Politics 31 Law & Order episodes
Politicians, campaigns and political pressure on the DA’s office.
- Season 1 · Episode 11
Out of the Half-Light
A teenager’s accusation against police officers becomes a political battle before anyone can establish what happened.
- Season 2 · Episode 21
Silence
A well-liked city councilman falls from a bridge onto 10th Avenue, and the evidence suggests he was murdered first.
- Season 2 · Episode 22
The Working Stiff
A Wall Street takeover legend is shot in the head at his trading desk before dawn.
- Season 3 · Episode 2
Conspiracy
A Black nationalist leader is gunned down after a Harlem rally, and the only suspect is a white man whose ex-wife was having an affair with the victim.
- Season 5 · Episode 8
Virtue
A young campaign worker’s death after a fundraiser leads to a city councilman and a novel extortion charge over sex demanded for a law partnership.
- Season 5 · Episode 23
Pride
An openly gay city councilman is shot on a Greenwich Village street, and suspicion falls on his young live-in partner and on a conservative rival.
- Season 7 · Episode 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.
- Season 7 · Episode 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.
- Season 8 · Episode 9
Burned
A stray confession on an answering machine reopens a fatal fire blamed on a drunk father and points to his teenage son, whose powerful grandfather is an old friend of Adam Schiff.
- Season 8 · Episode 17
Carrier
The accidental shooting of a teenage girl at a party leads detectives to a young man accused of deliberately infecting girls with HIV, and McCoy pushes a case that tests medical privacy.
- Season 8 · Episode 21
Bad Girl
A young drifter who stabbed an off-duty police officer is sentenced to death, then refuses to appeal after a religious conversion, while Schiff faces a challenger backed by an old friend and Briscoe’s daughter Cathy is arrested on drug charges.
- Season 8 · Episode 23
Tabloid
A law professor married into a famous family dies running from a gossip columnist into traffic, and when the columnist is later shot, her husband admits the killing and blames the tabloid press.
- Season 8 · Episode 24
Monster
Pressed by Schiff before a primary election, detectives extract a confession from a known pedophile in the rape of a 10-year-old girl, only to find the real attacker works in her building.
- Season 9 · Episode 14
Sideshow
A former White House staffer is found dead in Battery Park, and a joint investigation with Baltimore homicide draws McCoy into a fight with an Independent Counsel who wants his secret witness.
- Season 9 · Episode 20
Empire
A powerful bond analyst dies after a massive Viagra dose, and a charity fundraiser with her own angle helps the DA’s office go after the developer behind a new stadium.
- Season 11 · Episode 11
Sunday in the Park with Jorge
A woman is found dead in Central Park on the afternoon of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, and political pressure follows a case that switches suspects in the middle of a trial.
- Season 12 · Episode 14
Missing
The disappearance of a 24-year-old state aide leads to the head of the State Gaming Board, a married family friend who denies any affair while his old buddy confesses to her murder.
- Season 14 · Episode 14
City Hall
A gunman kills a city councilman inside City Hall, but his real target was a water inspector, and the murder weapon surfaces through a secret federal search.
- Season 16 · Episode 20
Kingmaker
An undercover narcotics detective is executed after a newspaper column reveals she is a cop, and the leak traces back to a congressman’s combative chief of staff.
- Season 17 · Episode 9
Deadlock
A mass murderer spared from execution escapes and kills again before his capture, and after McCoy fails to revive the death penalty, the father of a child victim shoots him.
- Season 17 · Episode 13
Talking Points
A sophomore is killed when protesters rush a conservative commentator’s campus lecture, and prosecutors must prove the gunman was really aiming at the speaker.
- Season 17 · Episode 22
The Family Hour
The beating death of a former senator’s ex-wife exposes years of abuse in his family, and then the senator kills his daughter and claims self-defense.
- Season 18 · Episode 6
Political Animal
Three men are shot dead in a Manhattan apartment, and a trail that first leads to a closeted state assemblyman ends with a celebrated political fundraiser who is living under a borrowed name.
- Season 18 · Episode 8
Illegal
A legal immigrant is killed by gunfire as police break up an immigration rally, and McCoy’s pursuit of the auxiliary officer who fired puts his own record on trial.
- 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 5
Knock Off
An upstate man is shot in Chinatown, and the case against the woman who accused him of rape unravels into a sheriff protecting his informant, with the governor’s office shielding a key witness.
- Season 19 · Episode 14
Rapture
The murder of the man behind a website that emails unbelievers after the rapture leads to stolen gold, a Christian charity that sends Jews to Israel, and a suspect who takes shelter in Iran’s diplomatic mission.
- Season 20 · Episode 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.
- Season 20 · Episode 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.