lurleen (Fox) Langley, was a homemaker.After serving in Army intelligence in the early 1960s — he was in Panama during the Cuban missile crisis — Mr. Langley earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature from California State University, Dominguez Hills, and studied for a Ph.D. in the philosophy of aesthetics at the University of California, Irvine, but did not complete his degree.He worked in marketing for Northwest Airlines, wrote short stories and a screenplay, and had a job with a company — where he met Mr. Barbour — that produced press kits and posters for movies. Forming their own company, the two men directed “Cocaine Blues” (1983), a documentary about the perils of cocaine abuse, which led them to make an antidrug music video, “Stop the Madness,” for Ronald Reagan’s White House in 1985. (Mr. Barbour retired from producing in 1994.)Mr. Langley received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2011.Michael Kovac/Getty ImagesMr. Langley produced several other documentaries, some with Mr. Rivera, while trying to pitch “Cops” to NBC, CBS and ABC, all of which rejected the idea. But Fox ordered a pilot.“Barry Diller watched it and said: ‘God, that’s powerful, too powerful,’” Mr. Langley said in the Academy interview, referring to a meeting with the Fox chairman at the time. Another executive worried that Fox’s stations would not accept such a raw program. (Mr. Langley had left in a lot of blood and guts, he said, knowing he could cut it.) But Rupert Murdoch, whose company controls Fox, said, “Order four episodes.”“Cops” spawned several other unscripted crime series by Mr. Langley, including “Las Vegas Jailhouse,” “Jail,” “Street Patrol,” “Undercover Stings” and “Vegas Strip,” which he produced with his son Morgan, the executive vice president of development at Langley Productions.Mr. Langley was a producer of feature films as well, including Antoine Fuqua’s “Brooklyn’s Finest” and Tim Blake Nelson’s “Leaves of Grass,” both released in 2009.In addition to his son, Mr. Langley is survived by his wife, Maggie (Foster) Langley; their daughter, Sarah Langley Dews; another son, Zak, who is the senior vice president of music at Langley Productions; a daughter, Jennifer Blair, from a previous marriage to Judith Knudson, which ended in divorce, and seven grandchildren.Mr. Langley understood the power of a police department’s cooperation when, while shooting “American Vice,” he asked the Broward police if he could shoot a drug raid live.“I said, ‘If you’re going to do this bust anyway, can you do it on this date, and maybe do it in this two-hour window?’” he told the Television Academy. “They said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and that’s how we did it.” More

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      Freddie Mercury and Virginie Despentes: What ‘We Are Lady Parts’ Is Made Of

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      Nida Manzoor, the creator, writer and director of the series, shares what things inspired her to make a show about Muslim women in a punk band.There have been many stories about being young, obsessed with music and starting a band, and the series “We Are Lady Parts” does nail the fundamentals: the joys and the arguments, the feuds and the romantic entanglements, the mortifying gigs and the uplifting concerts. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The People vs. Agent Orange’ and Macy’s Fireworks

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      PBS airs a documentary about the enduring effects of Agent Orange. And the Macy’s annual fireworks display returns to New York in full force.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 28-July 4. Details and times are subject to change. More

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      John Sacret Young, Creative Force Behind ‘China Beach,’ Dies at 75

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      The series, about a Vietnam War hospital, was just one vehicle for him in his writing career to explore war and its aftershocks.John Sacret Young, a writer and producer who was behind the television series “China Beach,” set at a Vietnam War military hospital, and whose work often explored the psychological wounds of war, died on June 3 at his home in Brentwood, Calif. He was 75.The cause was brain cancer, his wife, Claudia Sloan, said.Mr. Young was the executive producer of “China Beach,” which recounted the experiences of several women at an evacuation hospital on ABC from 1988 to 1991. He created the show with William Broyles Jr., a former editor at Newsweek who had served in Vietnam and went on to write the screenplay for Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” (1995).Mr. Young was later a writer and producer of the Aaron Sorkin’s series “The West Wing” (1999-2006) and co-executive producer and writer of the Netflix series “Firefly Lane,” which was released in February.“China Beach” drew comparisons to “M*A*S*H,” particularly when it came to their settings: one in a military hospital in Korea, the other in Vietnam. But where “M*A*S*H” was part comedy, part drama in mostly half-hour installments, “China Beach” took a fully dramatic approach in hourlong episodes. It drew praise for its well-drawn characters, particularly that of Colleen McMurphy, an Army nurse played by Dana Delany.With a cast (many headed for stardom) that also included Tom Sizemore, Kathy Bates, Helen Hunt, Don Cheadle and Marg Helgenberger, “China Beach” won the 1990 Golden Globe Award for best drama, beating out contenders like “L.A. Law” and “Murder, She Wrote.” It also launched the careers of Ms. Delany and Ms. Helgenberger, who went on to a leading role in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”Though the show was not a major ratings hit, “China Beach” earned praise for its writing and period-appropriate score, featuring a theme song by Diana Ross and the Supremes.In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2013, on the occasion of the show’s 25th anniversary, Mr. Young called the Vietnam War “a story of our generation” and said that choosing to focus on women felt “crucial, interesting and relevant.”The New York Times television critic John J. O’Connor wrote in 1991 that “the series sensitively tapped into national terrain that remains difficult.” The year before, he lauded the show for avoiding the clichés of prime time television in favor of something “inventive, imaginative, adventurous.”Much of Mr. Young’s work — in books, television and movies — explore the impact of war. In addition to “China Beach,” he wrote the mini-series “A Rumor of War” (1980), which adapted Philip Caputo’s celebrated memoir of his time in the Marines Corps in Vietnam and the emotional devastation that followed; “Thanks of a Grateful Nation” (1998), a television movie set in the aftermath of the Gulf War; and the theatrical release “Romero” (1989), starring Raul Julia, which addressed the civil and religious upheaval leading to the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador.Vietnam was also a prevailing theme in a memoir by Mr. Young, “Remains: Non-Viewable” (2005), which centered on the death of his cousin Doug Young in combat in Vietnam and its emotional fallout.The memoir focused on a culture of New England stoicism that, he wrote, prevented his family from processing their loss.“There was a shoe to drop,” Mr. Young wrote in the book, “the actuality, the coming of the coffin, and that would happen soon enough; but in the waiting there was a free fall of silence, an odd decorum, and the postponement of a free fall of emotion that could not be measured.”Mr. Young told NPR in 2005 that though his family had actually been able to view his cousin’s remains, the title, read another way, suggested how they had “looked at that war after it was over and said, ‘Remains non-viewable.’”A scene from a 1989 episode of “China Beach.” The series drew comparisons to “M*A*S*H,” without the comedy. Walt Disney Television via Getty ImagesJohn Sacret Young was born on May 24, 1946, in Montclair, N.J., to Bill and Peggy (Klotz) Young. His mother was a homemaker, and his father worked for the Public Service Electric and Gas Company in Newark. John was the youngest of four siblings.He attended College High School in Montclair and earned a bachelor’s degree in religion at Princeton, graduating in 1969. Ms. Sloan said he chose to study religion primarily because the program allowed him to write a novel as his senior thesis.He married Jeannette Penick in 1973. After their divorce, he married Ms. Sloan in 2010. Along with his wife, Mr. Young is survived by two sons, John and Riley; two daughters, Jeannette and Julia; a brother, Mason; and three grandchildren.His first big break came with “Police Story” (1973-1987), a crime drama for which he began as a researcher and eventually wrote three episodes. To add verisimilitude to his scripts, Mr. Young embedded himself in the Los Angeles Police Department, Ms. Sloan said.Mr. Young spoke at a ceremony for the Humanitas Prize for film and television writers in 2020. Much of his work centered on the impact of war on combatants and society.Gregg Deguire/Getty ImagesAmong his other credits was the movie “Testament” (1983), starring Jane Alexander, about a suburban family’s struggles after a nuclear attack.Over his career, Mr. Young received seven Emmy nominations. An avid art collector, he also wrote “Pieces of Glass: An Artoire” (2016). The book functions as a memoir, his life as seen through the lens of art as he considers how artists, from Vermeer to Rothko, had affected him.Mr. Young opened “Remains: Non-Viewable” with a reflection on storytelling, the art form that defined much of his life and career.“Call up a story: a writer makes them up and sets them down,” he wrote, “but it is what we all do to make shape of our days.” More