Law & Order Season 24 Episode Guide
Plot summaries for the twenty-fourth season of Law & Order, which aired on NBC from October 2024 to May 2025, featuring Det. Vincent Riley, Det. Jalen Shaw, Lt. Jessica Brady, Executive ADA Nolan Price, ADA Samantha Maroun and DA Nicholas Baxter.
Season 24 recap
Lt. Kate Dixon is gone when Season 24 opens in October 2024, and a text to Det. Vincent Riley says only that she has followed her son to Miami. Maura Tierney takes charge in “Catch and Kill” as Lt. Jessica Brady, overseeing Riley and Det. Jalen Shaw, while Exec. ADA Nolan Price and ADA Samantha Maroun prosecute for DA Nicholas Baxter over 22 episodes running to May 2025. The opener ends with Maroun, whose sister’s killing 12 years ago was never solved, talked out of confronting the witness whose refusal sinks her case.
News drives several plots. In “Greater Good,” which appears to draw on Sean Combs, a father (Mekhi Phifer) is convicted of shooting the mogul who exploited his daughter after Shaw contradicts a fellow detective who backs the shooter’s story. “Folk Hero” draws on the 2024 killing of a UnitedHealthcare executive and ends before the verdict is heard. In “A Price to Pay,” which reportedly draws on Matthew Perry’s death, a ketamine dealer gets a manslaughter plea once Shaw lets the only witness, his old training officer, ship out. Capt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) testifies for the defense in “The Perfect Man” and joins Brady in “Play with Fire Part 1,” which leaves a detective’s killer unknown and continues on Special Victims Unit.
Riley drives his brother, Matt (Ryan Eggold), in to face a gun charge after Matt balks on the stand in “Big Brother.” Brady admits under oath in “Bad Apple” that she once steered a murdered sergeant away from reporting his partner, the killer. Price takes a manslaughter plea in an assisted-suicide case in “The Hardest Thing” while his own father declines, and Baxter recuses himself in “Crossing Lines” because defense attorney Kate Norris (Maggie Siff) is the woman he is seeing. In “Inherent Bias” Shaw testifies for the defense, doubting Riley’s account of what a suspect threw into the river.
Maroun’s family history, which already split her from Price in “Duty to Protect,” returns in “Look the Other Way.” DNA links a model’s killer to the murder of Maroun’s sister, Christina, but the judge throws out the genealogy match, and Price will not use a witness Maroun tainted, despite Baxter’s hint to look away. Carter Mills is acquitted, then shot dead, and Price asks Maroun if she had a hand in it. It is Mehcad Brooks’s last episode as Shaw, a departure described as mutual.
Episodes
- 1
Catch and Kill
When a Brooklyn prosecutor is killed in the home she shares with a fashion heir, the case exposes a right-wing media figure who has been paying to hide videos of the heir’s violence, and Maroun takes the loss personally.
- 2
The Perfect Man
The killing of an AI dating-app founder is traced to a woman identified through DNA she gave as a rape victim, and SVU’s Capt. Olivia Benson takes the stand for the defense.
- 3
Big Brother
The murder of a star college basketball coach leads to a bar owner with mob ties, and the case depends on whether Riley’s brother, facing his own gun charge, will testify against his friend.
- 4
The Meaning of Life
A pipe bomb left at a fertility doctor’s home leaves her brain-dead, and Maroun and Price charge the anti-IVF bomber with first-degree murder while she remains on life support.
- 5
Report Card
A 13-year-old foster child is charged as an adult with killing his teacher, and Price and Maroun trade him a deal to go after the principal who ignored a warning that the boy had a gun.
- 6
Time Will Tell
When the dean of an elite Manhattan prep school is beaten to death, a scholarship student who was refused extra time on her exams confesses, and then her mother takes the stand to claim the killing as her own.
- 7
Truth and Consequences
A journalism professor married to a state judge is bludgeoned at home by a law student whose clerkship she revoked over his campus protests, and the case is bent by the judge’s own secret.
- 8
Bad Apple
When a narcotics sergeant from Brady’s old precinct is killed after a fentanyl raid, the evidence points first at a dealer and then inside the squad, where no officer will testify.
- 9
Enemy of the State
A man shoved onto the subway tracks had seen his best friend’s bomb, and the friend’s jihadist handler turns out to be an FBI agent, whom the DA’s office charges with manslaughter.
- 10
Greater Good
A celebrated music mogul is shot outside his own party, and the father of a young singer he exploited claims self-defense, backed by an undercover detective who will not help convict him.
- 11
The Hardest Thing
The founder of a DNA-testing company is shot dead at home, and his daughter, arrested for murder, says he begged her to end his life before a fatal dementia took hold, while Price faces his own father’s decline.
- 12
Duty to Protect
A 17-year-old model is found strangled, and when the stepfather who abused her takes his own life mid-trial, Price prosecutes her mother, a filmmaker who knew of the abuse, splitting him from Maroun.
- 13
In God We Trust
A lawyer who left a closed religious community is found dead, and the killing traces back to the church, whose members refuse to testify and offer their own form of justice in place of a trial.
- 14
A Price to Pay
A movie star’s stabbing leads to the doctor and the “drug shaman” who supplied him, and the only witness who can convict her is a Marine who was once Shaw’s training officer.
- 15
Crossing Lines
A reporter is charged with killing the senator’s son she was exposing and says he tried to rape her, and her lawyer is the woman DA Baxter is dating.
- 16
Folk Hero
When the head of the country’s largest health insurer is shot dead outside his Midtown headquarters, New Yorkers rally around the young gunman, and his lawyer argues he killed to save the lives the company’s claim denials would cost.
- 17
A Perfect Family
A 12-year-old girl is pushed to her death from the High Line, and when her mother proves to be gripped by postpartum psychosis, the prosecutors try to hold the girl’s father responsible for keeping her from treatment.
- 18
Inherent Bias
A rookie basketball star is shot in a tunnel at Madison Square Garden, and the case against her former business partner divides Riley and Shaw over what each saw him throw into the East River.
- 19
Play with Fire Part 1
A woman’s burned body near a Washington Heights warehouse echoes a killing Brady never solved, and when the victim turns out to be an undercover detective Olivia Benson mentored, SVU joins the hunt.
- 20
Sins of the Father
The shooting of a garage mechanic who was once a promising chemist leads to a drug boss testing a new fentanyl, and the DA’s office leans on the boss’s law-abiding son to bring him down.
- 21
Tough Love
When a demanding sports agent is knifed during his dawn run, the trail leads to his younger son, whose messages to a chatbot therapist reveal years of punishing training.
- 22
Look the Other Way
DNA from a 19-year-old model’s body links her killer to the unsolved murder of Maroun’s sister, but a ruling against genealogy searches guts the case and Maroun’s zeal compromises its last witness.