Warning: These examples contain unhidden spoilers.
Justice by Other Legal Means in Live-Action TV series.
- In an episode of Ashes to Ashes (2008), Gene Hunt mentions how Al Capone was caught for tax evasion. Inspired by this, the team arrest a troublesome loanshark for outstanding parking tickets.
- In the Spanish series Ana Tramel: El Juego, the title character takes on a big casino corporation because she knows her brother was manipulated and coerced by its main stockholder into continuing to play even though he was trying to detox himself. As the trial waits for the jury's veredict, one of the casino's stockholders tells Ana the casino's lawyers offered her brother's widow (the plaintiff Ana represents) a million euros in exchange of dropping charges against the casino, while the stockholder is hung out to dry for Ana to take down. Ana uses that to get the main stockholder to accept a deal where she drops all charges in exchange of 16 million euros - and tricks him into admitting to have sent a Dirty Cop to kill her. The deal goes through, but the man is immediately arrested for his conspiracy to commit murder, and the casino becomes the target of another lawsuit from Ana's brother's fellows in the detox group, one that looks less likely to be a success for the casino.
- Blue Bloods: In "The Power of the Press", Erin Reagan meets with the daughter of one of her old schoolmates. The girl, Hannah, says she was raped several weeks ago at a freshman orientation party by a star athlete, but did not report it because the dean of students said the school could act on the incident quicker than the police. As a result, the perpetrator walked free. Despite Erin's best efforts, she cannot find any evidence to bring the rapist to trial as the evidence from the original crime has been tainted. She is, however, able to find evidence to arrest the dean for deliberately ignoring evidence in a cover-up attempt.
- On Blue Heelers, Tom goes after a suspected gangster (played by Gary Sweet) in this fashion, even bringing up Al Capone at one point.
- Bones:
- In the episode "Harbingers in the Fountain", the suspect appears to be getting away with his crime of killing a dozen people and burying them under a fountain. US Attorney Caroline Julian calls them near the end of the episode to tell them to arrest the man. She has handed the evidence to the DC DA, who is going to prosecute him for fraud. As Caroline notes, "Murder isn't the only crime. It just seems like it around you two."
- A Villain of the Week tries to use diplomatic immunity but has a change of mind upon the prospect of dealing with the Mexican Justice instead of the American one.
- In By Any Means, the team's mission is to either find some way that the criminals can be charged with their original crime, or find some other crime they can be charged with. Cases which take the second option fall under this trope.
- In the Chicago P.D. episode "Fagin", which introduces Hailey Upton, Team Voight catches a case where a bank gets robbed by a group teenagers. Later, they deduce the group is run by Lavar Spann, a former bank robber turned car dealer. They know that Spann kills off members of the robbery group if they pose a threat, so when one of the children writes his confession implicating Spann, Voight tells him not to testify. Team Voight ultimately nails Spann for the contribution to the delinquency of and provision of alcohol to minors.
- The Closer, "Good Housekeeping"; a spoiled rich youth, Austin Philips, killed the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and fled south of the border. Brenda knew she couldn't get him extradited, went to Mexico to get the full story from him, he refuses to come back to the US, and Mexico refuses to extradite him. Brenda meets him in a Mexican police station and asks him for the story so she can close the case, and offers to drop the accessory charges against his parents. The killer tearfully confesses that he did it by "accident". Then Brenda hands the Mexican cops evidence the victim was actually born in Mexico, not America, which made her a Mexican citizen. The Mexican cops arrest Austin despite his pleas to go with Brenda, and Brenda is noticeably disturbed right afterwardsnote . You don't want to be a white gringo prettyboy in a Mexican prison. Much less one who seduced and killed an innocent, underage, Mexican girl.
- Columbo: In the episode "A Bird in the Hand", although Columbo suspects the perp of murdering her husband, he never does turn up any evidence of it. He does prove, however, that she committed a second murder to cover up the first, and that's good enough for him. Thus, the title of the episode; as he puts it, "A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush."
- Criminal Minds: This is a possibility in an episode where the team travels to Alaska to track down a serial killer. When the team discover that the killer is a teenager on the run from revenge-hungry vigilantes, they go to his home to see if his parents can help track him down before he is killed. The boy’s abusive father refuses to comply and orders his wife to keep quiet in front of the agents and local authorities. Later, when they save the killer, he is seen in a jail cell neighboring his. While it’s unknown if he will finally be charged with domestic violence, he can certainly be charged with interfering with a federal investigation.
- Common in the CSI-verse:
- In one case, someone was cleared of murder during a burglary but discovered to be guilty of Felony Murder.
- In another case, the perp initially got away with murder by framing his victim for the sexual assault of his 12-year-old daughter. When new evidence proved that the killer was in fact the abuser, he was arrested for the new crime, one which guarantees an automatic life sentence without parole.
- In yet another episode, the team can't get enough evidence to press charges against a guy who murdered his wife before the episode is over. However, they assure him it's only the beginning of their investigation. In the meantime, the evidence acquired thus far is enough for the wife's insurance company to want their $750k back and to start repossessing the guy's stuff, starting with his brand new Ferrari.
- In one of the few original CSI episodes not involving murder, an exhibit of valuable Japanese historical items is robbed, with the perps making off with several items and millions of dollars in cash from the vault. The team finds out that all the items were fake. The perps, including the supposed owner of the items, a wealthy Japanese businessman, turn out to be employees of the guy hosting the exhibit (the pretender was also Chinese). Grissom confronts him with the evidence, but the guy points out that there's not enough to press charges. Grissom agrees but says he will send the evidence to the guy's insurance company to expose his scam.
- CSI: Miami has Horatio unable to arrest a murderer because he has diplomatic immunity. However, one of the victims was a Canadian citizen, and Canada does not recognize the guy's diplomatic status. When the guy's yacht ends up in international waters, Horatio alerts the authorities.
- Another CSI: Miami episode has Horatio figure out that the deaths of two people were caused by toxic genetically modified lettuce but cannot press charges against the company or its smug CEO. However, all the evidence he gathered will make for a massive lawsuit by the victims' families.
- In the CSI: NY episode, "Pot of Gold," when the main perp (who hired a man to kill a pair of journalists and an informant to cover up a gold counterfeiting scheme) denies having any connection to the murders, Mac (who has no solid evidence linking him to the killer) calls in a Treasury Agent who informs said perp of a laundry list of charges against him because of the aforementioned counterfeiting, for which they have a lot of physical evidence, including one of the fake bars being the murder weapon. Mac and Stella walk away grinning as the agent goes on.
- Daredevil (2015): Most of season 1 concerns Matt, Karen and Foggy trying to find something that proves Wilson Fisk is engaged in criminal activity, then getting someone who is willing to testify against Fisk, who has a habit of intimidating and killing off witnesses before they can testify against him.
- Matt first attempts to get testimony from Detective Blake, a corrupt cop on Fisk's payroll who got shot for being disloyal, but Fisk blackmails Blake's partner Hoffman into poisoning him in the hospital, so instead Matt ends up having Hoffman (who only did it because Fisk and Wesley threatened to have him killed otherwise) snitch on Fisk.
- In between Detective Blake's death and trying to use Hoffman, they try to take down Fisk using their tenancy dispute between Elena Cardenas and her landlord Armund Tully, a notorious slumlord who is being paid by Fisk. This fails when Fisk has Elena killed as part of a trap to lure Matt into a fight with Nobu.
- After this, Karen finds out that Fisk is hiding his mother in an upstate nursing home. When she and Ben go there, they get Marlene to reveal that Fisk killed his father with a hammer when he was just 12 years old. Unfortunately, Marlene's word is not considered reliable enough to implicate Fisk due to her age and senility (she'll die offscreen between now and the events of season 3), and Fisk kills Ben before he can get some corroborating information from an old mafia contact of his, plus moves his mother to Italy, rendering this angle dead in the water.
- Season 3 ends up repeating this, after Fisk manages to beat his charges and gets out of prison. Karen tries to connect Fisk to the hotel he's under house arrest in. Matt first tries to expose Fisk by bringing in an inmate Fisk hired to shank himself as part of his gambit to get out of prison, but Fisk hires Dex to kill said witness. Ultimately, what takes Fisk down this time is a two step process: first, Karen provokes Fisk into sending Dex after her to avenge James Wesley, causing Dex to go after her at Matt's church, during which Father Lantom gets killed. Subsequently, Ray Nadeem (the agent who sprung Fisk) grows a conscience and decides to testify before a grand jury, with Matt and Foggy negotiating a deal for him with Blake Tower. Fisk thwarts their attempt to use the grand jury by intimidating the jurors, so Nadeem goes home and records a confession video before Dex is sent to his house by Vanessa to kill him. The video ends up being what brings down Fisk, while Matt brings down Dex by using Fisk's murder of a woman close to him to get Dex to turn against Fisk.
- The District has an example of an interesting legal loophole. An ambassador's son is smuggling drugs in diplomatic bags — specially marked and exempt from searches as part of diplomatic immunity. The cops convince a citizen known for clumsy driving to make a fender-bender on the kid's car, so the contents of the bags in the trunk can be examined. For damage. The traffic cops are admirable: fast, polite and by-the-book. The commissioner is overseeing them personally. While reading from said book. And it's all in the guise of preventing a diplomatic incident. The son has diplomatic immunity (and so can't be charged) because he is still a college student, so the Metro PD have to make their case to the Dean and get him expelled before successfully charging him.
- The Good Detective: Discussed Trope in the first-season finale, as Jong-tae is going to prison for throwing Jung-seok off a bridge to his death. Ji-hyuk wonders if maybe Jong-tae didn't do it, if Jung-seok actually jumped off the bridge like Jong-tae claimed. Kang and Seo-kyung both say that they don't care, that Jong-tae killed Ji-sun five years ago and that's good enough for them. Ji-hyuk remains troubled but there's no evidence to contradict the guilty verdict. (In fact Ji-hyuk is right; Jung-seok jumped from the bridge after setting up Jong-tae to be arrested in a Thanatos Gambit.)
- One episode of The Good Wife takes the unusual approach of making this the setup for the episode rather than the resolution. In The Teaser Lockhart/Gardner successfully defends a man accused of murdering his wife, but as their client was an activated Army reservist at the time of the murder, prosecutor Cary Agos hands the case materials to Army JAG, which tries him for the same murder.
- Pick any TV western (most notably Gunsmoke) and there will likely be a grass roots mob of angry citizens who won't wait for due process on behalf of some culprit who may or may not have committed a crime and will act as judge, jury and executioner right there on the spot. In Gunsmoke's case, Marshall Dillon will do some vast detective work to right the wrong or clear the presumed guilty party. However in season 10's "Old Man," an unidentified old man is framed for stabbing another man and is hanged for the crime, even after Dillon vouches for his innocence in court since there was no evidence to the contrary. It's when the actual murderer starts talking too much in the saloon that Dillon is tipped off.
- JAG: Invoked on at least 3 different occasions when an aviator did something which was clearly the wrong thing to do (e.g. accidentally killing Russian peacekeepers in Serbia, unilaterally destroying a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft captured by the Chinese, and intervening in civilian law enforcement in the U.S.), but got acquitted of all significant charges all thanks to having Harmon Rabb as his defense counsel. After the trial, however, the CO informs the aviator that he's permanently grounded and will undergo extensive medical evaluation. In any case Uncle Sam always wins.
- Joy of Life: Forms the first main plot of the show. Due to Li Yunrui being a member of the royal family, Fan Xian can't directly get her for the murder of Teng Zijing, his friend, because to many people, the fact that Teng Zijing was a lowborn nobody means that his death is insignificant, so instead he exposes her for meddling with the Overwatch Council, thus revealing that she broke the emperor's cardinal rule and getting the emperor to exile her far from the capital.
- This is also a fairly common tactic on Law & Order, as is threatening suspects' friends and acquaintances with accessory charges to get them to testify — or to get the criminal to confess.
- In a classic Law & Order episode, the show's resident expert psychologist, Dr. Olivet, accuses a gynecologist of raping her, but the court is forced to withdraw the charges when the defense attorney claims that Dr. Olivet has visited the OB-GYN when one of her patients claimed he had raped her, and therefore claims entrapment. ADA Stone then publicly announces that the city of New York would attempt to prosecute the OB-GYN again. When the doctor gloats that they can't touch him for Olivet's rape, Stone reveals that after his public announcement, some fifty-plus former patients stepped forward with rape charges of their own. As Stone then says when discussing a reduced sentence, Stone answers, "In a perfect world, I would leave you in a room with your former patients for an hour. I'll settle for you spending the rest of your life in jail." The same happens with the UK version of the episode, "Alesha".
- An episode in the Ben Stone era features an African tribal chief, whose drug-trafficking resulted in a a death, which led Stone to charge him with Felony Murder. The chief fled to his home country in the middle of his trial, with the cooperation of his country's embassy. When Stone confronts the ambassador, he gets a response he never expected: the ambassador says that he wasn't helping the fleeing defendant get away with it; quite the opposite, when the defendant gets home he will be arrested. The ambassador then thanks Stone for collecting all the evidence that will be needed for conviction; due to the defendant's political power in his native country, they never could have gotten all that evidence together to charge him, but now that they have absolute proof of his guilt, they can proceed with charges against him — and there, his crimes make him eligible for the death penalty, as New York's Felony Murder law does not.
- Jack McCoy is an expert at coming up with creative "legal theories" usually involving a defendant's actions being legally reinterpreted to make them guilty of a legal statute that wasn't obvious before or coming up with a new theory of the defendant's motive to sidestep some evidentiary hurdle that enabled him to present an open-and-shut case (or threaten to present it in order to force a plea). The most common example was a "Depraved Indifference" murder, where Jack only had to prove the defendant acted recklessly or neglected a legal burden to act in a given situation, even if they were not provably guilty of the actual murder.
- There's also a few episodes where McCoy doesn't have enough admissible evidence to convict the accused of what actually happened, so he instead re-presents the evidence based on a version of events that he suspects or even knows is false, but still holds together from a legal standpoint. People would occasionally try to call him out on this, accusing him of essentially lying in court by making bogus claims, but he'd always insist he was only presenting the jury a "theory" which they were free to either agree with or reject and that there was no reason legal loopholes shouldn't work both ways.
- One example: A woman hires a hitman to murder her wastrel husband who is driving her broke, then murders the hitman when he tries to blackmail her. The evidence showing she hired him in the first place is ruled inadmissible, so McCoy instead argues that the hitman was hired by someone else, and his murder was the result of the dead man's grief-stricken wife taking revenge on him. Even though it's the exact opposite of what happened, there's enough admissible evidence that he gets his conviction.
- A pregnant woman and her boyfriend deliberately stage an assault on her that causes a miscarriage so they can file a wrongful death suit. When their plan is uncovered, the DA brings murder charges, only for the boyfriend to smugly tell them the unborn fetus was too young to count as a "person" under the law, and therefore they can't be convicted. Stone instead argues that he believes they didn't know that particular technicality at the time of the crime and only found it out later when constructing their defense, thus they acted with the prerequisite intent that legally satisfies attempted murder. Despite the fact the boyfriend had some legal training and probably was telling the truth the Jury buys the prosecution's theory out of sheer indignation at them and they're convicted.
- Another involves a pair of conspirators who shot a man just for the thrill. Their defense tactic is to have both of them point fingers at the other, only one person actually shot the victim (only one bullet was fired) and the evidence proving conspiracy was thrown out. The jury can't convict them both, and since they're unsure who did it, they would likely acquit both. However, McCoy tricks one of the lawyers into getting the trials severed. The result, both defendants will now face separate trials for the same crime, where attempting to blame their co-conspirator is a defense the jury can choose to believe or not. And given the heinousness of the crime, they probably won't. We don't see it play out though, one of the defendants confesses out of guilt before his case can go to the jury, and his testimony hangs his partner. D.A. Schiff even remarks on how McCoy almost got the justice system to legally accept a physical impossibility (both men fired the same bullet from the same gun).
- Another good example is when the police are in pursuit of a pair of thugs who killed an off-duty cop and kidnapped a limo driver. They catch one of the pair, but with no idea if the limo driver is dead or alive McCoy is forced to give him a very advantageous plea deal (including any "related crimes") in exchange for the whereabouts of the driver. Of course, the driver was already dead and the police later find the guy's partner also dead. McCoy can't get out of the deal, so he charges the living perp with murdering his partner on the slippery theory that the partner's murder was not established as a "related crime" when the defendant took the original plea bargain. The plea means the original perp essentially walks for killing a cop, but ends up drawing a lengthy prison sentence anyway, for killing his accomplice.
- One from a different vector comes about when an OJ Simpson Expy, who had gotten off on the murder of his wife due to a bribed juror, is eventually nailed for the murder of the publisher of a book about the previous trial. McCoy was eventually able to get evidence that the defendant had lied about previous evidence, but also that he admitted killing his wife. The jury convicted him of the current murder, but looking at the jury kind of implied this trope for the previous case.
- Yet another case involves two women on trial separately but simultaneously for a "Strangers on a Train"-Plot Murder case. The wealthier of the two is able to buy a top-dollar defense and is acquitted of the murder she committed, while the other, who can't afford the same quality of representation, is convicted. McCoy realizes that, seeing the disparate outcomes, the woman who was convicted would be willing to testify against the other one, especially if she got a deal on sentencing, but he can't re-try the other woman on the same crime because that would be double jeopardy... so instead he has the woman charged with murder for hire in the death of her own husband, on the premise that killing the other husband in return constituted a payment for purposes of the law, and the judge, after thinking it over for a minute, agrees. McCoy then offers the woman the same deal he'd given her co-conspirator, and the woman, realizing there's no getting out of it this time, accepts.
- The episode "Virtue" has a politician accused of raping his aides. The one victim able and willing to testify is forced to admit that she consented to sex after the politician threatened to ruin her career, which isn't technically rape as far as the law is concerned. McCoy instead goes after him for extortion on the basis that his behaviour is no different from mobsters running a Protection Racket and the politician ends up getting 10 years in prison.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
- "Producer's Backend" features a director consciously abusing the Casting Couch trope to sleep with 16 and 17 year old girls, lying to them about their chances (in more ways than one, since he filed "scripts" that he knew would never get off the ground) and then cutting them loose, leading to at least one accidental death-that-was-probably-a-murder. The detectives are stuck, since he only does this in states where he wasn't violating Age of Consent laws, meaning he hadn't done anything legally wrong. Except the detectives realize he'd once pulled this stunt with a 16-year-old in Canada; he thought he was legally in the clear because she was above the Canadian age of consent, but it turns out there's also a federal statute against leaving the country for the purpose of having sex with a minor, which is defined for purposes of that statute as anyone under 18. It even gets a dramatic Lampshade Hanging:Defense Lawyer: You can't be serious. That law's intention is to stop pedophiles from flying to Thailand to have sex with twelve-year-olds!
Benson: Your client is a pedophile, and a rapist, and a murderer, [to Brubeck] and if this is the only way that we can get you, then this is the way that you're going down! - Inverted in another episode. A case is in jeopardy after a rape victim dies of a staph infection from an injury she received during the attack, so Cabot adds on some additional charges that allow her to present more evidence (most notably adding a murder charge in order to introduce the deathbed statement of the victim). The defendant is acquitted of the additional charges, but the evidence that was introduced based on those charges allows him to be convicted of the original charge of rape.
- Yet another SVU case involves a man who runs an organization that encourages adults to have sex with children. They catch him, but they can only link him to one victim, and since he didn't personally abuse the boy (his role was that he encouraged the boy's stepfather to abuse him), his actions only carry a ten-year sentence. The only other thing they have on him is possession of child pornography, which doesn't usually carry massive sentences either... unless, that is, the prosecution convinces the judge to hand down a series of consecutive two-year sentences for each of the 1500 images on his computer. That's right, he got sentenced to three thousand years.
- In "Taken", a con artist family runs a callous scam to set up a guy via False Rape Accusation. The young female ringleader ends up getting away from fraud charges with probation. However, because he was murdered while in prison, after accepting her deal and coldly telling the court what she did, the detectives arrest her for manslaughter, because she just proved herself criminally liable for his death.
- In the episode "Fast Times @TheWheelHouse", a girl accuses two Tik-Tok stars of rape. They get acquitted for that, but the detectives and ADA quickly realize they bribed the jury...because they did so with their own phones, to the jurors' own phones. They promptly get arrested and convicted for that instead.
- The "Man Up/Man Down" two-parter has a man acquitted of raping his son, who then goes on to commit a school shooting. A.D.A. Stone manages to convict the man of criminally negligent homicide on the basis that his abuse of his son drove him to commit the shooting.
- In "Branded", season 12, episode 6, the story's perp turns out to have sodomized and branded her victims because they gang-raped and impregnated her when they were counselors at her summer camp. The ADA can't prosecute them for rape because of the statute of limitations, so she sets a perjury trap, prosecuting them for perjury after they testify in their attacker's trial but deny having raped her.
- The episode "Behave" gives us a particularly vile Serial Rapist who stalks his victims so that he can rape them again and again over a period of years until they live in constant fear of him. The statute of limitations and degraded DNA evidence means that none of the rape charges the SVU team bring against him stick, but Benson eventually manages to have him charged with kidnapping, a crime with no statute of limitations that will get him sent to prison for 25 years, because he held one of the victims captive for twelve hours while he was raping her. He also might face Federal charges from the FBI, who have started investigating some of the rapes outside of SVU's jurisdiction which had involved him crossing state lines.
- "Producer's Backend" features a director consciously abusing the Casting Couch trope to sleep with 16 and 17 year old girls, lying to them about their chances (in more ways than one, since he filed "scripts" that he knew would never get off the ground) and then cutting them loose, leading to at least one accidental death-that-was-probably-a-murder. The detectives are stuck, since he only does this in states where he wasn't violating Age of Consent laws, meaning he hadn't done anything legally wrong. Except the detectives realize he'd once pulled this stunt with a 16-year-old in Canada; he thought he was legally in the clear because she was above the Canadian age of consent, but it turns out there's also a federal statute against leaving the country for the purpose of having sex with a minor, which is defined for purposes of that statute as anyone under 18. It even gets a dramatic Lampshade Hanging:
- An episode of Law & Order: UK has a man get off for manslaughter and drug running after a witness changes his statement. After the trial, Steel has a "Eureka!" Moment and asks his boss to "pull a Capone" on him and get him for tax evasion (which they do).
- Madam Secretary: One episode has DC Police charge a Bahraini diplomat with human trafficking, only to have the diplomat skip town on Diplomatic Impunity. However, Elizabeth convinces the Crown Prince of Bahrain (whom she went to boarding school with) to try him in Bahrain. The prince is assassinated by Bahraini hardliners after the announcement and we don't learn how the case ends.
- Mission: Impossible: At the end of "The Counterfeiter", the eponymous villain claims that even with a recording of his Engineered Public Confession, the IMF still can't do anything more than slap him with a fine. Then Phelps points out that he didn't just confess to his criminal operations, he also confessed the scope of said operations, which is large enough to sic the IRS on him for tax evasion.
- Monk:
- "Mr. Monk and the Wrong Man": an ex-con named Max Barton has been exonerated from a conviction for a particularly gruesome double murder, and Monk tries to help him rebuild his life. When the original witness to the crime chides him harshly for helping the very person she insists was the man she saw leaving the crime scene after she heard screaming, Monk suddenly realizes a detail about the crime scene that means Barton was guilty of the original murders all along, but due to double jeopardy, he can't be retried for them. However, Monk finds that they still can rearrest Barton for killing his partner from the original crime out of fear the guy would talk.
- "Mr. Monk Takes the Stand": a sculptor named Evan Gildea is suspected of murdering his wife Nancy and making it look like a break-in. However, when the trial comes up, Gildea's lawyer, the Saul Goodman-esque Harrison Powell, gets the case against his client thrown out by discrediting Monk and Captain Stottlemeyer despite all the evidence suggesting Gildea is guilty. However, Randy then approaches Monk asking him to help exonerate Rudy Smith, a friend of his from a police outreach program who has been accused of robbing an auto parts store and killing a clerk in the process (Rudy has confessed to robbing the clerk and taking her necklace and money from the cashier). In examining the scene, Monk notices evidence that exonerates Rudy of murder, and then he finds a discarded taillight bulb in the bushes next to the store, meaning that while they are unable to put Evan Gildea away for murdering his wife, they can put him away for killing the store clerk.note When interrogated, Gildea incriminates himself by calling Rudy "a chain-snatching, dope-smoking little thug," only to be told that while Rudy had indeed taken the clerk's necklace, this detail was never in the police report or released to the media.
- NCIS: In Season 15's "Death From Above", a team pulls an All Your Base Are Belong to Us on NCIS headquarters to destroy evidence of their boss's drug smuggling. While they manage to pull it off, it doesn't help the guy any. The Mole survived, and now the drug lord is going down for attacking Federal law enforcementMcGee: He'll do more time for terrorism than he ever would for drugs.
- In The Nevers, when a pair of Purist perps, have proven to be uncooperative in the interrogation, Frank Mundi proposes that they be charged for assaulting a police officer instead; a proposition that the larger perp was all-too-happy to accept, until the interrogator introduces Mundi as "the Ape" of East-End London boxing fame. When both perps recognize him, they are quick to back off and cooperate.
- Mentioned briefly in the series finale of NUMB3RS. While pursuing a case involving a string of vigilante murders, the FBI questions a man whose daughter's rapist was acquitted, and he tells the FBI that they're planning to sue in civil court, where the burden of proof is lower. As it's only tangential to the plot (the FBI was only concerned with the possibility that he might be looking to kill the rapist), it's not mentioned after that.
- In one episode of The Practice, a man kills his wife. His son, trying to protect him, claims he attacked his dad and the gun went off accidentally. When the man is acquitted, the DA has the son arrested for felony murder. The dad then confesses to the killing but is protected by double jeopardy, so the judge puts them both away for 20 years for perjury.
- Something of an inversion on Psych. SBPD are going after a known crime lord for tax evasion, and Shawn's illegally obtained evidence threatens to get the whole thing thrown out of court. Shawn redeems himself by convincing several other victims to overcome their fear and testify, meaning the DA can now pursue more serious charges.
- Quincy, M.E.:
- While trying a kidnapping case, Quincy is able to prove that the kidnapper hid his victim on the grounds of a national park. The state prosecutor throws the case in exchange for the kidnapper telling him where the victim is so she can be rescued, but then hands the material off to the local federal prosecutor for retrial, since the use of the national park means the perp also broke federal kidnapping statutes.
- An antagonistic example in another episode had a federal prosecutor trying a man from a mafia family for mail fraud (an insurance claim against a fire that is believed to be arson and killed a janitor) uses multiple attempts at a federal grand jury to get an indictment. Under the law, this does not count as double jeopardy, so Quincy has to prove forensically that the fire was accidental (the janitor's cleaning chemicals leaked onto a space heater). (The supposed mafia man, by the way, is entirely innocent and actively rebuffed attempts by his family to use his business for money-laundering.)
- Smallville: A criminal used diplomatic immunity to evade justice for kidnapping multiple American citizens. A tip to the Interpol, and he is arrested for keeping them as slaves in his own country.
- In the Supernatural episode "ScoobyNatural", after they manage to figure out that the haunting that placed them in Scooby Doo was done by Jay for the sake of an (incredibly bloody) real estate scam-slash-"Scooby-Doo" Hoax, Sam and Dean confront him once they return to the real world. Jay of course dismisses them because there is no way that "manipulated the ghost of a scared little boy to hurt people" will be believed by the police. Sam and Dean explain to him, just as the cops are arriving to arrest him, that they did some computer research and got evidence that Jay had been doing some tax evasion, which they happily e-mailed to the authorities.
- When an Engineered Public Confession doesn't work in The Thin Blue Line, Fowler gets the case thrown out by revealing that Goody was still wearing the prototype uniform that he was modeling when he found the planted evidence.
- Played with in the final season of The Wire, where the Baltimore P.D. finally catches the "serial killer" terrorizing the homeless population; they admit they only have evidence for one murder so that's all he'll be tried for (he's also clearly mentally unfit to stand trial so there wouldn't be any point in further charges anyway), but the chief implies that the one conviction will serve as a proxy for all the murders. (In actuality, the murder is unrelated to the "serial killings" which they know was a ploy by McNulty for more funding and never even happened.)
