‘Law & Order: SVU’ season 15 spoilers: An episode with ties to Paula Deen, Trayvon Martin

If there is one franchise that has become notorious in many ways for their “ripped from the headlines”-style episodes, it’s “Law & Order”. Therefore, we’re not exactly shocked at all to find out some of the details about an upcoming episode that may at least draw a certain amount of inspiration from some of these high-profile cases.

According to a new report from TV Guide, Cybill Shepard (most recently of “Psych” and “The Client List”) has been cast to play the part of a Southern restaurant owner in New York City named Jolene Castille, who is being tried for murder after shooting a young black teenager wearing a hoodie. Why did she do it? She knew that the SVU was tracking down a rapist with a similar description, and will claim that it was self-defense rather than anything deliberately out of malice to kill the man.

While there are names and events changed, it’s pretty obvious that this story is basically combining Paula Deen’s racism scandal with the Trayvon Martin trial, and at this point, we’re almost shocked that they didn’t find a way to throw in “Big Brother 15” so that they could have the racism trifecta. Even if there are going to be other differences that will come out of this, we’re not really about blatantly being “inspired” by current events for a fictional show, at least when a man’s death was involved in one of them. There’s a difference between a Paula Deen character and Trayvon Martin, and the trial of the latter is so soon that this may be a little too controversial for our taste.

Photo: NBC