Race 42 Law & Order episodes
Cases where race shapes the crime, the investigation or the trial.
- Season 1 · Episode 2
Subterranean Homeboy Blues
A young white woman opens fire on two Black teenagers on a packed subway train, and the city argues over whether she is a victim or a vigilante.
- Season 1 · Episode 8
Poison Ivy
A police shooting during a drug arrest is ruled self-defense almost immediately, but Greevey doubts the gun found on the dead man was ever his.
- 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 19
The Fertile Fields
A diamond dealer’s burned body is found in an Upper West Side alley after witnesses see a group of Black teenagers running from the area.
- Season 2 · Episode 20
Intolerance
A 17-year-old honors student from Chinatown is shot three times in a dead-end courtyard on his way home from school.
- 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 3 · Episode 3
Forgiveness
A college student is bludgeoned the night before she leaves for Italy, and her boyfriend confesses but says he cannot remember the attack.
- Season 3 · Episode 15
Mother Love
A former honor student turned crack addict is shot in her apartment, and the trail leads from her dealer back to her own family.
- Season 4 · Episode 4
Profile
A gunman with a sawed-off shotgun kills dark-skinned residents of the Upper West Side, and the white supremacist charged with the murders hires a prominent Black defense lawyer.
- 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 19
Sanctuary
After a Jewish driver avoids charges for killing a Black boy in Harlem, a riot leaves an innocent man dead, and his young killer takes refuge in a church.
- Season 5 · Episode 3
Blue Bamboo
A visiting Tokyo nightclub owner is shot in a Manhattan hotel, and the American singer who once worked for him says years of abuse drove her to kill.
- Season 5 · Episode 6
Competence
Lt. Van Buren kills an unarmed, mentally disabled 14-year-old during an attempted ATM robbery, and the question of who had a gun follows the case into court.
- Season 5 · Episode 13
Rage
A Wall Street executive’s staged suicide leads to his top trader, whose lawyers argue that a lifetime of racism drove him to kill.
- Season 6 · Episode 12
Trophy
Two new murders of Black boys lead to a confession that exposes a wrongful conviction McCoy won five years earlier, and Kincaid ends up prosecuting the colleague who hid the evidence.
- Season 6 · Episode 13
Charm City
A chemical bomb on a downtown subway train kills 20 Black passengers, bringing Baltimore homicide detectives to New York and sending McCoy to try the case before a Westchester jury.
- Season 6 · Episode 14
Custody
The killing of a corrupt social worker leads to a birth mother who took her son from his white adoptive family, and former ADA Paul Robinette defends her by putting the system on trial.
- 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 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 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 9 · Episode 2
DWB
The dragging death of a Black man is traced to white patrol officers, and McCoy fights both the U.S. Attorney and Schiff to prosecute the officer who bought immunity with his testimony.
- Season 9 · Episode 10
Hate
A 16-year-old girl is beaten to death by the neo-Nazi friends she wanted to impress, and McCoy charges the white supremacist whose speeches inspired them with murder.
- 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 22
Admissions
A math graduate student is found strangled behind her university library, and suspicion moves from a paroled rapist to her celebrated adviser before settling on two fellow students.
- 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 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 11 · Episode 6
Burn Baby Burn
A robbery detective hunting a reluctant witness at the wrong address is killed at a Harlem apartment door, and the former Black Panther charged with shooting him argues he was defending his life.
- 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 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 12 · Episode 9
3 Dawg Night
When an aspiring DJ is shot in a crowded nightclub after insulting a hip-hop star, the evidence points at the star, but his silence protects someone else.
- Season 12 · Episode 10
Prejudice
A Black magazine executive is shot after an argument over a taxi, and his killer’s lawyer argues that extreme racism is a mental illness that excuses murder.
- Season 12 · Episode 24
Patriot
A gas explosion in a tenement covers up the murder of an undocumented Yemeni man, and his killer, a Gulf War veteran, claims he was fighting terrorism.
- Season 13 · Episode 16
Suicide Box
When an 18-year-old confesses to shooting a police officer outside a diner, his media-savvy lawyer turns the case into an attack on the police who closed his older brother’s killing as a suicide eight years earlier.
- Season 13 · Episode 20
Kid Pro Quo
The admissions director of an elite Manhattan private school is beaten to death with her own cane, and her fight for a rejected scholarship applicant exposes a chain of favors that bought a kindergarten seat for a pornographer’s son.
- Season 14 · Episode 2
Bounty
A bounty hunter is found dead in a cheap Manhattan hotel, and the trail leads to a star reporter whose interview with a fugitive heir may never have happened.
- Season 14 · Episode 22
Gaijin
A Japanese tourist is fatally shot on an empty Manhattan street, and her husband’s story of a Black robber collapses only after he has gone home to Tokyo to denounce New York.
- Season 15 · Episode 23
In God We Trust
A revolver set off by the heat of an arson fire leads to a racially motivated murder from 1996, and the confessed killer, now a devout Christian, asks the court to dismiss the case in the interest of justice.
- Season 16 · Episode 6
Birthright
A 16-year-old murder suspect dies in a holding cell, and her autopsy points to a free-clinic nurse who has been quietly sterilizing young women she considers unfit to raise children.
- 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 5
Driven
A fight over a basketball ends with two children shot dead near an Upper West Side playground, and both a Black father and a white mother face a jury for the deaths.
- Season 19 · Episode 18
Promote This!
Three Long Island high school athletes who record themselves attacking Hispanic men are tied to the beating of a Honduran day laborer and the murder of a laid-off autoworker.
- 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.