Written By Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas
Directed By David Platt
ADA Cabot exceeds her authority to collect the evidence necessary to put a serial child abuser away, risking the careers of Benson and Stabler in the process.
Tropes
- Beat: Cragen reams out Stabler and Benson for their illegal search, only for them to protest that Cabot said they had a warrant. There's then a several second pause as they all realize that Cabot lied.
- Bungled Suicide: Sam attempts suicide after the stress of the trial proves too much for him and ends up in a coma.
- Exact Words: Invoked by Cabot to ensure that Benson and Stabler don't come under any fire for the illegal search of Linda Cavanaugh's home; she asks the detectives to meet her there for a search, and answers in the negative when asked if the search warrant has any restrictions, but at no point does she actually say to them that she has a search warrant.
- Loophole Abuse: When the defense tries to contest the admission of the evidence found during the illegal search of the Cavanaugh home, Cabot successfully argues that the defendant doesn't have standing to object to an illegal search of someone else's home since his own rights were not violated.
- The Needs of the Many: Cabot tries to invoke this regarding her illegal search of Linda Cavanaugh's house, saying that Linda chose to put her own right to privacy aside for the opportunity to stop a child molester from going on to hurt more children in the future. Elizabeth Donnelly immediately calls her out on the fact that she mostly did it because she felt responsible for Sam's suicide attempt.
- Refuge in Audacity: Alexandra Cabot's defense for presenting illegally obtained evidence? A mix of this and Loop Hole Abuse. She admits to lying to the victim's mother and violating her civil liberties as well as to manipulating the detectives in front of the judge, but she argues that the evidence should be allowed anyway since she did not violate the suspect's privacy or civil rights. It actually works too, although she did end up with a thirty-day suspension and it took quite a while for Judge Petrovsky to let her live it down.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Alex Cabot breaks several laws to secure the evidence to convict a pedophile, including deceiving the victim's mother and the detectives to gain evidence illegally. She gets her desired conviction, but she also gets a thirty-day suspension and the presiding judge is noticeably much harder on her in later episodes.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Elizabeth Donnelly suspends Cabot for thirty days and also chews her out for what she did during Roy Barnett's case, including "successfully setting civil liberties back 200 years".
- Cragen starts giving one to Stabler and Benson for their illegal search until it comes out that Cabot had told them the search was legal, at which point he switches to giving an indirect one to Alex, since she isn't in the room to hear it at the time. Benson and Stabler subsequently confront Cabot on lying to them, although she insists that she planned it so that they would never be in danger of legal consequences.
