Law & Order Season 20 Episode Guide
Plot summaries for the twentieth and final season of Law & Order, which aired on NBC from September 2009 to May 2010, featuring Det. Cyrus Lupo, Det. Kevin Bernard, Lt. Anita Van Buren, Executive ADA Michael Cutter, ADA Connie Rubirosa and DA Jack McCoy.
- 1
Memo from the Dark Side
The killing of a former Marine who once guarded detainees in Iraq leads to the ex–Justice Department lawyer whose memos shaped the interrogation rules, and McCoy decides to put the memo itself on trial.
- 2
Just a Girl in the World
The murder of a crime scene investigator seems linked to a livery driver’s attack on a young music writer, until Lupo’s affair with that witness and a faked lab result turn the case around.
- 3
Great Satan
A virtual-kidnapping scam turns up an informant inside a small group plotting to bomb a synagogue, but a second, real bombing and the informant’s own secrets put the prosecution at risk.
- 4
Reality Bites
A mother of ten adopted special-needs children is beaten to death at home, and her husband’s eagerness to put the family on a reality show makes him the prime suspect.
- 5
Dignity
A doctor who performs third-trimester abortions is killed during a church service, and the protester who shot him claims he was defending one particular viable fetus.
- 6
Human Flesh Search Engine
When the founder of a racy clothing label is found dead in what looks like a sex game gone wrong, the trail leads to an online vigilante forum that published his address and door code, and Cutter tries to hold its members responsible for his murder.
- 7
Boy Gone Astray
An interior designer who secretly supplies marijuana is gunned down at her door, the shooters turn out to be young teenagers trained as killers by a Mexican cartel, and their lawyer is a former Manhattan prosecutor.
- 8
Doped
A pharmaceutical sales manager drives the wrong way up the West Side Highway with four children in her minivan, and what looks like a drunk-driving disaster proves to be a scheme to discredit a whistleblower.
- 9
For the Defense
The murder of a prosecution witness outside her Manhattan hotel exposes a mobbed-up car exporter and his lawyer, former ADA Marcus Woll, and Rubirosa must confront her own past with Woll to bring him to trial.
- 10
Shotgun
A Spanish Harlem tax preparer in his late sixties becomes a folk hero after gunning down three would-be robbers, but the detectives learn the holdup was meant to scare him into selling a valuable building, and McCoy asks a grand jury to charge him with murder.
- 11
Fed
A community organizer found dead with “FED” inked on his chest turns out to have been a conservative secretly filming his liberal employer, and the case widens into embezzlement and an affair at the top.
- 12
Blackmail
The murder of a freelance gossip writer exposes a daytime talk-show host’s affairs with women on her staff and a $3 million extortion scheme run out of the website she wrote for.
- 13
Steel-Eyed Death
After a family of four is murdered, a teenage runaway who says she cannot remember who she is becomes the key witness against the horrorcore fan who sheltered her, and his lawyer digs into Lupo’s past.
- 14
Boy on Fire
The burning death of a charter-school student leads to boys from a struggling public high school whose principal, guarding her own record of grade tampering, vouches for their alibi.
- 15
Brilliant Disguise
A young woman who secretly worked as an escort is executed in a hotel room, and suspicion moves from a smitten lab technician to a charming graduate student whose fiancée will do anything he asks.
- 16
Innocence
An anti-gay murder conviction is challenged by Cutter’s former law professor, whose clinic’s tactics come under attack before she turns the fight on Cutter’s own law license.
- 17
Four Cops Shot
Four police officers are gunned down in a pizzeria, and the shooter’s motive, along with a federal push for the death penalty, puts the dead officers’ own conduct under scrutiny.
- 18
Brazil
The poisoning of a climate-change skeptic leads to his wife’s embittered ex-husband and a custody war over their daughter, one that puts Cutter’s own childhood on the record.
- 19
Crashers
A young model who crashed a party at Gracie Mansion is beaten to death and burned, and the investigation leads from her troubled brother to a senator’s office and home.
- 20
The Taxman Cometh
An heiress’s heroin death points detectives to a fringe cancer clinic where wealthy patients all died in 2010, the one year their heirs owed no federal estate tax, and to the accountant who sent them there.
- 21
Immortal
A Bronx father’s fatal stabbing exposes a drug company’s hunt for the descendants of a Black man whose cancer cells it has sold for decades without ever paying his family.
- 22
Love Eternal
A reality show’s cameras arrive for a fashion makeover and find a murder scene, and the victim’s eccentric widow, whose first husband also died suddenly, becomes the obvious suspect.
- 23
Rubber Room
An anonymous blogger who has tested a pipe bomb threatens a New York City school, and the search for him leads detectives to the centers where accused teachers wait out their cases.