Wrongful Convictions 16 Law & Order episodes
People convicted of crimes they did not commit, and the cases reopened to set the record straight.
- 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 4 · Episode 8
American Dream
Remains found on Roosevelt Island contradict the testimony that sent a Wall Street swindler to prison for murder years earlier, and he uses the discovery to win a new trial, representing himself against Stone.
- 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 6 · Episode 7
Humiliation
A street prostitute is shot dead in a Hell’s Kitchen alley with $2,000 in her purse, and the evidence points to a married plastic surgeon who admits paying her for sex.
- Season 6 · Episode 10
Remand
An arsonist looking for a deal claims a notorious 30-year-old rape and stabbing was the work of a mob collector, setting off a retrial of the man Schiff convicted in 1965.
- 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 9 · Episode 18
Juvenile
The shooting of a star newspaper columnist leads back to the 1978 death of a Broadway actress, a mobster wrongly imprisoned for it, and a killer who was a juvenile at the time.
- Season 10 · Episode 5
Justice
The murder of a lawyer working on a death-row appeal suggests the wrong man was convicted, and McCoy finds Jamie Ross on the other side of the case.
- Season 11 · Episode 2
Turnstile Justice
A woman is struck down with a paving stone in a subway station by a psychotic man freed from Rikers Island the night before, and McCoy charges the executive whose company ran the jail’s medical care.
- 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 12 · Episode 7
Myth of Fingerprints
The death of a drug dealer leads to a man trying to prove his brother’s innocence, and the inquiry exposes a fingerprint examiner whose testimony sent two innocent men to prison in the case that made Van Buren a lieutenant.
- 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 13 · Episode 4
Tragedy on Rye
A struggling actress is found shot in her soundproofed apartment over a deli, and a tourist video of three men hauling away her TV becomes the centerpiece of a capital murder case that Branch insists on pursuing.
- Season 14 · Episode 21
Vendetta
A baseball fan hated for touching a foul ball is killed in a bar fight by a man recently freed after 20 years for a murder he did not commit, and the case leads to the officer who framed him.
- Season 18 · Episode 16
Strike
A Legal Aid paralegal is run down on a picket line, the suspect is a man freed by DNA after nine years in prison, and the strike leaves Rubirosa defending him against her own office.
- 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.