Law & Order Season 7 Episode Guide
Plot summaries for the seventh season of Law & Order, which aired on NBC from September 1996 to May 1997, featuring Det. Lennie Briscoe, Det. Rey Curtis, Lt. Anita Van Buren, Executive ADA Jack McCoy, ADA Jamie Ross and DA Adam Schiff.
- 1
Causa Mortis
A night-school teacher is killed in a carjacking, and a recording of her last minutes sets off fights over evidence, jurisdiction and the death penalty.
- 2
I.D.
An unidentified woman is found shot in an office building elevator, and the prosecution is upended by a judge who turns on the DA’s office and by the question of who the victim really was.
- 3
Good Girl
A white 18-year-old says she stabbed a young Black man after he drugged and raped her, and his parents pressure the DA’s office to put her on trial.
- 4
Survivor
A rare-coin dealer is killed in his gallery, and the hunt for a missing collection leads from a flamboyant tycoon to the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
- 5
Corruption
A veteran detective kills a drug dealer during a buy-and-bust, and Curtis’s doubts expose a payoff scheme that ends with Briscoe accused of stealing evidence.
- 6
Double Blind
A former university janitor is shot with homemade mercury-tipped bullets, and the student who confesses turns out to be a subject in a psychiatrist’s experimental drug study.
- 7
Deadbeat
A father who skipped out on about $200,000 in support is shot in a Midtown hotel, and the evidence points to the grandfather of his son, a boy with leukemia.
- 8
Family Business
The finance chief of a family-owned Manhattan department store is shot in his office, and suspicion falls on both of the owner’s daughters.
- 9
Entrapment
A gunman wounds activist Roland Books and kills his bodyguard, and the case against the son of Books’s murdered predecessor rests on an informant’s tape.
- 10
Legacy
A professional hit man’s near miss on a T-shirt printer leads to the grandmother who hired him, and to her son’s death five years earlier.
- 11
Menace
A young woman goes over the side of a Brooklyn Bridge ramp while fleeing a man after a fender-bender, and her death turns out to be tied to a suspicious factory fire.
- 12
Barter
A co-op treasurer is shot in her building’s garage, apparently mistaken for a neighbor, and the killings lead back to a lender who holds life insurance on his borrowers.
- 13
Matrimony
A wealthy philanthropist is strangled in his townhouse, and suspicion falls on his 22-year-old wife, a former stripper whose marriage was arranged by his lawyer.
- 14
Working Mom
A retired cop turned corporate security chief is shot with his own gun on a Manhattan prostitution stroll, and the trail leads to a suburban mother who works as a call girl.
- 15
D-Girl
The murder of a Hollywood studio president, found in pieces in Manhattan, sends Briscoe and Curtis to Los Angeles to pry a blood sample from her personal trainer.
- 16
Turnaround
The murder weapon in the Heidi Ellison case surfaces near a Long Island airport, shifting suspicion to her ex-husband and pulling McCoy and Ross into a hostile California courtroom.
- 17
Showtime
Eddie Newman’s murder trial becomes a media spectacle as his defense team builds a case against a Hollywood psychiatrist and Ross fights her ex-husband for custody of their daughter.
- 18
Mad Dog
When a teenager is raped and smothered weeks after the serial rapist Lewis Darnell wins parole, McCoy becomes convinced Darnell did it and uses every legal tool to get him off the street.
- 19
Double Down
An armed robber caught after a liquor store shooting that killed an off-duty cop offers to reveal where a kidnapped car-service driver is held, if the DA’s office signs his plea deal.
- 20
We Like Mike
A bellhop who helped a young Wall Street worker change a flat tire minutes before the man was shot goes from murder suspect to the prosecution’s only eyewitness.
- 21
Passion
A young book editor is found beaten to death inside a novelist’s loft, and suspicion turns to the novelist’s longtime companion, a lawyer who insists their relationship was intact.
- 22
Past Imperfect
A former supermodel is found dead before her own surprise birthday party, and a DNA clue points investigators toward a blood relative.
- 23
Terminal
A gunman fires on guests leaving a charity cruise, and the governor takes the case away from DA Adam Schiff when he will not pursue a capital charge.