Vigilantes 25 Law & Order episodes
People who take justice into their own hands, and juries asked to judge them.
- 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 18
The Secret Sharers
A dealer is gunned down in front of a crowd, and no one in the community is willing to say who did it.
- Season 3 · Episode 19
Virus
Patients at a diabetes clinic die of insulin overdoses after someone tampers with its computer, and the trail leads to a teenage hacker with a grudge.
- Season 4 · Episode 1
Sweeps
A molestation victim’s father shoots the abuser on a live talk show, and the detectives suspect the host steered him there for ratings.
- Season 4 · Episode 2
Volunteers
A violent, mentally ill homeless man is beaten nearly to death in an alley, and the trail leads to the Bedford Street neighbors he had tormented for years.
- 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 7 · Episode 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.
- 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 8 · Episode 15
Faccia a Faccia
A Mafia hit man turned federal witness is found shot in Central Park, and the prosecution of the aging boss blamed for it is threatened by a dementia claim and a confession that does not hold up.
- Season 9 · Episode 13
Hunters
A paroled car thief is found shot in the trunk of a towed car, and the hunt for his fugitive brother-in-law pits the detectives against a pair of bounty hunters who leave two more people dead.
- Season 13 · Episode 10
Mother's Day
A prep-school girl’s hit-and-run death leads to the driver, a young man stabbed to death by his own mother, whose niece defends her by arguing she acted to protect others.
- 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 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 15 · Episode 11
Fixed
Fifteen years after he was locked up for abusing his family and causing his young daughter’s death, Jacob Lowenstein is run down a month into his parole, and the evidence points to the prison therapist who knew him best.
- Season 15 · Episode 17
License to Kill
An SUV crashes into a Washington Heights restaurant at the end of a chase, and its dead driver proves to be a gunman who has just killed five hunters upstate, leaving McCoy to prosecute the motorist who pursued him.
- Season 16 · Episode 8
New York Minute
The shooting of a trucking-company owner uncovers migrants who died in his trailer and pulls in a citizen border-patrol group with secrets of its own.
- Season 16 · Episode 12
Family Friend
When the man accused of killing a mob-connected accountant is acquitted, a decorated retired detective shoots him dead, then threatens to unravel dozens of his old cases if McCoy prosecutes him.
- Season 17 · Episode 5
Public Service Homicide
A man caught in a tabloid TV sting meeting a supposed 12-year-old is stabbed to death the night his segment airs, and the case exposes a reality-show producer who sent his killer to his door.
- 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 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 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 13
Crimebusters
A firebomb at an Army recruiting center kills a sleeping baby, and while a band of internet crime-solvers chases the case on its own, the evidence points both to a grieving soldier’s brother and to the baby’s mother.
- Season 20 · Episode 6
Human Flesh Search Engine
When the founder of a racy clothing label is found dead in what looks like a sex game gone wrong, the trail leads to an online vigilante forum that published his address and door code, and Cutter tries to hold its members responsible for his murder.
- Season 20 · Episode 10
Shotgun
A Spanish Harlem tax preparer in his late sixties becomes a folk hero after gunning down three would-be robbers, but the detectives learn the holdup was meant to scare him into selling a valuable building, and McCoy asks a grand jury to charge him with murder.