Statute of Limitations 16 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Old crimes that may be beyond the reach of the law, and the legal routes around the deadline.
- Season 1 · Episode 14
Limitations
DNA links three five-year-old rapes to one unidentified man days before the statute of limitations expires, and the only victim who knows his name refuses to give it up.
- Season 1 · Episode 21
Nocturne
A respected neighborhood piano teacher is exposed by his own photographs, and the case rests on a former student whose abuse was taped for years and who has begun to repeat it.
- Season 3 · Episode 18
Guilt
A serial child molester slips toward freedom when his young accuser stops cooperating, and Cabot risks her career with an illegal search to stop him.
- Season 5 · Episode 5
Serendipity
The deaths of a young mother and her newborn lead to a dermatologist with a hidden past and a child predator still at large.
- Season 8 · Episode 3
Recall
A prominent lawyer charged with rape is cleared in one case by DNA, and Stabler’s new partner finds the woman he attacked as a teenager.
- Season 12 · Episode 3
Behave
A recluse who says one man has raped her across the country for 15 years helps Benson pursue him, but his crimes are buried in untested evidence.
- Season 12 · Episode 6
Branded
Revenge attacks on three men by a gifted hacker uncover a gang rape at a summer camp 14 years earlier, and the unit’s new ADA must prosecute the victim.
- Season 12 · Episode 21
Reparations
A teacher’s rape accusation against a Black deliveryman uncovers a 1964 Klan attack on his mother in which her own grandfather took part.
- Season 13 · Episode 2
Personal Fouls
A former player’s accusation against a revered basketball coach runs into the statute of limitations, forcing SVU to seek help from a guarded pro star.
- Season 14 · Episode 8
Lessons Learned
A retired teacher’s suicide leads the squad to decades of sexual abuse at an elite boys’ school, and to a board determined to protect the institution.
- Season 16 · Episode 3
Producer's Backend
A troubled former child star is charged with abusing a 15-year-old, and her story leads SVU to the producer who abused her and to a girl’s drowning.
- Season 18 · Episode 16
The Newsroom
A news anchor accuses her network’s powerful chief of rape on live television, and SVU struggles to find colleagues willing to risk their jobs to back her.
- Season 19 · Episode 3
Contrapasso
A man is castrated in a hotel room, and the trail leads to three former students he sexually exploited when he was their high school teacher.
- Season 22 · Episode 6
The Long Arm of the Witness
After a judge throws out a rape case and launches a campaign for attorney general, the squad uncovers a history of sexual assaults dating to his college years.
- Season 23 · Episode 13
If I Knew Then What I Know Now
A young woman who has just met her birth mother asks SVU to find the man who raped her mother at a teenage party 18 years earlier.
- Season 26 · Episode 2
Excavation
A woman’s discovery of her stepfather’s old journal leads SVU to investigate a retired federal judge for abusing her when she was eight.