Tonight on NBC Law & Order returns with an all-new Thursday, January 18, 2024 episode and we have your Law & Order recap below. In tonight’s Law & Order season 23 episode 1 “Freedom Of Expression,” as per the NBC synopsis, “In the wake of a murder on campus, the line between free speech and hate speech at a university is examined.”
Tonight’s Law & Order season 23 episode 1 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, a man was stabbed on his way home. Nathan Alpert was the President of Hudson University. He’s been having a bad few days at work and he was ready to go home to decompress when he gets stabbed. He was stabbed twice. It happened as he was walking through the park.
It also happened not long after he spotted a few teenagers drawing the Star of David on a Jewish newsstand. Nathan was able to get the kids to back down by threatening to be on the phone with the cops. He was actually on the phone with his wife and so she was the one that called the cops after hearing the murder. And her husband’s final words were him telling her he loves her.
Detective Shaw caught the case. His former partner retired after the brass came down on him. This was Shaw’s first case with Detective Riley and the new guy has a temper.
They were called to a scene nearby because someone saw a man with a large knife. The detectives went to the scene believing that this person could be their killer. Only Riley was being very trigger happy. He demanded their suspect drop a knife. He was the first to pull out a gun. He kept threatening to shoot the guy and so Shaw deescalated things. He got between Riley and their suspect.
Riley basically told him to never do that again in a threatening manner. Its almost like he wanted a chance to kill the guy in spite of Shaw successfully arresting the man without violence. Their suspect was homeless. He found the knife along with a jacket. It was cold outside and there wasn’t any blood on him. He has no connection with the victim.
The jacket also carried expensive lip gloss indicating this man who claimed to be Tupac was telling the truth. The jacket didn’t belong to him. The knife was being tested in the meantime.
With the cops losing their best suspect, they had to look into the victim. Nathan had a lot of enemies. He was seen arguing with a lacrosse coach from the university. He was on the brink of firing the coach because his players have been accused of hazing the younger students. They were also seen arguing on the night Nathan died.
The coach denied hurting the victim. There were no witnesses. They didn’t have enough to arrest the coach much less get a warrant for his place. And the coach wasn’t even the only person with a grudge against the victim.
There has been twenty-four wrongful termination lawsuits against the victim as well as the campus. One of them had threatened to kill Nathan. His name was Professor Phillip Klein.
He considered Nathan a traitor because Nathan wouldn’t condemn Palestinian protests on campus. The fact that he didn’t automatically side with Israel in this current conflict had his own people calling him antisemitic. Klein had threatened to kill him for being a traitor. Klein had an alibi for the murder and so he wasn’t their guy in spite of him being very happy Nathan was dead.
It bears repeating but Nathan had a lot of enemies. Another one of them was a well-known actress. Chloe Esper made a video and posted it on social media calling Nathan a traitor.
Nathan was going to dismantle the student organization that was Pro-Palestine at his University. They funded a Middle Eastern film festival in which they called Hamas’s attack on Israel a blessing.
One of them even said he couldn’t wait for more Jews to be killed. The person who said that was Cam Lawson. He was with Chloe the night Nathan was killed.
The cops went to interview Chloe when they spotted that expensive lip balm. They also got footage of who was really wearing that jacket the night and it was Cam Lawson. Cam ran into Chloe that night. She loaned him the use of her driver. The driver dropped him a block away from where he murdered Nathan.
Cam wasn’t even Middle Eastern. He was a white kid from the Upper Eastside. After he was arrested, the judge agreed to a million dollar bond that was paid instantly. He was released and Chloe started making videos calling him righteous.
Chloe stated that Nathan was a puppet of the “Zionist Agenda”. She said that Cam was being framed. She spread misinformation and they were working on getting a gag order against her when she attended a rally.
Chloe spoke up again about defending Palestine. This time someone shot her for it. The cops caught up to the shooter and Riley choosing again not to deescalate had finally gotten his chance to shoot someone. He shot Phillip Klein. Klein’s college friend had been murdered by Hamas along with his whole family.
Chloe’s mother was Palestine. She still had family in Gaza and that is why she refused to see the other side’s argument. Now they were both dead.
It was also revealed that both Chloe and the professor in charge of their student organization had known more than they let on. Professor Kendra Nasser pushed Cam into killing Nathan, she had indoctrinated him. She even supplied the murder weapon. It came from her own kitchen. And so District Attorney Jack McCoy chose to make a deal with Cam.
They were going to offer Cam a lighter sentence in return for him testifying against Nasser. McCoy knew he could lose support for this and yet he did it anyway regardless of ADA Price’s opposition.
It was going to look like they gave a lesser sentence to an antisemite killer in exchange for getting the woman who recruited him. But Price did it anyway. He got Nasser to admit she was proud of Cam for killing Nathan and shockingly, still that wasn’t enough. The jury found her Not Guilty.
THE END!