"Law and Order," Season Fourteen Quiz

Answer: The defense attorney was charged criminally for covering up the crimes.

Assistant DA Jack McCoy was guilty of the grossest overreaching in charging the attorney, who was simply trying to honor the attorney-client privilege set out in the Canons of Ethics. The attorney had made the mistake of allowing the defendant to show him where the bodies were, which created the ethical dilemma.

The trial judge allowed McCoy to present testimony from parents of five of the teenage victims who had disappeared, even though there was no evidence linking these victims to either the (original) defendant or to his attorney. And then in a totally unbelievable ending, the jury convicted the attorney. Fortunately, very few episodes of "Law and Order" are as "over the top" as this one.

Answer: a journalist

The journalist had fabricated information about the criminal the bounty hunter was pursuing. The bounty hunter got wind of this and threatened to expose the journalist. In his defense the journalist pointed to the tremendous pressure he was under to produce.

The situation of a newspaper reporter fabricating stories was based on a number of highly-publicized real-life examples in the U.S. These include Janet Cooke of the "Washington Post", Jayson Blair of the "New York Times", and Jack Kelley of "USA Today".

Answer: in a crowded night club

A band used pyrotechnics as part of its night club act, and when they overdid it a horrible fire resulted. As usual, the detectives have to work their way through many twists and turns in the evidence before uncovering the truth about what happened.

Answer: to borrow money against his house

The victim had borrowed a large sum of money against the house, and then allowed it to go into foreclosure. The defendant's son sought to have his father declared incompetent to stand trial, raising questions about when an elderly person is no longer competent to handle his own affairs.

Answer: divorce

From a legal standpoint, this is the hardest sort of rigging scheme to uncover, since in a divorce case the judge has wide latitude to do whatever he or she thinks is fair under all of the circumstances. Thus, the judge's rulings always stood up on appeal, even though those rulings sometimes had devastating effects on children placed in terrible custodial situations.

Answer: surrogate motherhood

Contracts for surrogate motherhood are not legally enforceable, leading to a problem when the surrogate mother in this case changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby she was carrying for her boss. Her boyfriend confronted the boss and killed him, but then he was found not guilty when the boss's widow threw the case based on an agreement that she could keep the baby if she did so.

Answer: Defendant pled guilty and was credited with the time served.

This case was full of twists and turns. Detectives Briscoe and Green learned that the detective who worked the twenty-year-old case had framed the defendant, because the defendant had gone free on another murder which he did commit. The prosecutors ended up prosecuting the defendant for the old murder based on DNA evidence newly available, and defendant is forced to plead guilty to it and to the new charge from the barroom fight.

Answer: Yakuza

The victim's husband identified the shooter as a Black man, but Detectives Briscoe and Green eventually zeroed in on a member of Yakuza (the Japanese mafia) as the shooter. In exchange for a somewhat reduced sentence, the shooter offered up the information that the husband had hired him to kill his wife. The detectives were able to verify this, but the husband had by this time returned to Japan. He was lured back to New York with the false information that he was needed to identify the shooter, and upon his arrival he was arrested, put on trial, and convicted.

The trial in this case was interesting legally in that it dealt with the issue of voir dire (jury selection). The defense wanted Blacks kept off the jury, because of the initial allegation of a Black man being the shooter. The prosecution wanted Asians kept off the jury, because of possible sympathy for the defendant. The judge heard the arguments in chambers and allowed the exclusions requested by both sides.

Answer: killed each other's husbands

Each defendant had a good alibi for when her own husband was killed, making it difficult for detectives Briscoe and Green to piece together what happened. Eventually they did so, and the two defendants were tried separately but simultaneously, as the DA was not permitted to try them together.

When one was convicted and the other acquitted, the one convicted was pressured to spill the beans on the other one, who then agreed to plead guilty after the prosecutors announced their intention to put her on trial for her own husband's murder.

Answer: Detective Lennie Briscoe

Briscoe rather casually mentioned his retirement plans to his partner, detective Ed Green, while they were sitting on a riverbank watching police divers search the river for a murder weapon. At the end of the episode, Briscoe was seen leaving the station carrying a box of his personal belongings.

His departure was deliberately understated by the show, with not much dialogue surrounding it.