Law and Order: "Liberty" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 14, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 14) I watched the season-ending shows of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order show, “Liberty,” begins in an illegal casino in New York City at which two of the patrons get into an argument with two of the proprietors’ staff over a large sum of money the players owe the management. Then the scene cuts to an outdoor location in which a dead body is found with its head lying in the obligatory pool of blood. The body turns out to be Navy Vice Admiral Wallace Kane (John Churchill), who was in New York for Fleet Week (I’ve lived in San Diego long enough I know all about Fleet Week!) and had been one of the men at the casino trying to bail out two of his crew members by giving the staff the $4,000 his sailors owed them – only the staff had demanded an extra $2,000 and Kane had refused. We assume at first that Kane’s death had to do with his quarrel at the casino, but as the case develops lead detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala), along with their commanding officer, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), learn it actually had something to do with the bribes Kane and his commanding officer, Admiral Rusten Garvey (Chance Kelly), were paying to a slimeball pier operator named Frank Mazzeo (Daniel Sauli) for choice docks and slips for Navy vessels during Fleet Week. Then an officious African-American woman authority figure identified in the cast list only as “ADIC” (the most likely meaning I can find online for those initials is “Association of Southeast Asian Nations Defense Industry Collaboration”) swoops down on the New York Police Department and demands that the investigation of Kane’s killing be transferred to the federal government. Lt. Brady refuses, but the ADIC woman insists that Frank Mazzeo is innocent of the murder, and though Mazzeo doesn’t have the strongest alibi in the world – he says he was at home alone in bed – it checks out. Then the police decide on the basis of a security video recording from a nearby bodega that Garvey, Kane’s immediate superior in the Navy, actually killed him during an argument over the bribe money both of them were paying to Mazzeo. The case becomes a battle royal as Garvey flatly refuses to allow NYPD officers on board his ship, since he declares it is Navy property over which the local government has no jurisdiction. He even summons four sailors to block the officers from coming aboard, and for a moment it looks like he’s threatening a civil war over his territory. The police return with a search warrant, and Garvey concedes they can come aboard and execute their authorized search.

Ultimately prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) get an indictment against Garvey and bring the case to trial, only the judge, Kenneth Sullivan (Anthony Edwards, whom I remember from the original Top Gun and thought back then he was sexier than Tom Cruise, though he hasn’t weathered the years as well), is blatantly biased against them. First he rules the bodega videotape inadmissible because it was made on substandard equipment. Then he refuses to dismiss three prospective jurors for cause even though they’ve made statements from the jury box that they consider the case against Garvey “fake news.” When Price calls Mazzeo as a witness, Garvey’s slimeball attorney, Charles Banks (Zeljko Ivanek), asks him on cross-examination about a case of domestic abuse his wife filed against him nine years before. Price objects but Judge Sullivan rules it admissible. Price goes to his boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), and ultimately to the chief judge of that circuit, Charles Lehman (Ian Blackman). He learns that Judge Sullivan specifically asked to be given the assignment to try Garvey’s case, but without any more evidence of Judge Sullivan’s bias than that, he doesn’t have grounds to demand a recusal. The whole thing angers D.A. Baxter so much that, in the middle of a re-election campaign in which the opponent accuses him of being a typical bleeding-heart liberal who’s “soft on crime,” he’s willing to risk his job and his political future by taking on Judge Sullivan, but eventually Price goes behind Baxter’s back and cuts a plea deal by which Garvey admits only to “criminally negligent homicide” and will get no more than a year in prison, and probably not even that. One thing we’re told is that the reason the net around Garvey to protect him from accountability is so strong is that he’s in line to be the next Secretary of Defense (and it’s nice to hear that term at a time when President Trump and his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, are insistent on renaming it the “Department of War”), though I can’t imagine that even in today’s degraded era in which government standards, including simple competence, have been thrown out the window and all Trump requires from his Cabinet appointees is “loyalty” not to the Constitution but to the person of Donald Trump (essentially the Führerprinzip, “leader principle,” under which Nazi Germany was governed), a man who pled guilty to “criminally negligent homicide” against a long-time friend and fellow war hero would get such a prestigious appointment.