Law & Order

- Season 20

(2009)

The shooting death of a veteran of the War on Terror leads to an investigation and conspiracy indictment against a former Bush Justice Department employee on conspiracy charges involving the torture of prisoners.

A crime scene technician is killed, and Detective Lupo jeopardizes the investigation when he gets sexually involved with a second victim who later becomes a suspect in the original case.

The DA's office is forced to tackle an embarrassing case involving domestic terrorists, the explosion of a synagogue with materials supplied by the police, and an informant who may have been lying all along to keep out of trouble.

The father of several adopted special needs children is accused of killing his wife over her reluctance to sign off on a reality show based on their family, and the subsequent trial threatens to turn into a media circus.

A late-term abortion doctor is killed, which leads to the emotionally-charged trial of a pro-life advocate, and threatens to drive a wedge between Cutter and Rubirosa.

The DA's office takes on the operator of a website dedicated to righting social wrongs after a delusional woman used information gathered on a website to kill a man.

The DA's office has to deal with a drug-related murder by two young teenage boys who have been trained as assassins by a Mexican drug cartel.

What appears to be a tragic drunk driving accident with multiple fatalities becomes more complicated when investigators discover that the driver was about to blow the whistle on the pharmaceutical company she worked for.

The DA's office discovers that a former prosecutor now working as a defense attorney has been getting damaging witnesses in his trials killed, and that Rubirosa was unknowingly a co-conspirator in one of his cases.

A small businessman in Spanish Harlem becomes a hero after shooting three armed robbers. However, the investigation later discovers that there are holes in his story and that it may not have been a case of self-defense.

Lupo and Bernard discover that a murdered member of a progressive community activist group may have been a conservative trying to expose the group's wrongdoings. Meanwhile, Van Buren gets bad news from former detective Rey Curtis.

The death of a journalist who worked for a celebrity gossip website leads detectives to her publisher, who sought to use information she gathered for a story to blackmail a well-known talk show host.

A family of four is brutally murdered. The investigation leads detectives to "horrorcore" culture, an accomplice who claims to have suffered from amnesia, and an accused killer with an unlikely post-traumatic stress disorder defense.

Two teens from an underachieving high school are accused of burning to death a student from a more successful charter school, and Lupo and Bernard suspect that their principal is providing them with a phony alibi.

Is a graduate student working in the medical lab at a prestigious university robbing and killing female escorts to support his gambling addictions? And how far will his loyal fiancée go to protect him?

Cutter is forced to play hardball with his mentor after her Innocence Project group gets his guilty verdict in a murder trial set aside, but is he ready to handle the unexpected consequences of his actions?

The debate rages over how to treat an informant who shot and killed four police officers. However, did one of the officers try to put undue pressure on him to help catch a dangerous criminal?

When an environmental scientist, Dr. Oscar Silva, is poisoned during a global warming symposium, Detectives Cyrus Lupo and Kevin Bernard initially suspect competitors from Dr. Silva's field of study. It is soon discovered that Dr. Silva is involved in a messy custody battle with his wife's ex-husband, Phillip Shoemaker and the focus of the investigation quickly shifts to the victim's family. Meanwhile, the case becomes personal for Cutter as it stirs up unpleasant memories from his own past.

A 20-year-old is accused of killing his sister after they crashed the mayor's black-tie party, but detectives also soon find unexpected links between the suspect and the office of a New York senator who was also at the party.

Lupo and Bernard uncover a possible conspiracy to kill off wealthy cancer patients in the calendar year 2010 so that their inheritors don't have to pay an Estate Tax, but legal roadblocks make the case difficult to prosecute.

A fatal stabbing leads to the discovery that a bio-research firm has been exploiting the cells of an African American man who died 50 years ago for medical research, but has never compensated his dirt-poor descendants.

Detectives suspect that a tacky and volatile wife murdered her husband, but they soon discover that the victim may have backed out of a conspiracy with fellow husbands to hide assets from their wives until their divorces.

Lupo and Bernard believe they are in a race against time to find a student threatening on an Internet blog to blow up a school--only to discover that they are looking for a disgruntled teacher instead.