Even though Law & Order: Criminal Intent has a more analytical feel to it, there are still some rather sad moments involved in the series. Here are but a few of them:
This page contains unmarked spoilers. Proceed with caution.
- In "Homo Homini Lupis", after a man's family is kidnapped as collateral for a debt, one of his daughters is raped (against the loan shark's orders). Afterwards, the girl refuses to speak to anyone about it until Goren finally nudges her into admitting she hated being a victim and feeling so helpless. She then bursts into tears, and Goren holds her as she cries, gently stroking her hair.Maggie: He hurt me. He hurt me so bad.
- In "Folie a Deux", a baby girl is abducted from a hotel room while her parents are out. After many dead ends, it's discovered that the little girl was never abducted but rather died in an accident some months earlier after being left in an overheated car by her mother after the air conditioning inside failed. Upon her remains ultimately being found on some property of her dying great Aunt, the last shot of the episode is of Goren looking sadly at the body bag holding the little girl as it's being placed in a morgue drawer.
- In "Silencer", the killer's motive seems to be preventing a surgeon from helping a certain woman getting a hearing implant that would no longer make her deaf. It turns out her boyfriend did it, shooting the man's hands to prevent his work, and then stomping on his throat and unfortunately killing him shortly after when he tried to scream. Except because the killer himself was deaf, fearing his girlfriend would leave him if she could hear, he didn't realize that the stomp had broken the man's voice box - which meant that he had no reason to finish the job but couldn't realize he rendered his victim mute.
- "Frame" displays Goren's Woobiedom at its full extent. Aside from still grieving the death of his mother from months earlier, he learns of a deceased junkie who fell out of a window. Being able to use his position to identify the body, he learns that the dead man is his older brother, Frank. Seeing him trying his best to hold back his tears is heartwrenching. It gets even worse when he finds out his mentor killed him and Nicole Wallace, who helped kill Frank, too, in a twisted attempt to "improve" his life.
- "Loyalty":
- The murder of Captain Ross. Making it all the more upsetting is Goren's and Eames's reactions to the murder, especially how it happened only minutes after they had last spoken to him. Rodgers is also very visibly emotional at the crime scene. At one point during his funeral, she's standing by on the fringes of the service, unable to bring herself to attend it.
- Goren and Eames saying goodbye after the latter is forced to fire the former. It's very much a Heartwarming Moment as well, but it's just as likely that many viewers were tearing up right alongside Eames.
- One of the most disturbing is from "Identity Crisis" where a man killed his brother to protect his new life and so he wouldn't have to go to prison for their mother's death. Turns out, the guy wasn't trying to set him up; he reached out because he loved and missed him and wanted to see him again before he died of his terminal cancer. Just before he was taken into custody, Goren explained all this to him and how the man never spent one second of his time served hated his big brother, which made the man cry and immediately regret his actions.
- "Gemini" had a mentally ill man set up by his sociopathic brother to look like a Serial Killer due to his illness and past criminal record. note Upon his own criminal misdeeds being exposed and the man cursing him and calling him a burden, he still has love and forgiveness on his mind, telling him how they're still brothers in spite of all the hell he put him through.
- The saga of reopening the murder of Eames's deceased husband, Joe Dutton, who was killed in the line of duty years earlier. Seeing her in a vulnerable state is not something to be taken lightly (particularly since she is considered less emotionally involved than her partner.)
- "Senseless" had three honor students and overall decent, good kids get shot in the park they used to play at growing up by a sociopathic maniac and two other kids whom the maniac forces to do his dirty work by threatening them. While the two boys are killed execution-style, the girl ends up shot in the stomach and after surviving surgery, it looks like she's going to make it... only for her to suffer from complications and end up dying too. Even worse is that two of the victims were twins, so their parents lost both their children at once.
- There's a specific moment when Logan is talking to the girl and she tells them she doesn't know what the perpetrators said because they were speaking Spanish, but then suggests they ask her brother because he speaks Spanish too. For all they've been working on the case, it hasn't even occurred to them that they'll have to tell this poor girl her brother is dead. (It doesn't actually happen because of the girl's death, but the moment still qualifies.)
- "Untethered" displays how fragile the relationship between Goren and his brother Frank is. After manipulating the detective into saving his previously unknown son, Donny, from a corrupt prison, he goes undercover without authorization, ends up in an isolation room, is nearly starved to death, sent to a disciplinary hearing which ends with him being placed on indefinite suspension, angrily confronts Frank, only to learn that Donny, after escaping by pretending to have a burst appendix, called Frank and told him to get Bobby help, only Frank didn't act on the message, and completely blows off Goren's (entirely justified) anger about this. At the end of the episode, Goren finds himself in Times Square, having been given a false tip that Donny may be there, all alone with his career in ruins and unsure of his next move.
- "Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger" has a few people gunned down in front of their young children. Aside from the senseless nature of the crime, especially upon learning the motive and who did it: a woman who wants to get her own son into a prestigious daycare at the pressure of her mother-in-law and killed the victims simply to get bumped up a few spots on the waiting list. One of the victims' children had also lost their father before she was born and was left an orphan after her mother's murder. It's not the only time in the series that Goren plays a hostage situation to his advantage and then disarms and slams the murderer for their arrest, but, in this case, he has a livid amount of utter contempt after accomplishing it. As he puts it himself about the victims to make it clear how pointless the whole affair was, "they had kids, too."
- "Playing Dead" has a young addict, Stacey Hayes-Fitzgerald, survive gunshot wounds that killed her boyfriend, a fellow addict. Aside from the trauma that she endured from that, now homeless, she has to move back in with her estranged mother, stepfather, and step-grandmother to recover. It eventually comes out that not only did the stepfather molest her throughout her lifetime, but he even raped and impregnated her with her kid sister. After a current-day suicide attempt, she still remains reluctant to go back home, instead lingering by her boyfriend's grave. Even Goren felt that, while her boyfriend was an addict that others looked down upon, he was the only adult in her life who genuinely loved and protected her.
