Jack McCoy is a pureborn fascist, a man who constantly ignores the law in his quest to win every case, and he absolutely loved the death penalty, constantly using it as leverage against his victims.
But worst was his (and Abby Carmichael, possibly the most hard-right character of the 1990s/2000s) dismissive attitude towards the US Constitution. Every time… and I mean every goddamned time… a suspect even DARED to suggest they have rights, McCoy would just act like it was the worst thing:
“Here’s a motion to dismiss.” Dismayed looks as we FADE TO BLACK.
OK, and I gotta go here…
Are we sure Lenny Briscoe was good?
I mean, there was that time when he fell off the wagon and was directly responsible for the sequence of events which led to Claire’s death… and yet he never felt remorse for this. He was retirement age and still chasing humps on the street? Never got a promotion, didn’t even make himself rich (like Farina’s character), just kept watching his partners get promotion after promotion while he is still cracking wise over corpses 25 years after coming onto the force. Too many times he had to testify as to the quality of his police work, and frankly, he was a shit dad.
Wasn’t a good good cop, wasn’t even a good corrupt cop, Lenny may not have been the absolute villain Jack McCoy was, but he was, at best, mediocre. Had his life taken one, two more bad turns, he would’ve been one of those two drunks in S1 of The Wire.
Shit, the entire L&O franchise is just a proto-fascist operation where the accused are always presumed guilty, Rights are considered mere inconveniences in keeping the incarceral state satisfactorily fed, and the “good guy” characters are simpletons who don’t even consider that their roles in society, and how they play them, may contribute to the problems they are fighting.