Wrongful Convictions 33 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Innocent people convicted or accused, and detectives forced to reopen cases they thought were closed.
- Season 2 · Episode 6
Noncompliance
A market manager is raped and shot, and the man charged is a schizophrenic who refuses medication, until the evidence points to the stabbed bystander he says he attacked to save her.
- Season 3 · Episode 2
Wrath
Three murder victims tied to Benson’s old cases are found posed at a research site, and the trail leads to a man she once helped convict before DNA proved him innocent.
- Season 3 · Episode 6
Redemption
A rapist-killer’s signature matches a strangler jailed in the 1980s, and the detective who caught him is sent to help, until it emerges that the old confession was false.
- Season 4 · Episode 13
Rotten
An inmate’s death from a brutal sexual assault leads Benson and Fin back to the precinct where he was booked, and to two officers killing drug dealers.
- Season 5 · Episode 11
Escape
Two inmates escape from a Virginia prison, and a convicted child rapist heads to New York to confront the boy whose testimony put him away.
- Season 5 · Episode 21
Criminal
A graduate student is raped and strangled by a killer who knows forensics, and suspicion falls on her criminology adviser, a former addict Cragen once arrested for murder.
- Season 5 · Episode 24
Poison
A mother accused of making her adopted daughter swallow detergent is acquitted by a judge whose past rulings Novak sets out to expose.
- Season 8 · Episode 10
Scheherazade
A priest sends Stabler to a dying man who has waited decades to confess, and his slowly told stories uncover old bank robberies, a buried partner and the truth about his daughter’s birth.
- Season 11 · Episode 1
Unstable
A volatile detective helps SVU with a rape victim who trusts only him, and the case suggests Stabler sent the wrong man to prison ten years earlier.
- Season 11 · Episode 15
Confidential
A woman’s murder in a Manhattan tower matches a 1987 killing, and the case turns on what the killer’s lawyer has kept secret ever since.
- Season 11 · Episode 21
Torch
A father is charged with setting the fire that killed his two young daughters, until the new SVU prosecutor, his accuser, comes to doubt the fire marshal’s science.
- Season 13 · Episode 4
Double Strands
Rollins links a New York rape to a serial rapist she chased in the South, but the suspect’s DNA cannot tell him apart from someone he never knew existed.
- Season 13 · Episode 9
Lost Traveler
When a Romani schoolboy disappears, prejudice inside and outside his community points the investigation at a disabled neighbor while the real killers hide in plain sight.
- Season 13 · Episode 17
Justice Denied
When a Fleet Week rape copies a 2004 case, Benson must face the possibility that the confession she obtained sent an innocent man to prison.
- Season 14 · Episode 10
Presumed Guilty
Fin’s ex-brother-in-law is jailed for beating a priest he says he rescued, and clearing him uncovers a parish secret kept under the seal of confession.
- Season 16 · Episode 6
Glasgowman's Wrath
A girl is found stabbed in Inwood Hill Park after a hunt for an urban legend, her sister and their friend are missing, and a homeless man takes the blame.
- Season 16 · Episode 13
Decaying Morality
A girl’s rape accusation against a man already suing the NYPD ends with her father killing him, before the evidence turns toward her uncle, a respected dentist.
- Season 16 · Episode 21
Perverted Justice
When a recovering addict recants the testimony that convicted her father of raping her, SVU and Bayard Ellis dig into how the original detective handled the case.
- Season 17 · Episode 19
Sheltered Outcasts
Carisi lives undercover in a shelter for sex offenders to find a serial rapist, but the attacks point to more than one man and a killer outside the shelter.
- Season 18 · Episode 2
Making a Rapist
A man freed after 16 years by a retested rape kit becomes the prime suspect when the daughter of the woman who misidentified him is raped and killed.
- Season 19 · Episode 17
Send in the Clowns
A teenage piano prodigy disappears during a school trip to New York, and the case against the butcher last seen with her goes to trial without a body.
- Season 19 · Episode 19
Sunk Cost Fallacy
A woman and her young daughter disappear after a frantic phone call, and the case against the husband collapses when Benson finds them alive under Alex Cabot’s protection.
- Season 20 · Episode 9
Mea Culpa
Stone is accused of a rape from his baseball days and asks SVU to investigate him, splitting the squad until the truth about that night emerges.
- Season 21 · Episode 6
Murdered at a Bad Address
DNA from the rape of a teenage girl in a housing project matches a 16-year-old double murder, suggesting the man imprisoned for killing his mother and sister is innocent.
- Season 22 · Episode 3
Remember Me in Quarantine
When an Italian exchange student is found dead in a freezer weeks after she vanished, suspicion falls on her party-loving roommate and the drug dealer she brought home.
- Season 22 · Episode 10
Welcome to the Pedo Motel
When a teenage girl is murdered near a hotel housing sex offenders, suspicion of a parolee coworker spreads to the neighborhood with deadly results.
- Season 23 · Episode 6
The Five Hundredth Episode
Former detective Nick Amaro uses new DNA techniques to reopen a 1996 prom-night murder, and the writer behind the case turns out to be Benson’s first love.
- Season 23 · Episode 18
Eighteen Wheels a Predator
A Central Park rape that seems solved is linked by DNA to a trucker who has assaulted women along the interstates for 20 years.
- Season 24 · Episode 10
Jumped In
After surviving a gang attack, Benson takes her squad to the Bronx and reopens a closed serial rape case against deaf schoolgirls.
- Season 25 · Episode 13
Duty to Hope
When the wrong man is charged in a string of gunpoint rapes, the real attacker strikes again and SVU races to free one man and catch another.
- Season 26 · Episode 13
Extinguished
When a teenage girl is raped in a Washington Heights park near Velasco’s home, he has to win over neighbors who distrust the police, starting with the vigilante upstairs.
- Season 27 · Episode 8
Showdown
A con man’s report that his girlfriend was raped and kidnapped sends SVU after the wrong suspect, and the mistakes follow the squad into court.
- Season 27 · Episode 12
Hubris
Benson rescues a trafficked foster girl and comes to doubt the child-abuse pediatrician whose testimony took her from her father and sent another mother to jail.