I’m watching Law & Order: SVU with my GF and this defendant is grandstanding and whatnot in this very emotional case. So I turn to the GF and say “gets shot leaving the courthouse”.
Sure enough BOOM! …vigilante justice is served.
So it seems to me that a lot of defendents end up getting their ass caped in front of the courthouse in the various Law & Order shows. Robot Chicken even pokes fun at this phenomenon.
I watch (too many) L&O reruns on cable, and this happens less than you think, IIRC. I remember a couple in the courtroom (one of which was deliberate murder disguised as grief-stricken vengeance), but not any outside, actually. Not that I say you’re mistaken, of course.
Of course, the times it has happened, it’s happened way out of proportion to RL.
They might be closing in on Miami Vice’s record by now.
I don’t remember all the details, but in an episode of L&O:CI, there was an incident where someone was about to get shot on the courthouse steps, but Det. Eames shot the shooter first. I think it was the episode with Malcolm McDowell.
Hmm I’ll have to add that one to the Law and Order Drinking Game…
There’s also the episode where a psychiatrist played by Kyle McLachlan shot a psychopathic kid who killed his child.
(for the purpose of this thread I’m considering any episode where a defendant was killed during the course of the trial. So anywhere on or in the courthouse grounds counts.
Are you going to count the magic phone calls (as I refer to them, in that a lawyer picks up a phone, says “hello”, squints for five seconds, says “goodbye” and then passes on about 60 seconds worth of information to his/her colleagues, suggesting the secretaries in the DA’s office can speak really fast and have psychic abilities allowing them to bypass the normal verification of who they’re talking to, i.e. a simple “Mister McCoy?” at the beginning of the call which typically gets a “Speaking” response or something similar) that typically lead to someone saying there won’t be any need for an appeal/retrial because the defendant’s been found dead?
Well?
It’s over-done enough to be a tiresome deus ex machina (Latin for “creative cop-out”). The only time I bought it was back on “St. Elsewhere” when the husband shot his wife’s killer in the hospital, and then reappeared the next season as the prison bitch of the same con who raped David Morse.
Which is completely NOT what your OP or title says. 
In this case, the number goes up considerably, ESPECIALLY if you’re doing all three L&O’s, not just the original.
Agreed, and I think it’s related to the number of dead bodies found by lovers in a park at the beginnings of shows. Maybe there’s a formula. . . .
Sure! Why the heck not! Throw in defendents who were killed in jail too while we’re at it!
How about the episode where the rapist is found not guilty, only to be killed by his own daughter the next day when he attacks one of her friends?
Not a shooting, but in an episode of L&O: CI, a criminal Svengali (played by Michael York) is killed off-camera on the stairs inside the courthouse by a hypodermic injection of poison; Goren suspects the man’s former pupil/accomplice, Nicole Wallace, who does not actually appear in that episode.
Oh and the episode I had last night had the Magic Trifecta:
as a bonus - the case hits especially close to home to either Detective Benson (rape) or Detective Stabler (pedophiles)
Benson starts to think about her own biological clock when the team loses a race against time to rescue some frozen embryos that were stolen by husband and wife activists. The embryos are inadvertantly destroyed and the husband is killed before the trial by the husband of a Reservist just killed in Iraq who had her eggs frozen just in case.
Take that sweet ironic justice!
if it’s the one I recall, the rapist wasn’t 'found not guilty" , he’d been released from prison, and was being publicly outed as a sex offender, followed, kept track of all the time, his PO authorized a search where they found he’d shaved all his body hair for example. the cops were told to stop harassing him, then having all this pent up rage etc, he then tried to rape his daughters friend, she shot him(she’d been supporting him as a changed person up til then).
why no, I have no life, why do you ask?
IIRC, his daughter claimed he’d always been innocent, and had been railroaded in the first trial. And she didn’t shoot him at the end, she brained him with a baseball bat.
yes, baseball bat. not sure I recall ‘he was innocent’ - but not certain enough to disagree. but definately was on parole, hence not ‘found innocent’.
Similar to the SVU with Fred Savage. He’s accused of raping several women, but the line-up for most of them is invalid because one of them accidentally talks to the others after she points him out. He is not guilty because of faulty evidence, and his lawyer believed him the whole time, but at the end, she killed him because he tried to rape her.
just watched the chicken video…I need new adult nappies.
Does everyone have the door-chain thingy?
Well, everyone on L&O. 