Law and Order: "In God We Trust" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 20, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 20) I watched episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order show was called “In God We Trust” and deals with the mysterious murder of an up-and-coming 26-year-old attorney with a penchant for taking on pro bono cases involving government support of religious institutions, always taking the side of First Amendment absolutists like me who argue that any governmental support for a particular religion violates the “no establishment” clause. When he’s found murdered, his head slammed against the marble countertop of the sink in his apartment, the investigating detectives, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), are able to trace his law-school education to Fordham University but are unable to find any information about where he went to school before that. The reason was that he was raised in an ultra-strict religious commune, which broke off from the Mennonites about a century earlier because they didn’t think the Mennonites were strict enough for them. The victim had fallen in love with a woman from his community, Amelia Penner (Laura Heisler), daughter of the church’s leader, Horace Penner (Peter Hans Benson), and even though he’d been ostracized and shunned for leaving the faith, she continued to see him clandestinely and eventually got pregnant by him. The killer turns out to be her former boyfriend, John Albrecht (Michael Devine), who confronted the victim in his apartment, lost his temper and murdered him. The cops learn this through Albrecht’s own confession to Amelia in the police station, but the confession is legally thrown out because under the community’s rules, Amelia was acting as a priest and therefore whatever John told her is protected by priest-penitent confidentiality. No one in the church community, not even the victim’s mother, will testify in court.

While all this is going on there’s a subplot concerning new district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and his interest in supporting alternative forms of punishment to prison. In the episode’s opening scene he’s shown presenting a speech by Martha Fairchild (Ashlyn Maddox) advocating for prison alternatives, and Fairchild turns up in Baxter’s office to support the church’s position that they can punish John more effectively and surely than the secular authorities. The church offers a plea deal by which John will plead to a misdemeanor and get probation, which the church itself will administer. Baxter is horrified at the idea that he should let a murderer walk out of some twisted sense of religious freedom and social justice, especially since his support of Fairchild’s efforts had been predicated on the idea that it would apply to nonviolent crimes only. But his prosecutor, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), is intrigued by the idea, especially since with none of the church members being willing to testify in court against John, his chances of getting a conviction aren’t looking all that great anyway. Amelia returns to the church community and John offers to marry her, which she accepts because, among other things, that will give her baby a father. Ultimately John himself has a crisis of conscience and agrees to plead to second-degree murder, with a sentence of up to 15 years, on the understanding that whenever he’s released he’ll be welcomed back into the religious community with open arms. This was a much better Law and Order than one could tell from my synopsis, touching not only on issues of faith, morality and the First Amendment but also our whole ritual incantation of “In God We Trust” as the basis of our legal and political systems when we pay at best lip service to it in practice. The episode closes with a lingering close-up on the words “In God We Trust” on the courtroom wall, raising the question of how much do we trust God and whether the members of this religious community are the only ones being honest and above-board about the level of trust they place in God.