Law and Order: "Street Justice" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired September 25, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 25) I watched the season openers of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law and Order: Organized Crime – though the Organized Crime episode turned out to be “Lost Highway,” a rerun of an episode first shown on April 17, 2025 as a loss leader for the rest of the show, which they immediately sequestered onto their premium “streaming” service, Peacock. I reviewed it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/04/law-and-order-organized-crime-lost.html. The Law and Order episode was “Street Justice,” a sequel to “Look the Other Way,” originally aired May 15, 2025 and covered by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/05/law-and-order-look-other-way-dick-wolf.html. In “Look the Other Way,” Carter Mills (Jordan M. Cox) was able to get away with rape after the police identified him as a suspect by finding a “familial match” to his DNA: an aunt of his had sent in her sample to a commercial DNA testing service and the two were close enough that the cops were able to identify him. Alas, the judge in Mills’s case, Erica Foster (Joy Lynn Jacobs), threw out both the DNA evidence and whatever the police had found based on it as inadmissible (returning Law and Order to its roots: when this show began in the 1990’s its running theme was the ability of criminals to use the “due process” requirements to evade justice), and Mills’s jury acquits him. Then he’s found dead on the street – according to my blog post on “Look the Other Way” he was strangled, but in “Street Justice” he was definitely shot (though it’s possible that I merely misremembered the ending of “Look the Other Way,” which I didn’t post about until two days after it aired, an unusually long lapse for me) – and as in the previous episode in the sequence, assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) suspected his prosecuting partner, Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), of knocking off Mills herself because among the previous victims the investigation uncovered was the murder of Maroun’s sister under the same M.O. 12 years earlier.

It looks bad for Samantha when the cops obtain a search warrant for her apartment to check for her gun, a .38 she bought for “protection” years before, and it’s missing from its locked case. It turns out that she threw the gun in the East River (reminding me of the similar bit of stupidity Teresa Wright’s character pulled in Don Siegel’s 1953 film noir Count the Hours), not because she actually shot Mills but because she feared she would. The police build a case from a surveillance video showing the murder (the killer was dressed in a black hoodie that concealed their gender – how Lifetime!) and from two witnesses, one of whom heard a woman’s voice say just before the gunshot, “You deserve this.” One of the witnesses says the killer bumped into him as she fled and he says she was the same height as he, 5’9”, which lets the 5’3” Samantha off the hook. Ultimately the real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Julia Keaton (Christine Spang), Mills’s former girlfriend (and an attorney herself), who sat with him throughout his trial and believed in his innocence until she broke up with him a few days before he was acquitted. Mills, whom we already knew was a guy who did not take rejection very well, responded by physically beating and raping her. So she bought a gun just six hours before Mills was shot and confronted him on the street, though her Black woman attorney does such a good job presenting her self-defense case on direct examination that Nolan Price decides to offer her a manslaughter plea which will net her at most five years. Then Julia blurts out to Samantha that she didn’t just “happen” to run into Mills on the street. She deliberately lay in wait for him, which means she’s guilty of murder, but after anguished talks with Samantha and their boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), they decide to go ahead with the manslaughter plea deal anyway. It was a pretty good Law and Order, though the ethical conflicts behind this episode have been done better on previous shows in this series.