Law & Order/Awesome: Difference between revisions

'''Robinette''': Paraphrasing Martin Luther King's thoughts won't lend credence to yours. ''King'' walked with the angels. You'd slide in slime on your belly to get what you want. }}

** It makes his subsequent race-baiting [[Character Derailment]] all the more aggravating, though.

* In the Season 19 finale "The Drowned and the Saved", Jack McCoy clashed yet again with Governor Donald Shalvoy and his wife, Rita -- and after the duo managed to work their way out of a prostitution scandal by stonewalling McCoy a season earlier (with Rita's support of her philandering husband especially infuriating McCoy), Jack finally got his revenge for it. The executive of a prominent charity is murdered, and when the investigation reveals he was into S&M, the trail eventually leads to the Shalvoys. Rita is accused of setting the murder plot in motion to help sell a Senate seat her husband was ready to give out, and Donald does his best to protect his wife by stonewalling McCoy yet again -- but when McCoy manages to secure an indictment against the governor, he promises to destroy the indictment if Donald offers up testimony which would guarantee a conviction against his wife. Shalvoy, seeing the writing on the wall, reluctantly gives up his wife.

** Jack's moment wasn't the only Awesome Moment in this episode, though. After McCoy leaves, ADA Michael Cutter reveals he continued talking with some of the sex workers involved with the original murder investigation -- and found out Shalvoy had kept seeing prostitutes, even after the original stonewalled investigation. In exchange for keeping the information private and letting Shalvoy's reputation stay intact, Cutter asks Shalvoy to resign -- and when Shalvoy tells Cutter McCoy said he wouldn't have to resign his seat, Cutter replies with a matter-of-fact statement which crushes Salvoy for good: '''"I'm not Jack McCoy."''' The next scene is of Shalvoy telling the press he's giving up his position in order to support his wife.

* McCoy gets one in the Season 20 finale (and the show's [[Grand Finale]]), "Rubber Room". A teacher who holds the key to stopping a school massacre by a disgruntled fellow teacher is forced to keep silent by her lawyer -- and when McCoy tries to change her mind, the lawyer tells McCoy about all of the reasons teachers get so disaffected with their jobs. McCoy fires back and tells the lawyer to shut up and let the teacher talk -- then Jack threatens the lawyer by saying he'll convict him of negligent homicide, resign as District Attorney, and represent every family in a wrongful death lawsuit to ensure the lawyer's career and life are left in ruins. The lawyer promptly shuts up and lets his client talk, which allows the police to stop the massacre without any loss of life. ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4R34GyKTkk Here's a link to the moment of awesome.]''

* A junior ADA cross-examination of a suspect often ends up being an Awesome Moment. Two examples are Serena Southerlyn's cross-examination of a sexist Islamic extremist and Alexandra Borgia's goading of a [[Smug Snake]] / [[Manipulative Bastard]] con-artist (who'd already managed to fool [[Law and Order Special Victims Unit|SVU]] in a previous episode) into implicating herself and her mother (in one of her first crosses, no less).

{{quote|'''Judge''': I'm allowing every bit of this depravity into evidence to impeach your client's alibi.}}

** For some context: the guy’s friend was killed by a girl at a party, and after being arrested, the killer claimed the producer raped her and was afraid that his friend would do the same thing. McCoy charged the friend of the victim with both rape and murder. It turns out the girl had agreed to sleep with him in exchange for footage he had previously shoot of her and she had signed over to him, which the prosecution was able to get stricken from the record. The producer even had her sign a consent form (the kind some celebrities have specifically so the girls they sleep with will not falsely accuse them of rape) and there was footage of her willingly going to sleep with him and waiting for his friend, meaning the prosecution had a weak "he said, she said" rape case (and the assumption that after being raped, a woman is not responsible for he own actions). McCoy was able to find that another woman the producer had slept with had killed herself afterwards; he brought the woman's mother in to claim the producer was responsible. The fact that this case should have been thrown out on numerous occasions for lack of merits and unrelated testimony, but McCoy was able to keep it in court ''and'' get a murder conviction on probably the flimsiest evidence ever presented in the entire franchise, is what made it an MoA.

* DA Adam Schiff was everyone's favorite curmudgeon, but in "Jeopardy", he gets his own Awesome Moment. An old law school friend of his - who is now a judge - throws out a triple-murder case against the son of a wealthy family, and when Schiff orders an investigation of the judge's finances, the police and the DA's office discover the family matriarch secured a favorable loan for the judge to keep him from being financially ruined. Schiff personally goes down to the 27th Precinct, walks into the interrogation room where the judge is being questioned, ''tells the cops to turn off the audio pickup'', and then proceeds to quietly ask the judge why he did it. The judge says his wife left him and was cleaning him out in the divorce, and the bribe was too good to resist - and he also claims claims McCoy would've lost the case anyway. Schiff, disgusted, tells him it shouldn't have mattered - he's going to tell the police everything, and then spend a very long time in prison.

'''Dwight Jacobs''': We had a deal! Son of a bitch! We had a deal, you son of a bitch! WE HAD A DEAL!! }}

** Why did the judge refuse to take the plea as it was written? DA Arthur Branch had, in a way, encouraged her to do so after figuring out Jack was preparing to make the plea bargain -- which was a variation of a trick McCoy himself pulled in an earlier episode to get out of a plea bargain he'd made with a [[Complete Monster]] of a murderer.

* Junior ADA Connie Rubirosa is roped into working as a defense lawyer for an accused murderer thanks to a legal aid strike -- and she's been handing Mike Cutter his ass in court. One of the paralegals in the DA's office asks her what it's like "working for the dark side" -- but DA Jack McCoy answers the question for her:

{{quote|'''Jack:''' Is that how you see it -- us versus Them? Miss Rubirosa is conducting herself within the bounds of the canon of ethics and zealously representing her client to the best of her abilities. That's what she's expected to do, whether that client is a criminal defendant or the People of the State of New York -- and if I hear any more crap from any of you, you'll all be working traffic court for the next five years.}}