Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (season 9)

Detectives Benson and Stabler suspect that Janis Donovan (Cynthia Nixon), a woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder, may have harmed her own daughter. Their investigation is met with initial resistance from her psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Carlisle (Bronson Pinchot). Captain Cragen is temporarily re-assigned due to problems with his detectives last season, and newly promoted Sgt. John Munch is assigned as Acting Squad Commander.

The detectives discover that Janis has four other alternate personalities. As the episode progresses, the detectives witness these personalities, culminating when one of Janis's personalities throws a chair across the room. Later in the episode, Janis and her sister are reunited after serving time in jail. The day after Janis and her sister go home together, their parents are found murdered in their beds. Janis's fingerprints are found on the gun. When Janis goes to trial, she displays one of her alternate personalities, choking Novak. Janis is found not guilty by reason of mental defect.

The detectives investigate the fatal stabbing of a private school teacher (Elizabeth Morton), who had volunteered at a victim's rehabilitation center. The teacher had been working with an Iraqi man whose story helped uncover some military secrets, which may have led to her murder.

• Elizabeth McGovern, Patrick Page, and Steven Weber guest star. 

The discovery of a kidnapped girl leads Detectives Benson and Stabler to her abductor, Saul Picard (played by Arye Gross), who is a violent, schizophrenic artist. As Detective Stabler prepares to take Saul into custody, he head butts Stabler, slamming his head into a car window which shatters on impact. As Stabler wakes up in the hospital room he is unable to see anybody around him. Novak must face her own dark past while attempting to convict Picard, whose reaction post-psychiatric treatment to his crimes complicates the case.

• Note: First appearance in the Law & Order series of Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) as the District Attorney. 

A brutal murder leads the detectives into the dangerous world of MMA (mixed martial arts). The investigation leads to two brothers who confessed that they had to rape the victim to enter a gang. The case gets harder when the leader of the gang and prime suspect is accidentally crushed to death in a trash compactor and one of the brothers lies to protect the other.

• Gaius Charles, Arlen Escarpeta, Forrest Griffin, Adina Porter, Coco Austin, Stephanie Andujar, Anwan Glover, and Lenny Venito guest star. 

Detectives Benson and Stabler investigate when a Nigerian polygamist's wife is killed, and the husband fears that his testifying in a crime may have led to his wife's demise. Benson and Stabler suspect that the man's cultural tradition may have been the cause of his wife's murder when they find a website that exposes potential witnesses to the crime that he was testifying for.

• Method Man, Gloria Reuben, Steven Weber, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, and Tracy Middendorf guest star. 

The SVU squad are called in when a wealthy teenager (Natalie Hall) is found murdered in Central Park. The case soon develops into an investigation of a community of homeless children.

• Mae Whitman and Madeline Taylor guest star. 

The sexual assault of a Jewish boy (Braeden Lemasters) prompts the attention of Benson and Stabler. Initially an orthodox Jewish rabbi (Bob Dishy) is suspected to be the one responsible for the raping the kid, but the case turns into a media circus as a flood of young victims are revealed, with all the clues pointing to one of their classmates. It's discovered that a 14-year-old boy (Alexander Gould) is the rapist, but he doesn't go to prison because (thanks to a psychological evaluation) he is declared mentally ill, as a result of daily exposure to pornography.

• Cara Buono, Rhea Perlman, Novella Nelson, Linda Emond, and Zoe Lister-Jones guest star. 

When fertilized embryos disappear from a sperm bank, examination of a security tape points the detectives to two publicity-hungry extremists. Meanwhile, Benson ponders her own decisions about fertility and motherhood.

• Mark Moses, Janine Turner, Gabrielle Anwar, Meredith Eaton, James Waterston, Richard Masur, Meredith Zinner, and Emilio Delgado guest star. 

After a young girl (Shareeka Epps) is found raped in a community garden, Benson and Stabler realize the girl has a mother who is in a female correction facility. After the rape kit on the girl goes missing, the detectives realize one of the corrections officers at the facility is raping and brutalizing women. Without the rape kit, however, Benson and Stabler have no proof, so Benson goes in undercover at the same facility to catch the officer, but is almost raped herself in the basement of the facility.

• Johnny Messner, Todd Stashwick, LaChanze, Hassan Johnson, Tawny Cypress, Matthew Cowles, and Dinah Lenney guest star. 

When investment banker Jeremy Haynes is found murdered, suspicion turns to his boyfriend Lincoln Haver (Bailey Chase), a professional football player who could lose everything if the truth about his sexuality came to light. When information about Haver's sexual orientation is leaked to the media, Benson comes under fire for her relationship with a reporter (Bill Pullman).

• Robert John Burke, Rick Hoffman, Beverly D'Angelo, Richard Lewis, and David Del Rio also guest star. 

The 200th episode of the show features an engineer, Merritt Rook (Robin Williams) who has been posing as a cop to make people do abnormal things all in the act of trying to convince people to oppose authority. He turns his trial into a media circus and the case gets more complicated when Rook abducts Benson. He tries to make Elliot inflict pain on her by way of a Milgram experiment, but he refuses.

• When Rook's "No Sheep" crew freeze in their tracks at Grand Central Station, it is based on Improv Everywheres' 2006 performance. 

The SVU squad is left at ends when they have a dead cop on their hands and Det. Chester Lake is their prime suspect. They discover Lake was investigating a ten-year-old cold case and the cop may have been involved in the rape of one girl and the rape-murder of another girl. Lake tracks down the surviving victim and convinces her to testify against the partner of the dead cop who also raped and helped murder the other girl. However, as the case quickly goes downhill in the courtroom, Novak withholds evidence in desperate hopes of winning a conviction, but her efforts fail to win her a conviction. In the end, Novak is censured for her misconduct and Lake hunts down and kills the cop, while Fin, upset at Elliot for gaining his cellphone records in hopes of finding out if he had informed Lake of the detective's progress, announces his intent to transfer out of SVU.

• Adam Beach and Diane Neal leave the cast.