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#LAW AND ORDER WE LIKE MIKE TRIAL#
In that case, Law & Order ‘s clearance rate would be nearly 100%, since even in the rare episodes without a trial somebody usually gets arrested. (UPDATE 12/10/12: One of the commenters on Reddit has pointed out that the “ clearance rate” has nothing to do with convictions, only arrests. (Although you have to figure Law & Order isn’t meant to represent every case these detectives investigated in 20 seasons, I don’t think there was a single murder that didn’t result in an arrest.) That’s not too shabby, considering that the actual NYPD has a homicide clearance rate of about 50%. 80% of episodes ended in solid wins: either Guilty verdicts, plea bargains, or implied victories. Over the entire run of the show, more than a third of all the episodes ended in Guilty verdicts, while another third ended in plea bargains. (The rare cases where the result was completely unclear went into the Other category.) For instance, if the killer’s wife tearfully agrees to testify against him and then the episode ends, it’s an “implied win.” We don’t know the outcome, but we are led to believe it’s going to be some flavor of Justice. “Implied win” refers to episodes in which you don’t see a plea bargain or Guilty verdict, but it’s pretty clear that’s the way things are headed. Since multi-part episodes are meant to be one story, I’m only counting the final part, giving us a total of 450 L&O stories to calculate percentages with. Okay, ready for some graphs? Chung-CHUNG.įor starters, let’s look at the frequency of each outcome. So even though they successfully nail the actual killer, this episode goes into the database with an outcome of “Not Guilty.” He wins the jury verdict, but the judge throws the conviction out. But then McCoy decides to go after the gun manufacturer, who he accuses of purposely making the semi-automatic weapon easy to convert to fully-automatic. Police catch him relatively early and he pleads out. For instance, in the season 10 episode “Gunshow,” a man kills 15 people in Central Park. (Think about all those episodes in which there’s a hitman, but also a person who hired him or incited him to violence.) In these cases, I only considered the “final” prosecution that the episode is leading up to.
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There are a lot of Law & Order episodes in which an “opening” prosecution leads to a more interesting “final” prosecution. Now we’ve got all 20 seasons plugged into Excel, and it’s time to bring the evidence to the grandest jury of all: you, the overthinkers.įirst off, a note about how I categorized these. Thanks to him, I reported on the first 10 seasons back in February 2011. And by “we,” I mean mainly Josh Kyu Saiewitz, who has been watching the show in order and emailing me the results. Well, it’s “years from now,” and we did it. And when you do, come back here and tell me if the good guys won that day. Years from now, long after you’ve forgotten all the crazy revelations in the final episode of Lost, you’ll still be catching reruns of L&O after work, marveling at Dennis Farina’s mustache. I predicted that it was going to be a while before we could unveil the results: In May 2010, I announced an effort to crowdsource a list of how all 456 episodes of Law & Order ended. At Overthinking It, Law & Order is analyzed by two separate yet equally important groups: the people who watch the show and send in the data, and the people who build the spreadsheets.