Law & Order/Awesome: Difference between revisions

* 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.