[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Law & Order Season 24 Episode 5 “Report Card.”] The latest Law & Order episode isn’t an easy one for Detective Jalen Shaw ( Mehcad Brooks ), as he’s faced with a tough decision and opens up about his own past. Shaw and Detective Vincent Riley ( Reid Scott ) investigate after a teacher is murdered.
A student, Anthony (Colton Osorio), had written a diss track about him, and the teacher threatened to report him; that would have violated his parole and would have sent him to juvenile detention. Anthony claims he just went to the teacher’s home to scare him, but the gun went off and he hadn’t known it was loaded. ADA Nolan Price ( Hugh Dancy ) wants to try him as an adult, which Shaw is against, but then the detective learns Anthony’s prints are on the bullets; he knew it was loaded.
He tells Price, who rescinds a plea deal he’d offered the teen. Does any part of Shaw regret telling Price? “Yes and no,” Brooks admits to TV Insider. (Watch the full video interview above.
) “The dilemma that Shaw had at that moment was really a false choice because if he didn’t tell Price that the kid loaded the bullets into the gun, then Shaw is now putting Riley on the hook to keep his secret, right? So not only is he putting his own credibility on the line, he’s now putting Vincent Riley’s credibility on the line...
It’s something that he’s going to struggle with,” explains Brooks. “It’s something that he lost so.