Law and Order SVU season 20, episode 7: Peter Stone highlights

What happened to Peter Stone in this week’s Law & Order: SVU? Find the highlights in our Philip Winchester-centric SVU season 20, episode 7 recap.

Peter Stone is dishing out Chicago Justice on Law & Order: SVU, and we’re keeping track of what happens next for his character.

Thursday’s episode was entitled “Caretaker” and featured another Chicago Justice character making a visit—but this time it wasn’t a friend. Could Stone defeat his former turned current adversary to deliver a guilty verdict?

If you missed any of Philip Winchester’s latest episode, or you’re a Chicago Justice fan who wants to know what Peter got up to, we’re breaking down the installment for you with the highlights for his character.

So what happened to Peter Stone in this week’s SVU episode?

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“Caretaker” was a pretty vicious episode, focusing on the slaughter of almost an entire family. Only one of the children survived, and he died from his wounds at the hospital. It’s no surprise that SVU gets pretty dark, but this was a particularly dark plot.

Anna Mill (that’s Sasha Alexander from NCIS and also Rizzoli & Isles) found out at work that the whole rest of her family was dead.

So who could’ve done such a thing, and could Stone and the detectives ensure they paid for it?

Initial suspicion fell on the family’s nanny Delores, who claimed the victims were dead when she got to the home. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) was sympathetic to her story, and proven right when the paper trail led back to some business wrongdoing on Anna and her husband’s part.

Anna was the killer, trying to make it look like a family tragedy. She confessed to Benson, saying her family was “better off now.” That was an indictment that no one saw coming.

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But it would also be perfect material for a defense attorney to manipulate with. And SVU season 20 brought back one of the best from Chicago Justice: Billy O’Boyle (Gary Basaraba).

He showed up in New York because his firm has offices in both New York and Chicago, and he had previously represented Anna in another matter. And of course, he was going to mount an insanity defense, so Stone called in Lisa Abernathy (recurring guest star Sandrine Holt) to evaluate Anna.

Abernathy told him and Benson that Lisa was a textbook family annihilator, thinking that she was sparing her family from future suffering. She wasn’t legally insane, but Peter knew he’d have a lot to deal with anyway:

"Stone: Mr. O’Boyle’s going to make a seven-course meal out of it."

He met Benson for drinks the night before the trial, to compare notes and vent about the whole thing, but O’Boyle crashed their get-together. He immediately annoyed Benson by asking how she was as a mother, then essentially tipped his opening statement to Stone. Because he’s chummy like that.

Once SVU finally got into the courtroom, the defense attorney wasted no time in splitting hairs. Unfortunately, fans didn’t get to see much of the legal battle between them, as “Caretaker” took time to show how Benson was affected by the case as a mother, and how fellow mom Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) was there to support her.

But the final ten minutes of this SVU season 20 installment did include O’Boyle putting Anna on the stand, so she could talk about how much pressure she was under to deliver the perfect life. It was a literal sob story, and one could see the wheels turning in Stone’s head as he listened.

First, he tried to confront Anna with images of her dead family but the judge told him to move on. He then hammered her argument into the ground by point-blank asking her a question that must be one of Peter Stone’s most vicious moments:

"Stone: Why didn’t you just kill yourself?"

O’Boyle tried to reinforce his client’s complaints about social pressures with his closing statement, saying she was driven crazy by society. But hey, Stone had something for that too, and it might be Philip Winchester’s best monologue since he joined SVU last season.

"Stone: I feel for every woman in this courtroom and the completely unrealistic expectations that society puts on them. But that does not allow you to kill without consequence."

It was all for near naught, though, as the jury acquitted Anna on two of the three counts. They only convicted her of her husband’s murder. Stone passed the news to Benson, who told him that Anna promptly committed suicide in her jail cell.

Next. Revisit the previous Chicago Justice reunion. dark

For the latest SVU season 20 spoilers and news, plus more on all of Dick Wolf’s other series, follow the Dick Wolf category at One Chicago Center.

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