Plea Bargains 111 Law & Order episodes
Deals offered, accepted and broken: cases where a plea agreement shapes the outcome.
- Season 1 · Episode 5
Happily Ever After
A well-off couple is ambushed in a garage near their home, and the surviving wife’s account starts to look too tidy.
- Season 3 · Episode 4
The Corporate Veil
A teenager dies when his pacemaker fails, and the investigation moves from a dealer in recycled devices to the family that runs the manufacturer.
- Season 3 · Episode 5
Wedded Bliss
Two Mexican teenagers found in the city’s rivers in handcuffs lead detectives to a sweatshop where immigrant workers were chained to their beds.
- Season 3 · Episode 8
Prince of Darkness
A cartel assassin guns down a couple in a crowded restaurant, and the hunt for the murder weapon costs Cerreta dearly.
- Season 3 · Episode 10
Consultation
A young Nigerian woman dies carrying heroin in her stomach, and the people who sent her include a tribal chief with diplomatic protection.
- Season 3 · Episode 12
Right to Counsel
A widow’s much younger boyfriend pleads guilty to her murder, but a detail in his confession sends Robinette after the lawyer who sent him his defense attorney.
- Season 3 · Episode 14
Promises to Keep
A surgical resident’s murder reveals that her fiancé was sleeping with his psychiatrist, and Stone tries to hold the doctor criminally responsible.
- Season 3 · Episode 22
Benevolence
A young deaf woman is murdered, and the suspects include a possessive former boyfriend and the mentor who expected her to stay.
- Season 4 · Episode 10
The Pursuit of Happiness
A meat wholesaler is shot in his own office, and the detectives look hard at his young Russian wife, who came to New York through a mail-order marriage broker.
- Season 4 · Episode 11
Golden Years
An elderly woman is found dead after a break-in, but the autopsy shows she starved, and suspicion moves from her fired maid to her granddaughter.
- Season 4 · Episode 12
Snatched
A real estate magnate caught carrying millions in cash says his son has been kidnapped, but the case turns back on the son himself.
- Season 4 · Episode 13
Breeder
A young woman who gave birth alone says her newborn has vanished, and the search for the baby uncovers several couples who each paid her expecting to adopt it.
- Season 4 · Episode 14
Censure
Threats against a wealthy couple’s young daughter lead to a respected appellate judge, and the case exposes Kincaid’s own past affair with him.
- Season 4 · Episode 15
Kids
A stray bullet kills a promising 14-year-old student, and the shooter turns out to be the teenage son of a retired detective who is an old friend of Briscoe’s.
- Season 4 · Episode 16
Big Bang
A mail bomb kills a physicist’s estranged wife, and the trail leads through a particle accelerator to a jobless scientist with a grudge against her husband.
- Season 5 · Episode 1
Second Opinion
A teacher with breast cancer dies after skipping surgery for an unapproved treatment, and the DA’s office tries to hold the woman who sold it responsible for her death.
- Season 5 · Episode 4
Family Values
A wealthy publisher disappears in an apparent suicide, and the case exposes her husband’s affair with her teenage daughter.
- Season 5 · Episode 5
White Rabbit
Loot from a safe deposit burglary leads police to a 1971 payroll robbery in which a cop was killed, and to a suburban mother who has been a fugitive ever since.
- Season 5 · Episode 7
Precious
A reported baby kidnapping turns into a murder case against a mother whose earlier infants also died suddenly.
- Season 5 · Episode 9
Scoundrels
A lawyer’s murder exposes a scheme to fleece victims of a savings and loan swindler, and McCoy goes after the swindler himself.
- Season 5 · Episode 12
Progeny
The murder of a doctor who performs abortions leads to an anti-abortion activist and the defrocked priest who leads his movement.
- Season 5 · Episode 14
Performance
A videotape that seems to show a girl’s rape and murder leads detectives to a high school clique that keeps score of its sexual conquests.
- Season 5 · Episode 16
Wannabe
The shooting of a corporate turnaround expert leads to a subway track walker whose son was expelled from an elite private school.
- Season 5 · Episode 17
Act of God
A bombing that topples a building under renovation pits a bankrupt contractor against a jealous husband trained in explosives.
- Season 5 · Episode 19
Cruel and Unusual
The death of an autistic teenager at the precinct leads to a clinic director whose aversion therapy crossed into abuse.
- Season 5 · Episode 21
Purple Heart
A radio-car driver with a Purple Heart is shot dead in his cab, and the robbery behind it starts to look like a contract killing.
- Season 6 · Episode 1
Bitter Fruit
A 12-year-old girl is abducted on the way to her piano lesson, and after her accused killer is shot dead at his arraignment, suspicion turns to the shooter: the girl’s own mother.
- Season 6 · Episode 21
Pro Se
Three people are stabbed to death in a clothing store, and the schizophrenic suspect, a law school graduate, insists on defending himself.
- Season 7 · Episode 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.
- Season 7 · Episode 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.
- Season 7 · Episode 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.
- Season 7 · Episode 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.
- Season 8 · Episode 3
Navy Blues
A Navy chief found shot in a Manhattan park turns out to have been involved with his pilot, a celebrated female aviator whose account of an accidental shooting keeps shifting.
- Season 8 · Episode 7
Blood
A drug executive’s young wife falls from their balcony weeks after giving up a baby who turns out to be part Black, exposing her husband’s lifelong secret and his ex-wife’s fears.
- Season 8 · Episode 8
Shadow
A bail bondsman’s murder exposes a lawyer selling fixed cases, and a secret sham prosecution meant to find his inside man leads to one of Jamie Ross’s colleagues.
- Season 8 · Episode 10
Ritual
An Egyptian importer’s killing first looks like terrorism, then reveals a family plan to have his 11-year-old grandniece cut by a doctor flown in from Cairo, and her father is the killer.
- Season 8 · Episode 11
Under the Influence
A speeding car kills an elderly man and a father and his young son on an East Harlem street, and the trail leads to a wealthy executive who had been drinking heavily on a flight home from Rio.
- Season 8 · Episode 12
Expert
Gunfire in a restaurant men’s room kills a diner and wounds a psychologist famous for testifying that killers were in a dissociative trance, and the suspect turns his own defense against him.
- Season 8 · Episode 14
Grief
An orderly left for dead in Riverside Park was beaten by brothers who say he raped their sister, and the case leads to a pregnant coma patient and a mother who kept a terrible secret.
- Season 9 · Episode 5
Agony
The torture of a recently separated woman leads to a traveling serial killer who trades six bodies for a plea deal, before new evidence shows he may not be the man who attacked her.
- Season 9 · Episode 6
Scrambled
An embryologist dies when she walks in on a break-in at a fertility clinic, and the trail leads to a wealthy woman who wanted her late ex-husband’s frozen embryos gone before his young widow could carry them.
- Season 9 · Episode 7
Venom
A paid society escort is shot outside a charity concert, and the detectives learn the bullet was meant for the wealthy widow beside him, whose secret young lover turns out to be her son.
- Season 9 · Episode 8
Punk
A corrections officer is executed in a Manhattan playground, and the case leads to a women’s prison, where an inmate Carmichael once sent away says the guard had been raping her.
- Season 9 · Episode 11
Ramparts
Police divers looking for a gun in the Hudson find a 1960s VW bus with a skeleton inside, and the 30-year-old murder of a campus radical turns out to involve an undercover police unit.
- Season 9 · Episode 12
Haven
The beating death of a reformed gang member who runs a Harlem youth center leads to the first student from the neighborhood to reach an Ivy League school.
- Season 9 · Episode 15
Disciple
A teenage girl dies of internal injuries after being left in a hospital waiting room, and the trail leads to a homemade exorcism run by a former nun who says she hears the voice of Saint Michael.
- Season 9 · Episode 16
Harm
The beating of a retired divorce lawyer leads Carmichael to a busy gynecology practice where a patient died after an equipment saleswoman ran an unapproved fluid pump during routine surgery.
- Season 9 · Episode 17
Shield
When a detective is gunned down during a stakeout, suspicion falls on the fellow officer he had been beating, and her trial exposes how the department ignored her complaints.
- Season 9 · Episode 19
Tabula Rasa
A philosophy professor goes under a subway train after recognizing a Cincinnati money manager as the man who disappeared with his two young daughters 15 years earlier.
- Season 9 · Episode 21
Ambitious
An audio installer is beaten to death after leaving a strip club, and the trail leads to the son of a jailed mob boss who has been extorting the club’s owners.
- Season 10 · Episode 6
Marathon
A daylight robbery-murder in upper Manhattan turns into a long chase as evidence against the suspect is thrown out piece by piece, and the strain splits Briscoe and Green.
- Season 10 · Episode 8
Blood Money
An elderly man dies in a taxi from a stab wound and a hidden gunshot, and his death exposes an insurance company’s effort to bury policies sold to Jewish families during World War II.
- Season 10 · Episode 9
Sundown
A woman in the hospital for a biopsy is found beaten to death, and suspicion moves from a smooth con man to her daughter and finally to her husband, who has Alzheimer’s.
- Season 10 · Episode 10
Loco Parentis
A high school student is found with his throat cut after selling candy door to door, and McCoy takes the untested step of charging the killer’s father with murder.
- Season 10 · Episode 13
Panic
The shooting of a best-selling mystery writer and her business manager exposes her secret affair with a married female FBI agent, and the agent’s husband tries a “gay panic” defense.
- Season 10 · Episode 15
Fools for Love
The bodies of two teenage girls lead to a serial rapist and his girlfriend, the older sister of one victim, and a plea deal with her comes back to haunt McCoy.
- Season 10 · Episode 17
Black, White and Blue
A prep-school student is killed in Harlem after two patrol officers leave him there to teach him a lesson, and the prosecution of the officers turns into a fight over race, politics and venue.
- Season 10 · Episode 18
Mega
A helicopter bombing that kills six is traced to a passenger’s wife and to the charismatic couple whose self-improvement circle has collected a fortune from her and her husband.
- Season 10 · Episode 22
High & Low
A business student who secretly danced at strip clubs is raped and strangled in her dorm, and the trail runs from skinhead drug dealers to a banker leaking stock tips to a former porn star.
- Season 10 · Episode 23
Stiff
A wealthy woman falls into a coma after an insulin injection, and the case turns from her husband’s secret sex game to a scheme by her daughter and her neurologist to reach her fortune.
- Season 10 · Episode 24
Vaya Con Dios
An old man who spent decades hunting the people behind his son’s 1973 murder in Chile dies in a Manhattan stairwell, and McCoy goes after a retired Chilean colonel receiving medical care in New York.
- Season 11 · Episode 5
Return
When the son of a murdered store owner’s partner flees to Tel Aviv to avoid a murder-for-hire charge, the DA’s office has to fight Israel’s Law of Return to bring him back.
- Season 11 · Episode 10
Whose Monkey Is It Anyway?
A researcher dies of a bite after a lab security guard sets free 17 monkeys used in AIDS vaccine studies, and the guard’s manslaughter trial turns into a test of whether saving animals can justify a crime.
- Season 11 · Episode 12
Teenage Wasteland
A Chinese restaurant owner is beaten to death on a delivery to an empty apartment, and the case against five Queens teenagers forces DA Nora Lewin to weigh the death penalty for an 18-year-old.
- Season 11 · Episode 13
Phobia
A gay man is beaten to death and his partner’s adopted son is taken, and the case turns on whether the boy’s birth father killed for custody or out of hatred.
- Season 11 · Episode 14
A Losing Season
A pregnant bank loan officer is found shot in the trunk of a stolen car, and the case moves from two car thieves to a drug dealer, a hired gunman and a professional basketball player.
- Season 11 · Episode 15
Swept Away
A cast member of a reality show falls to his death from the roof of the cast’s loft, and the case climbs from the castmate who pushed him to the network executive who arranged the fight.
- Season 11 · Episode 16
Bronx Cheer
With too little evidence to charge a drug dealer in a young woman’s strangling, Manhattan prosecutors pursue him for an older Bronx shooting, even though another man is already serving a life term for it.
- Season 11 · Episode 18
White Lie
The execution-style killing of a cocaine dealer and his wife leads detectives to an Army officer’s wife who has been carrying drugs from Colombia on military flights.
- Season 11 · Episode 23
Judge Dread
A hard-line Manhattan judge survives a shooting outside the courthouse, and the dead gunman’s trail leads to a white-collar defendant she sent to Rikers.
- Season 12 · Episode 1
Who Let the Dogs Out?
A teacher out with her terrier is killed by a pit bull in Riverside Park, and the hunt for its owner runs through a dogfighting ring to a convicted killer in Attica and the lawyer and her husband who handled his business.
- Season 12 · Episode 2
Armed Forces
A shoeshine man stabbed in a Tribeca alley turns out to be a decorated Vietnam veteran who was about to reveal what his squad really did in a village in 1969.
- Season 12 · Episode 5
Possession
An eccentric rent-control tenant is stabbed outside her Madison Avenue penthouse, and suspicion moves from the janitor she helped to her feuding landlady, the landlady’s estranged brother and finally the building’s agent.
- Season 12 · Episode 8
The Fire This Time
A fire in a new apartment building put up over a community garden kills a schoolteacher, and the case leads to three young eco-radicals and the activist whose website seems to steer them to targets.
- Season 12 · Episode 11
The Collar
A priest is shot dead while hearing confessions, and the only man who can explain why is a fellow priest who refuses to repeat what the killer once told him.
- Season 12 · Episode 13
DR 1-102
Southerlyn talks a double murderer into freeing his hostage by letting him think she is there as his lawyer, and the move wins a plea but puts her law license on trial.
- Season 12 · Episode 17
Girl Most Likely
The killing of a principled private-school student points first to the athletes she reported, then to a secret that her best friend was desperate to keep.
- Season 12 · Episode 19
Slaughter
The stabbing of a student looking into a meat plant leads McCoy past the killer to the fast-food executive who kept buying tainted beef.
- Season 12 · Episode 23
Oxymoron
A cosmetic dermatologist found strangled and dumped from a car turns out to have been writing forged painkiller prescriptions for a mobster’s son.
- Season 13 · Episode 12
Under God
The shooting of a dealer blamed for a boy’s overdose points to the grieving father, until the family’s parish priest confesses and claims the killing was God’s will.
- Season 13 · Episode 14
Star Crossed
The beating death of a luxury car manager leads to a dishwasher with limited intellect and the fashion student he steals for, and McCoy suspects the confession he accepted was a lie.
- Season 13 · Episode 17
Genius
The stabbing of a moonlighting cab driver who turns out to be a fugitive Klansman leads to a celebrated novelist’s protégé, an ex-convict writer who then offers to plead guilty only if the state puts him to death.
- Season 13 · Episode 18
Maritime
A young real estate broker is found shot and floating in the East River, and the trail leads to a retired star quarterback’s abandoned yacht, the blood of three people and the quarterback’s drug-addicted older brother.
- Season 14 · Episode 6
Identity
The murder of a man who hid his layoff from his family exposes an identity-theft scheme that cost an elderly Harlem veteran his home, and the case turns on whether the old man is fit to stand trial.
- Season 14 · Episode 9
Compassion
A psychic grief counselor dies of cyanide at lunch, and the trail leads to a celebrated pediatric oncologist he once robbed under another name, leaving McCoy to decide whether she wanted revenge or has lost touch with reality.
- Season 14 · Episode 10
Ill-Conceived
The beating death of a garment-factory owner leads to an undocumented worker whose girlfriend’s newborn turns out to be the victim’s child, and a secret surrogacy arrangement reshapes the case.
- Season 14 · Episode 12
Payback
A former bookie who informed on a Mafia crew boss is executed in a Central Park carriage stable, and the killings that follow lead to a mild-mannered real estate broker working for the newly freed boss.
- Season 15 · Episode 7
Gov Love
The wife of Connecticut’s governor is stabbed at a Manhattan fundraiser, and the case exposes a developer’s favors, the governor’s secret affair with a man and a legal fight over same-sex marriage.
- Season 15 · Episode 8
Cry Wolf
A radio shock jock who once staged attacks on himself for publicity is shot for real, and the hit traces back to a mob boss whose mistress he was secretly seeing.
- Season 16 · Episode 1
Red Ball
A five-year-old girl vanishes with her mother’s car, and the ex-convict arrested for taking her uses the child as a bargaining chip, offering to reveal where she is if prosecutors set him free.
- Season 16 · Episode 7
House of Cards
A recovering addict is found dead and her five-day-old son missing, and the search leads to an Upper East Side woman who hid a miscarriage from her husband.
- Season 16 · Episode 11
Bible Story
A burglar is beaten to death outside a Lower East Side synagogue while carrying a desecrated family Chumash, and the investigation uncovers a bitter fight between the two cousins who own the building.
- Season 16 · Episode 13
Heart of Darkness
A freelance journalist with a severe mood disorder is found drowned in a hotel bathtub beside a forged suicide note, and his girlfriend’s claim that she simply helped him die begins to crack when a video shows a third person in the room.
- Season 16 · Episode 17
America, Inc.
A security contractor home from Iraq is gunned down in a hotel room, and the men accused of avenging a beheaded colleague bring the war into the courtroom, until one of them offers the government a wanted terrorist.
- Season 17 · Episode 3
Home Sweet
An eight-year-old girl is killed when an Upper East Side brownstone explodes, and suspicion falls on the owner’s ex-wife, who stands to profit from a battle over his land.
- Season 17 · Episode 6
Profiteer
The murder of a body armor executive at his daughter’s sweet 16 party leads to an Iraq veteran avenging a fallen friend, and then to the company official who shipped vests he knew might fail.
- Season 17 · Episode 14
Church
A young actor’s staged suicide leads to the preacher of an anti-gay megachurch he had threatened to expose, until the case turns to the preacher’s wife.
- Season 17 · Episode 18
Bling
When a rapper is found shot in her home, her secret affair with a married jeweler to hip-hop stars points to him, and then he points to her tough record producer.
- Season 18 · Episode 9
Executioner
A visiting doctor is beaten to death in a borrowed hotel room, and the intended target turns out to be a New York physician who quietly carries out executions in South Carolina.
- Season 18 · Episode 10
Tango
A high school girl is raped and killed after straying from a Manhattan tow pound, and the case turns on whether a pimp or his drug-addicted girlfriend dealt the fatal blow.
- Season 18 · Episode 11
Betrayal
When a psychiatrist who treats troubled teenagers is shot dead in his office, the evidence leads to his wife, who was his patient at 15, and she takes over her own defense to put his abuse on trial.
- Season 18 · Episode 15
Bogeyman
A novelist’s staged suicide becomes a murder case against her husband, who blames a secretive self-help movement, and his lawyer turns the trial into an attack on the group.
- Season 18 · Episode 17
Personae Non Gratae
A car-stereo worker beaten to death had tried to expose his boss’s online romance with a girl whose messages were really written by her mother.
- Season 18 · Episode 18
Excalibur
A gold refiner’s murder leads to his brother-in-law’s escort agency, and one of its clients turns out to be the governor who holds McCoy’s political future.
- Season 19 · Episode 1
Rumble
A stockbroker dies after an organized street fight in Union Square, and when his killer gets a lenient plea, a revenge brawl in a park leads McCoy to charge every fighter as a terrorist.
- Season 19 · Episode 4
Falling
A crane collapse that kills a passerby exposes a bribed inspector, then leads to the near drowning of the dead man’s wife and a fight over a controversial procedure to keep a disabled girl small.
- Season 19 · Episode 16
Take-Out
A freelance writer who spent six years in a Chinese prison is shot in a park, and the trail runs through the family of a man serving life for spying for China.
- Season 19 · Episode 20
Exchange
The stabbing deaths of two British graduate students lead to a city accountant with bipolar disorder who confesses, but Rubirosa suspects her brother let her illness spiral for his own gain.
- Season 20 · Episode 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.
- Season 20 · Episode 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.
- Season 20 · Episode 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.