Law and Order: "Look the Other Way" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 15, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Thursday (May 15) NBC ran what I think are the last new Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit shows of the current season. The Law and Order episode was a quirky one called “Look the Other Way” which I suspect may have been written (by Rick Eid) as a way to get Odelya Halevi, who plays assistant district attorney Stephanie Maroun (and I’ve already noted the irony of casting an Israeli actress as an Arab-American), off the show. The plot deals with the savage beating and murder of 19-year-old model Georgia Kent (Hazel Graye), whom we meet in a typical Law and Order opening. We first see Georgia out for a night on the town in the company of a young Black man, Jaxon (Zach Sowers), though it’s pretty clear he’s just a friend and not a lover or a partner. He worries about her going off by herself at night but she assures him she’ll be perfectly safe. Of course the moment we hear that, we know she’s not long for this world, and in the next scene police detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks, who was off the series for a brief hiatus and whose return is very welcome), find her body literally beaten to the proverbial pulp by whomever murdered her. Her killer turns out to be a youngish man named Carter Mills (Jordan M. Cox), whom the police are able to identify by running a DNA test on the blood he left behind on the corpse. His motive, we eventually learn, was that he’d raped Georgia three days before he killed her and he’d got word from one of her friends by intercepting their text messages that Georgia was about to report him to the police, so he killed her to cover up having raped her. The police don’t get a DNA match on his blood but they find a “familial match” because his aunt sent in a sample to one of those commercial DNA testing services and they’re able to find him through her.

Unfortunately, the judge in the case, Erica Foster (Joy Lynn Jacobs), decides that by searching Carter’s aunt’s DNA the police invaded his privacy, and therefore she throws out not only the DNA identification but also the blood-spattered shoes the police found at Carter’s home as “fruits of the poison tree.” With that major blow to their case, Price sets out to find more evidence to convict Carter. He tells Maroun that she’s too close to the case because the familial DNA also revealed a connection to an as-yet unsolved murder from 12 years ago – and the victim in that crime was Maroun’s sister. So she can’t sit second chair in the actual trial, but Price allows her to do evidence-gathering outside the courtroom – which she does. She discovers a hotel doorman, Peter Dagnello (Kyle S. Moore), who saw Carter in the vicinity of the site of Georgia Kent’s murder just 15 minutes before it happened. Dagnello proves eager to testify, but when Price is prepping him for cross-examination and asking hypothetical questions Carter’s attorney, Nicole Potter (Anna Woods) – it’s typical of both Law and Order and real life that defendants accused of violence against women hire women attorneys – might ask him, Dagnello says that Maroun asked him leading questions and implied that she and the authorities already knew Carter was guilty. Price decides that he can’t call Dagnello as a witness because then he’d have to disclose Maroun’s improper questions of him to the defense.

The episode’s title comes in when Price’s boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), tells him an anecdote in which he was prosecuting a man on trial for raping and murdering a seven-year-old girl. As he was getting ready to deliver his closing statement, Baxter received an anonymous handwritten note stating that the writer, not the actual defendant, killed the girl, but Baxter decided to “look the other way” and not disclose to the defense that he’d received the note. (Later Price searches both court records and newspapers of the period to find that case, doesn’t and assumes that Baxter just made up the anecdote to stiffen his resolve to pursue the case against Carter.) With no real admissible evidence against him, Carter is acquitted of murdering Georgia Kent (and director Alex Hall gives us a heartbreaking shot of her parents, played by Richard Lear and Celia Schaefer, in the audience in the courtroom as the verdict comes down and they realize they’re not going to get justice for their daughter), but at the end of the episode he’s found beaten to death the same way he beat and killed Georgia. The hint is that Samantha Maroun committed the crime to avenge her sister’s death 12 years ago. Where I thought this was going was that, though acquitted of Georgia’s killing, thanks to Judge Foster’s ruling to try the cases separately he could still be convicted of Samantha’s sister’s murder if new evidence came to light in the 12-year-old case, but as it turned out writer Rick Eid left things open-ended to give Dick Wolf and his show runners the option of either keeping Odelya Halevi and her character on the show (and having Carter’s killer turn out to be someone else) or writing her out of it (if the killer turns out to be her).