Jack McCoy - Personality

Personality

While his is a brilliant legal mind, McCoy has more than a few personal demons. The episode "Aftershock" reveals that he was abused by his father, an Irish Chicago policeman who had also beat Jack's mother, and who eventually died of cancer. In the same episode, McCoy says that his determination and unyielding work ethic are a byproduct of having been harshly punished by his father for losing at anything. He also revealed that his father was a racist who once hit him for dating a Polish girl.

McCoy has been divorced twice (one ex-wife having been a former assistant) and has an adult daughter, Rebecca. A gossip columnist writes that McCoy has not seen or spoken to his daughter since 1997, and McCoy receives an envelope containing pictures of his daughter. He does not open the envelope; rather, he places it in his bottom left desk drawer, next to a bottle of Jim Beam. In "Fallout", the last scene shows McCoy meeting his daughter at a restaurant. During a conversation with (fictional) New York Governor Donald Shalvoy in the Season 18 episode "Personae Non Grata", he mentions Rebecca has taken a job in San Diego, and that she drove up to Los Angeles to meet him there for dinner while he was attending a conference on official business; the governor uses this to try to smear McCoy, wrongly implying that he used public funds to visit Rebecca. In the Season 20 episode "Dignity", McCoy mentions to ADAs Michael Cutter (Linus Roache) and Connie Rubirosa (Alana De La Garza) that his daughter either is pregnant or is a mother, thus making him soon to be or already a grandfather.

McCoy has a reputation for having romantic affairs with his ADAs. Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy) mentions this when they first meet; he tells her he has had affairs with only three of his ADAs, but by the end of the episode she realizes that he has only had three female ADAs before her. In the episode "Scoundrels", McCoy reveals that Sally Bell, a recurring defense attorney played by Edie Falco, had been one of those ADAs. Kincaid initially makes it clear that she is not interested in a romantic relationship, and McCoy agrees to her stipulation. However, it is later revealed that they have indeed had an affair. Kincaid is killed in a car accident just as their affair is beginning to unravel, a source of ongoing pain for McCoy. Defense attorneys have used this against him. Since Kincaid's death, McCoy has kept his relationships with assistants professional, although he nurtures friendships with all of them.

McCoy's affairs with his ADAs have often had explosive consequences. For instance, his former ADA Diana Hawthorne, with whom he had a sexual relationship, was found to have suppressed evidence so they could win several cases. In one such case, Hawthorne engineered a defendant's wrongful conviction for several murders.

In "House Counsel", McCoy tries to prosecute Vincent Dosso, an organized crime figure, for bribing and murdering a jury member. Dosso's lawyer, Paul Kopell, went to law school with McCoy and proves to be equally aggressive in his approach to his work. As Kopell repeatedly stymies McCoy's prosecutorial efforts, McCoy takes the position that Kopell is not acting as an independent attorney but as a participant in organized crime, and eventually prosecutes Kopell for conspiracy in the jury member's murder. He tells Kopell's wife that the prosecution is not personal, but she angrily replies that McCoy simply wants the final victory over a rival. By the end of the episode, even though he has won the case, McCoy is so troubled that he does not even want to share an elevator with Kincaid.

While McCoy was not exactly a part of the 1960s counterculture, he did protest against the policies of the Richard Nixon administration, particularly the Vietnam War. In 1972, he published an article in the New York University Law Review in defense of Catholic priests who had been opposed to the conflict. He does retain some of the wild streak from his youth: he is a huge fan of punk rock bands like The Clash and he drives a Yamaha motorcycle.

Unlike his predecessor Ben Stone, McCoy embraces the option of the death penalty, claiming it is a suitable punishment for particularly heinous crimes and a useful threat in plea bargaining. This often leads to heated arguments with his more liberal colleagues. In "Savages", when the death penalty has just been restored in New York State following the election of Governor George Pataki, Kincaid asks McCoy about the probability of executing an innocent individual. McCoy responds that, with the lengthy prosecution process and opportunities for the defendant to appeal the verdict, the probability of wrongful execution is unlikely. Kincaid asks McCoy if he is able to accept the probability of "unlikely"; his hesitation indicates clearly that he has never considered the possibility. In later seasons, his view towards the death penalty has apparently changed: in Season 18's "Executioner", he is deeply troubled hearing of a gruesomely botched execution in South Carolina, and in Season 20's "Four Cops Shot", he resists efforts by a U.S. Attorney to prosecute a suspect in the murder of a police officer under a federal death penalty statute.

He has shown mercy on occasion, such as the 1997 episode "Burned" in which he prosecutes a boy with bipolar disorder for murdering his sister. The boy's grandfather (Robert Vaughn), a wealthy CEO (and good friend of Schiff's) who also proved to suffer from the disorder, had attempted to get his grandson to plead guilty and go to jail rather than plead insanity and be committed to a mental institution, fearing that a public revelation of the boy's illness would provide enough evidence to reveal his own illness and affect his reputation. McCoy leads the effort to prevent an unjust punishment for the boy.

McCoy was raised Catholic but does not appear to be in practice, and has not been for some time. In the episode "Angel", it is revealed that McCoy was educated by the Jesuits. In the Season 17 episode "Good Faith", he describes himself as "a lapsed Catholic". On several occasions, religion has been the subject of various cases. In the episode "Thrill", in which two teenage boys are accused of killing a man just for fun, McCoy finds his case particularly complicated when one of the suspects confesses the crime to his uncle, a priest. When the confession tape is labeled privileged, McCoy ignores the bishop's request to preserve the sacrament of reconciliation and instead tries to use the tape as evidence. When Detective Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) tries to dissuade McCoy from doing so, reminding him that he is a Catholic, McCoy responds, "Not when I'm at work."

By the episode "Under God", McCoy had particularly soured on the Church. When a man is accused of killing a drug dealer who killed the man's son, a priest confesses to the crime. Though McCoy personally believes that the priest is covering for the man, he prosecutes the priest instead. At the end of the episode, McCoy says that he lost his faith after the death of a childhood friend.