After a young woman is battered to death, the mentally retarded Gary Patterson confesses and the police consider the case solved. However, Gary later withdraws his confession, leaving Judge Deed's court struggling with limited evidence.Meanwhile, Deed is also busy looking into a case about a multi-million pound mortgage fraud and comes up against a masonic conspiracy. The fraud case is due to go before a brother judge who himself proves to be implicated, and who commits suicide. In Deed's own court, the jury finds Gary Patterson not guilty, Deed asks who the killer was, and Gary says he witnessed the killing and knows the answer.

Deed gets angry when a brother judge deals leniently with a man convicted of political offences from whom the judge has had certain favours. He makes an accusation of corruption, despite Jo's misgivings.Meanwhile, Jan Dobbs is in Deed's own court charged with murder, and the hit-and-run case from the previous episode is still not concluded. Of course, the bigwigs of the legal profession are still busy scheming to marginalize both Deed and Jo Mills.

Jo Mills was planning to take time off work, but then she agrees to defend a man who escaped trial sixteen years before after he was charged with attempted murder. Jo is partly attracted to the case because she recognizes two of the detectives who are mixed up in it.

Deed has three drug-dealers in his court accused of a vicious gang killing, and he comes under pressure from government law officers to hear the case without a jury. A witness is killed, and the jury starts to melt away. If the case is abandoned, the dead witness's evidence will be lost, but Deed wrestles with his conscience over setting what to him would be a terrible precedent. Meanwhile, Jo's application to adopt Michael is turned down by the Adoption Panel, who feel she is too busy with her legal career to look after a child. Deed encourages Jo to challenge the Panel's decision in the High Court.

Deed has the case before him of a man charged with killing a paedophile, but the jury find the defendant not guilty. After his acquittal, the man calls a press conference and sends out a message calling for similar actions elsewhere. Meanwhile, Marc Thompson, Michael's real father, arrives in England from overseas. This seems to end Jo's hopes of adopting Michael, but she starts dating the new arrival, sending Deed into a jealous rage. Deed then unwisely starts a new affair with a woman appearing in his court as a claimant in an action, and Jo decides to move with Marc to South Africa.

Deed's fling with a woman claimant in his court gets him into hot water. His brother judges are appalled, and Deed finds himself exiled to Warwick.Meanwhile, Jo is sitting as a judge in a trial in which a company secretary is accused of stealing more than four million pounds from the arms king Sir Tim Listfield. Allegations are made during the trial about senior politician Neil Haughton, the close friend of Deed's former wife Georgina - Haughton is said to have taken bribes to over-pay on government defence work. Jo is threatened, and Deed comes home to help her.

Deed has an environmental case before him, in which a company operating a large-scale waste incinerator is accused of damaging people's health by air pollution. Jo Mills represents the parents of a damaged child, but is losing. Then it comes out that the company deliberately hid a fault at the incinerator which made its emissions far worse. Meanwhile, Rufus Barron comes up with evidence to support the claim that Neil Haughton took a bribe on a defence contract. Then the evidence is lost, and Haughton demands that Deed should be impeached for unprofessional conduct.

An angry contestant in a TV show kills another competitor on camera, and the show's producers face charges of manslaughter in Deed's court. Meanwhile, Deed is pressing for an inquiry into the death of Rufus Barron, a man who had been accused of embezzling money from his employer, the arms dealer Sir Tim Listfield. Sir Tim becomes violent when Deed keeps questioning the 'accident' which killed Barron.

Deed questions an unpleasant prison officer closely about the death of Paul Settle, a young prisoner who was stabbed to death and then partly eaten by his cell-mate Ben Bradwell just a week before he was due to get out.

The Judge is worried that Settle was black, while Bradwell was known to be a vicious racist. In another case, Deed comes up with a thoughtful sentence for a drunk driver who killed a child.

Meanwhile, Deed and Jo seem to be growing apart.

In a case in Deed's court, his daughter Charlie is the junior counsel defending Henry Free - an animal rights activist charged with murder after a fire-bomb at an animal research unit killed an eminent scientist. Then Henry falls out with his leading counsel and asks Charlie to defend him - but Deed advises her not to. Part of Free's defence is that his group had been infiltrated by an officer of MI5, the British secret service, acting as an agent provocateur, and Deed is angry when Charlie reveals the officer's identity in court.

Meanwhile, Jo is helping and encouraging Charlie - and she is back with her old flame, Marc Thompson. Deed is losing her.

Deed has to judge a case concerning Jo's boyfriend, Marc Thompson. Marc wants to take the decision not to resuscitate a two-year old patient at his hospital who has a weak heart and is in a coma, if the child's heart stops again, but the parents disagree.

In another case, Deed has to sentence a young thief, and the youth then dies in custody. All this brings back Deed's memories of his own traumatic childhood. He is spoiling for a fight and argues with Jo - who announces that she has decided to marry Marc.

In court, Deed has to judge the case of a couple who are fighting their local council over a police communications mast on the roof of the building they live in. Gilly Bridges has motor-neurone disease, while her husband Jake has stomach cancer, which they claim are connected with the 'tetra' mast. The incidence of both diseases in the Bridges' block of flats is many times the statistical norm. Jo represents Jake and Gilly Bridges, while Deed's former wife George appears for the defendant council.

Then Deed receives an application from Rose Hussein, the English wife of a former government minister from Iraq. Rose believes depleted uranium used by the British Army in its tank shells killed her family - and she wants the court to establish the facts. Of course, the government doesn't want the case to be heard.

Deed's superiors want him out of the way, and they arrange for him to be called for jury service on a case which will not be over quickly - a murder trial.

In court, a teenage nanny from the Ukraine is accused of killing Baby Jonathan by shaking him, which she denies. As a juryman, Deed wants to see more medical evidence. Then he discovers a cross-over with a case of Jo's, in which she has evidence that the effects of the MMR vaccine could have led to Baby Jonathan's death.

Meanwhile, Marc Thompson is asked to travel to South Africa, to give evidence about its child vaccination program - and Jo begins to have doubts about marrying him. After quarreling with Marc, she starts to see Deed again. But then she also quarrels with Deed, who still seems to have another woman in his life - one of his fellow judges.

In Deed's court, Jo Mills acts for a mother whose former husband, Paul Robson-Alan, wants their baby to be given the 'MMR' vaccination. Robson-Alan is a British Government health adviser, and the outcome of the case is important to the political credibility of the Health Department. But Paul's ex-wife, Marika, believes the MMR jab is dangerous - and some dramatic new evidence is produced on that.

Meanwhile, Jo's wedding to Marc is still on, but she is so busy that she forgets to turn up for the rehearsal of the service. Jo is angry with Deed when he forces her to attend a legal meeting on the morning of the wedding itself. Will she get to the altar on time, and will she go through with it?

Deed's involvement in the case of a far-right British National Party councilor brings him to the notice of terrorists who decide to send a woman to kill him. When the assassin meets Deed, she has a surprise in store, but she still plans to carry out her orders.

Meanwhile, The Lord Chancellor sends Deed to sit on an International Tribunal in the Hague, as the British government sees him as a mischief maker at home. Deed finds himself judging the case of a British soldier accused of war crimes by killing eleven Iraqi civilians.

Continuing the story of a war crimes trial in The Hague. Deed finds the defendant is a victim of the British government's attempts to develop an exit strategy out of the continuing occupation of Iraq by western forces, and he has to balance the interests of justice against the possibility of saving British lives.

Deed risks a constitutional crisis in pursuit of justice for a soldier?s family. Jo Mills asks him to review the withdrawal of Legal Aid funding in the case of the soldier, who committed suicide after being made ill by vaccines given to him by the British Army. Deed is reluctant, as the case has been heard and closed by another judge. His only course is to accuse the other judge of bias. When he does so, he causes consternation in the British government.

Deed delves deeper into why funding for the soldier to sue the pharmaceutical company was withdrawn and makes ever more sinister discoveries. Then the forces of reaction move to stop him.