Law and Order: "Duty to Protect" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 13, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 13) I went home from a dinner party with my husband Charles and his half-sister to watch Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Elsbeth on TV. The Law and Order episode, “Duty to Protect,” was a chilling tale about a 17-year-old girl named Carrie Lawson who emancipated herself and moved into her own apartment. Her mother is Michelle Burns (Abigail Spencer), a well-known filmmaker who specializes in stories about female empowerment and in particular about women who escape abusive relationships with men. Her (adoptive) father is Michelle’s husband, Ron Lawson (J. Anthony Crane). It’s unclear what – if anything – he does for a living, but he legally did a second-parent adoption of Carrie. After a few red-herring suspects, including a 17-year-old boy who was found with a piece of Carrie’s jewelry in his possession (he says he just found it on the street, and a surveillance camera proves it), the police zero in on Ron Lawson as Carrie’s killer. But they have no idea of his motive until a video surfaces that Carrie filmed the day she was killed in which she says Ron sexually molested her regularly from the time she was 10 until she moved out. Carrie had threatened to release this video on social media, and Ron killed her after he demanded she not do that and she insisted she would anyway. The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), indict Ron and win a $20 million bail award – which Michelle pays for him. The trial is just getting underway when Carrie’s last-word video is shown in court – and Ron responds by overpowering one of the court bailiffs, stealing his gun and shooting himself with it. Director David Grossman, working from a script by old Law and Order hands Rick Eid and Pamela J. Wechsler, gives us an extreme close-up of the bullet entry wound on Ron’s forehead just to make it clear to us that he did kill himself instead of just wounding himself and leaving open the possibility that he could recover and the police and prosecutors would have the task of deciding whether or not still to prosecute him once he was well enough to stand trial again.

With half the show’s running time still to go when Ron offs himself, both Charles and I wondered how they were going to keep the show moving to the end – which they did by indicting Michelle for criminally negligent homicide, especially since Michelle actually told Ron that Carrie had made the video incriminating him and was planning to release it on social media. Much of what they knew about the case comes from Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), boss of the principal police investigators on the case, who wormed it out of Michelle in what Michelle thought was a quiet, calm woman-to-woman talk until Lt. Brady metaphorically brought the hammer on her and arrested her for the murder. Later it develops that Michelle herself was sexually abused as a child (the vampire theory of molestation strikes again!), and Nolan, Samantha and their boss, district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), argue over the morals of taking a woman to trial who’s as much a victim as a perpetrator. Ultimately they cut a plea deal with her in which she gets a one-year sentence instead of the 15-to-life she would have drawn for a conviction. I wish the writers would have done more about the contradiction of Michelle’s character – between her status as an artist who makes films about female empowerment (including one that has a life-imitates-art commonality with the real-life crime) and her willingness to remain in a marriage with a man who sexually exploited her daughter as well as beat her regularly. I also wish they’d done more about what her film fans would think of her after the real revelations of the case. But then I’d just watched the Lifetime TV documentary Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive, a real-life case of a woman who became identified with female empowerment through her best-known song while simultaneously remaining in an abusive marriage for 25 years, so perhaps the plot of this Law and Order wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed while I was watching it.