Tonight on NBC Law & Order returns with an all-new Thursday, January 5, 2023 episode and we have your Law & Order recap below. In tonight’s Law & Order season 22 episode 11 “Second Chance,” as per the NBC synopsis, “When an ex-con is found beaten to death, Cosgrove and Shaw arrest an unlikely culprit. Maroun must put her personal feelings for the suspect aside and take the lead in court when she and Price can’t agree on the best trial strategy.”
Tonight’s Law & Order season 22 episode 11 looks like it is going to be great and you won’t want to miss it. So make sure to bookmark this spot and come back from 8 PM – 9 PM ET for our Law & Order recap. While you wait for the recap make sure to check out all our Law & Order SVU recaps, spoilers, news & more!
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In tonight’s Law & Order episode, Derek Stanton was working late one night when someone harassed him. He was in his pizzeria. The assailant threw a brick through the glass door. Derek then called out. Just in case it was a robbery. Only it wasn’t that. No one tried to come inside. Derek went outside to see who did it.
He spotted someone walking away and when he called out to them – they began running away. Derek pursued this man. They later got into an altercation a few blocks away. This other man ended up beating Derek to death. Now, Detectives Shaw and Cosgrove were working on this homicide. They looked into Derek. He turned out to be an ex-con and so naturally everyone assumed he must have done something to have gotten himself killed.
But that wasn’t the case. Derek went to prison for selling weed. It was now legal in the State of New York and it was a nonviolent crime. He was in prison for four years. He was in there so long partially because he kept getting into fights while he was in prison. You know to survive. He would often fight a man by the name of Jordan Spall. Spall has since been released from prison. He was back to his old drug-dealing ways. The cops found him at it and they had to chase him down before Spall finally talked to them. Spall had no reason to kill Derek. The last thing he heard about Derek was that he was putting a crew together of ex-cons.
It wasn’t for anything illegal. It was because he wanted to own and operate a string of pizzerias that gave ex-cons a second chance at going legit. Derek was a good guy. He didn’t want to return to prison. He was a model parolee. He was focused on getting his life back. He was even in contact with his ex-wife and daughter. The girls were staying at a women’s shelter because his ex had gotten remarried to a man who hated Derek. This same man hated Derek coming around to see his daughter and so things were tense at home for the girls. They were staying at the shelter until things cool down at home.
The police checked on the current husband. He wasn’t their killer. It turns out their killer was in the neighborhood after going for a joy ride and he destroyed the door to the pizzeria because he just wanted to create trouble. The killer’s name was Jesse Erickson. He was eighteen. He went out that night with his buddy Kyle Brimmer. They used Kyle’s weed card to get legal weed. It eventually got late and Kyle was ready to return home. It was just Jesse who didn’t wish to. Jesse walked off from his friend. Kyle went home and Jesse attacked Derek’s place of business. He did that, but he didn’t want to face repercussions for it and so he beat a man to death to cover up what he did.
Derek was a black ex-con. Jesse was a white privileged high schooler. It didn’t matter that Derek had turned his life around or that he had started his own business. He was still seen as the enemy. Jesse’s lawyer played up in court. It didn’t matter that there was literal footage of Jesse beating Derek to death. Jesse’s lawyer still claimed it was in self-defense. They said Jesse was just a kid and that he was in a strange neighborhood by himself. It was Derek who attacked him. Jesse was simply fighting back. However, evidence refuted that theory. Derek had no wounds on his hands that indicated he ever put a hand on Jesse.
Derek also didn’t have a weapon nor was he drunk or high. If anything, Derek was excited about opening up his pizzeria. He was in a good mood. He was working late into the night to get his place up and running and this kid-targeted him. He did it for no reason. He broke that door and Derek wouldn’t have bothered him if it wasn’t for the door.
EADA Nolan Price brought that up in court. He fought against every mislead or bias that Jesse’s lawyer was trying to play into. He must have done something right because Jesse’s lawyer later changed his stance in court. They stopped claiming it was self-defense and were then claiming that Jesse was not guilty of the reason of the mental defect.
His defect? He was high. Jesse was claiming that because he tried a highly potent batch of weed for the first time that he had no control over his actions on the night in question. The District Attorney’s office looked into those claims. It turns out that it might be as far-fetched as they thought. Jesse was a good kid. He was taking a gap year to go build a school in Kenya. He’s never been racist. His guidance counselor is black and they have a great relationship. He’s a straight-A student. He has a bright future and yet this one night in question he just flipped. He beat a man to death. Which wasn’t easy.
Price thought about offering Jesse a deal. It was his second chair Ada Samantha Maroun that was against it. She thought they should throw the book at Jesse. It wasn’t until Price confronted her about the similarities in the case to what happened to her sister that she realized she was treating Jesse a little unfairly. He had no motive. It was time to offer him a plea deal and that’s what she did.
Jesse will still serve time, but he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.
THE END!
