The theory that violence has a genetic link has appeared in two episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999). These episodes are the season 3 episode Inheritance (2001) and the season five episode Hate (2004).
Chris Pollit refers to Lenny Briscoe as "Brylcreem", which is a brand of hair styling products, usually marketed towards men, that originated in Britain. Brylcreem ads originated the famous line, "A Little Dab'll Do Ya!"
Briscoe retorts to Chris Pollit: "Okay, Kreskin, how did you know he was on the Upper East Side?" Briscoe was referring to The Amazing Kreskin (born George Joseph Kresge Jr.), a popular TV personality in the 1970s. He worked as a magician and mentalist but never called himself a psychic, but often when people claim to have psychic powers they're jokingly referred to as "Kreskin" or "The Amazing Kreskin".
Schiff refers to Gary Gilmore and Westley Dodd in his argument with Stone. Both were convicted of multiple murders and were executed by their choice of method; Gilmore by firing squad in Utah and Dodd by hanging in Washington state.
This episode appears to be based on several cases/incidents:
- The 1993 Eric Smith case. Smith, at the age of thirteen, killed a four-year-old child, Derrick Robie, in Steuben County, New York, on August 2, 1993. Smith was convicted of second-degree murder in 1994 and sentenced to the maximum term then available for juvenile murderers: a minimum of nine years to life in prison Smith was paroled in October 2021, after 27 years in prison.
- The 1989 Craig Price case. Price was an American serial killer who committed his crimes in Warwick, Rhode Island between the ages of 13 and 15. He was arrested in 1989 for four murders committed in his neighborhood: a woman and her two daughters that year, and the murder of another woman two years earlier.
- The 1968 Mary Bell case, in which 11-year old Bell strangled two toddler boys to death, whom she was babysitting in North East England.
- The 1971 Willie Bosketis case. Bosketis is an American convicted murderer, whose numerous crimes committed while he was still a minor led to a change in New York state law, so that juveniles as young as 13 could be tried as an adult for murder and would face the same penalties. He has been in either prison or reformatories for all but 18 months since 1971, and has spent all but 100 days of his adult life in custody. He is currently serving a sentence of 82 years to life at Wende Correctional Facility.
- The story of Beth Thomas, who became the subject of the documentary Child of Rage (1990).
- The 1976-1977 Gary Gilmore case. Gilmore gained international attention for demanding the implementation of his death sentence for two murders he had admitted to committing in Utah. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia, he became the first person in almost ten years to be executed in the United States. These new statutes avoided the problems under the 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, which had resulted in earlier death penalty statutes being deemed "cruel and unusual" punishment, and therefore unconstitutional. (The Supreme Court had previously ordered all states to commute death sentences to life imprisonment after Furman.) Gilmore was executed by a firing squad in 1977.
- The 1993 appeals waiver of Westley Allan Dodd. In 1989, Dodd sexually assaulted and murdered three young boys in Vancouver, Washington. He was arrested later that year after a failed attempt to abduct a six-year-old boy at a movie theatre. Dodd wrote detailed accounts of his murders in a diary that was found by police. After pleading guilty to the charges of murder, he received the death penalty. After refusing an automatic appeal, he was executed by hanging on January 5, 1993, the first legal hanging in the United States since 1965.
- The debunked XYY syndrome thesis and resulting hysteria allegedly equating the diagnosis to male violent tendencies.
- The controversial debate on the impact of genetic predisposition versus environmental upbringing on the nature of violence.