Law and Order: "Beyond Measure" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 9, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 9) I watched successive episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show was called “Beyond Measure” and began with an encounter between the two leading police officers on the “Law” section of the series, Detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), and Roman Catholic Archbishop Keane (Michael O’Keefe). The two cops were passing a Catholic church while it was in the middle of hosting a service and Riley is confessing to Walker that he grew up in the church but became disillusioned with it and sought spiritual answers elsewhere. Just then the two detectives see a crowd of people fleeing in panic, and my first thought was that there was a gunman doing a mass shooting in the church. Instead the targeted building was an art museum and the people with the guns were garden-variety robbers after a particularly important relic, an emerald-encrusted golden crown from Colombia that had been made by indigenous workers back in the day. The Catholic church in Colombia had seized the crown 100 years before, and it was now on display in that museum. The typical red-herring suspect is indigenous Colombian activist Amaru Yupanqui (Mario Golden), who’d put out online messages demanding that the Church return the crown to the Native Colombians, but he insists that he’d never do something as stupid as hire people to steal it. The actual crooks turn out to be two Afghanistan war veterans, one of whom gets killed in a shoot-out with police, along with a museum staffer whom they blackmailed into helping them but who turns state’s evidence in exchange for a reduced sentence. The police and prosecutors investigate it as a murder case because a security guard named Carbo was shot and killed during the robbery, and Carbo’s wife Valentina (Betzaida Landín) and daughter Luna (Isabella Miranda) are naturally upset and demand justice.

At first the prosecution loses a ruling before Judge Evelyn Boyd (Diane Ciesla), who rules that because the defendant, Luis Salazar (Shawn Mintz), had already checked his suitcase with the airline he was going to fly out of the country on when the cops arrested him at the airport, the phone pager he and his fellow crooks had been using to communicate is inadmissible. Needing more evidence against Salazar, the police learn that a man using crutches had been the last one to flee the museum when the gunfire started. They interview him and learn that Salazar had said during the robbery, “I hope Leo comes through for us.” “Leo” turns out to be Leonard Hawkins (Julio Perrilán), who was briefly married to Salazar’s aunt, who testifies against Salazar and makes it clear that now that he and Salazar’s aunt are divorced, he has no family feeling towards him and had no intention of handling the stolen item anyway. The case appears headed for a slam-dunk guilty verdict when Archbishop Keane intervenes, appearing before district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) with Salazar’s lawyer, Max Wood (an oddly Anglo character name for a character that looks Asian and is played by Rob Yang). The three are demanding that prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) accept a plea bargain in which, in exchange for a reduced sentence, Salazar will reveal the whereabouts of the crown (ya remember the crown?) and it will be returned to the museum from whence it was stolen. Price suspects that Baxter wants him to cut the deal because Baxter will be running for re-election and he doesn’t want to alienate the estimated 2.5 million Roman Catholic voters in New York City, but the deal is done, the crown is returned to the museum, and predictably Valentina and Luna Carbo aren’t happy that Salazar, even if he serves the full 15 years he’ll be sentenced to, will be out before he’s 40 while Valentina’s husband and Luna’s dad will still be dead. “It’s complicated,” Price tells the Carbos, who understandably intuit that he doesn’t personally believe what he’s saying. Of course, “It’s complicated” has also entered the language as code for Facebook users who are cruising the site for partners for extra-relational activity!