[dealing with a defendant who makes wild changes to his story] It's a suicide, it's an accident, it's a breath mint! This guy gives me a headache!
S10 E23Stiff
She denied knowing her mom had Parkinson's, she lied about the money, she's 0 for 2 and counting.
Getting her paws on that money is a pretty good motive for a murder.
Except it's her step-dad who pulled the trigger. Wow, what a cozy little family this is turning out to be.
Once you turn to necrophilia, incest doesn't seem so bad.
Moore must be feeling pretty stupid sitting in Riker's while Debbie is out spending up a storm. He might be in the mood to deal.
I'm not. Get a search warrant for her office and home. We find evidence they had an affair, they can both rot.
Have you arrested this girl?
Not yet.
Are you waiting for an invitation?
S10 E24Vaya Con Dios
RReyes
They hung me upside down by my ankles and burned me with cigarettes. They put electrodes on my tongue and my eyelids. They would not let me sleep. They tried to drown me. Three times they put a gun to my head and pretended to shoot me. They did this to me for 2 months.
And you're positive that the people who tortured you were under the command of Colonel Pantoya?
RReyes
Yes. He visited the prison many times. [to Pantoya] The man you laughed at, the man hanging like a pig, it was me. Through my blood and my tears, I saw you, Colonel.
May it please the court. Man has only the rights he can defend. Our most basic right is life. It's enshrined not only in our Constitution, but in the charter of the United Nations. The prohibition against taking a life is found in our most ancient texts and in the statutes of every nation. Every murder, whether in Brooklyn, Santiago, Rwanda or Kosovo, demands punishment by whatever legal means possible. Otherwise, the right to life is just an empty promise. The law against murder applies to all. No matter the perpetrator, the victim, or the country where the murder is committed. It is the one moral law that recognizes no national, racial or religious boundaries. It can tolerate no exceptions. There is one law. One law. And when that law is broken, it is the duty of every officer of any court to rise up in defense of that law, and bring their full power and diligence to bear against the law breaker. Because, man has only those rights he can defend. Only those rights.
S11 E1Endurance
Your Honor, this is nothing more than Mr. Peck's conceit that he can pull a rabbit out of a hat, and his never ending love for an opportunity just to hear himself talk.
It's possible she suppressed her memory of that night. It's possible she felt too guilty to fully participate in her own defense.
It's also possible that her lawyer isn't the idiot that we take him for. He held on to this until he thought it would do the most good.
No, he's an idiot.
PPeck
The heart is an unruly little chihuahua.
S11 E2Turnstile Justice
Mr. Donatelli: You guys declare yourselves done, and they're done. You say the one and only person responsible for Steph getting killed is this lunatic, you put a line through it on your list and then you pat yourselves on the back!
Judge Mizener: Mr. Donatelli, I understand you're upset, but this isn't the time or the place to address these things.
Mr. Donatelli: Tell me what is the time and place and I'll be there! Tell me when you're gonna hold someone accountable for turning him loose on Steph, and I'll be there.
Lewin: You have a defendant responsible for sending a dangerous psychotic out among the citizens of New York. Whatever excuses he has, whatever excuses the two of you have, now that you've gone after him, I want you to run him to ground.
McCoy: No one should be heard to say that providing medical care at Riker's Island is easy, nor is it the position of this District Attorney's office that there aren't legitimate financial constraints on the provider. We've heard that the defendant operating under those constraints is just a simple man doing the best he could. Let's look at that a little bit. Brian Gallant was at Riker's for a year. He was medicated on a daily basis by the defendant's company with the defendant's knowledge. On the day he was released, he was hallucinating and disoriented. Nonetheless, he was handed over to the Department of Corrections who dropped him off at a subway station in the middle of the night. He was given no medication, no referral for ongoing care, not an address to go to, not a phone number to call. This was not done by accident or oversight. This was the express instruction of the defendant. Was not the violent behavior of Brian Gallant a foreseeable event? Was not the defendant well aware, not only of Mr. Gallant's propensities but of the risk he constituted for every person he came in contact with? The answer is, of course, he was aware of it. Of course, he chose to ignore it. Of course, it was his recklessness that brought about this woman's death. Find him guilty, ladies and gentlemen. He deserves it.
How much time will Andrews serve with good behavior?
Under a year.
Good, that means jail, not state prison. He'll serve it at Rikers. Let's hope he has a good immune system.
S11 E3Dissonance
You need to understand that when it comes to trying someone for murder, particularly someone like Carl Reger, who's given so much of himself to the city, that Jack McCoy doesn't get a free one.
And you need to understand that veiled threats disguised as friendly advice sound an awful lot to me like judicial bias. Especially when delivered ex parte.
First off, I don't have to justify my decisions to you. Second, that sound you hear is the ice cracking underneath your feet.
With all due respect, your honor, you weigh more than I do. I request that you recuse yourself from the case of the People v. Reger.
Request denied.
Then you can explain yourself to the grievance board.
You file a complaint against me, and your A.D.A.'s will never get to first base inside my courtroom, based strictly on the merits of their cases.
If you threaten me again, I'll report this conversation and our last conversation to the presiding judge of the appellate division. And if you step over the line in court just once, I'll take you down. And you won't get up again.
S11 E4Standoff
GGuard
Listening to a couple of lawyers tell me what we should and should not do makes me feel like putting them in a cell with one of my 250-pound CPSU All-Stars. Then I'd go home, have a hot meal, get a good night's sleep, and come back in the morning to watch them mop.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Law & Order pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.