After a call girl is found dead in a skip, an Arab sheikh's chauffeur is charged with killing her, but the evidence points to the sheikh himself being involved in the murder. Unfortunately for Deed, the Arab ruler was in London to place a huge order with a British aircraft manufacturer, and pressure is piled on Deed by the British government, as well as by the sheikh's own. The plot thickens when counsel for the prosecution is also killed and Deed's lover, Jo Mills, takes over the case, and when he hears that Georgina Channing, his former wife, is engaged to marry Neil Haughton, the government minister fighting for the aeroplane order. Before long, witnesses disappear and the jury is being interfered with - by the British Government, no less. And then Deed gets an offer they think he can't refuse, when appointment as an Appeal Court judge is dangled before him.

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 rekindles his old love affair with Francesca Rochester, and at first he fails to notice that she is making use of him in a struggle with her dotty aunt for power over a property and publishing empire. Francesca's husband Ian and another enemy set out to undermine the Judge's credibility, aiming to have him removed from office.In court, Deed is busy presiding over a murder trial in which a young lawyer and his brother and sister are charged with conspiring with a burglar to kill their parents. Meanwhile, the judge's student daughter Charlie has got herself pregnant by a married lecturer at her college. Charlie's mother persuades her to have an abortion, which Deed is against, but he finds out about it too late. We discover that Deed bitterly regrets Jo's decision years before to abort his own child.

Deed has to give judgement in a court battle between a child and his parents. Jason Powell (who is represented by Jo Mills) has heart disease, and the doctors say his only hope of life is in a heart transplant - but he refuses to agree to the operation. His parents want the court to rule against an interim injunction supporting Jason, who clearly understands the risks he faces and who has a good legal case to decide for himself. His parents, Mel and Andy, plead for the heart transplant, and Deed lifts the injunction... but then Jason dies on the operating table, after spending his last moments pleading with the surgeons not to go against his wishes... Meanwhile, Deed's own life is running no more smoothly. Both he and Jo are accused of serious misconduct when she spends the night in his chambers...

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 presides over a murder trial. An old man suffering from cancer died from a morphine overdose, and his attractive young woman doctor has been charged with murder, on the accusation of the dead man's niece. The doctor is acquitted, following a patholigist's evidence that the cause of death was beta blockers in the medication building up in the old man's liver, so the increase in dose from 50mg to 200mg had not affected the outcome... But then the doctor comes to Deed and confesses that she intended to kill her patient. When the Lord Chancellor's Department gets wind of this development, they suggest Deed was sleeping with the doctor - but with Jo's help, he is able to neutralize this threst.

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 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.

Romero, a serial rapist sentenced by Deed to twelve years imprisonment, is out on parole after serving eight years. As a sex offender, Romero has had a rough time inside and he plans to get even with the Judge who sent him down. After harassing Deed himself, Romero turns his attentions to the judge's daughter Charlie.

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 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.

Deed presides over the murder trial of Maurice Hart, a black defendant who shot and killed the driver of a van which ran over and killed Hart's daughter in a hit and run accident. At the same time, the judge is keen to investigate Hart's attractive defence counsel more closely, and he also jousts over the case with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at a London fencing club. Of course, Deed undertakes these misdemeanours against his professional code in supposedly good causes. These include helping his student daughter Charlie to protest against genetically modified crops (and springing her from the cells when she is arrested) and working out how to free his vigilante defendant.

Deed presides over the case of a young man's death on a building site, in which the well-connected construction company boss is trying to lay the blame on his employees. Deed's determination to get at the truth is strangely unwelcome to the Lord Chancellor's department. At the same time, Charlie Deed is getting herself into hot water by 'liberating' a dog from a laboratory in the name of animal rights. With the police hot on her trail, Charlie adroitly dumps the dog on Deed and a blackmailer gets to work.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Jo Mills leads for the prosecution and Brian Cantwell for the defence when a British member of parliament, Alan Roxborough, is tried on a charge of attempting to murder his boyfriend with a frying pan. As usual, there is a conspiracy in the background to pervert the course of justice, which may be connected to Roxborough's opposition to certain British arms deals.Meanwhile, Deed goes into therapy and has a brief affair with his therapist.

A charismatic MI5 informer appears in Deed's court charged with battering his wife, and the judge comes under pressure from on high to let him off, as he is an important source of information about 'The Real IRA'. In a second case, three men are accused of using Rohypnol to carry out a date rape, and a pushy young defence counsel rubs the judge up the wrong way.Outside court, Deed flirts with Francesca, a publisher who is married to his antagonist Ian Rochester: their resulting short affair is caught on camera, and a jealous husband is quickly looking for revenge.

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.

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 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.

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.

The case of Diana Hulsey, a single mother with terminal brain cancer who is suing a telephone company, is concluded in Deed's court. The Establishment dreads a verdict in Diana's favour, and Ian Rochester is yet again out to discredit the judge before he can deliver judgement. Rochester conspires with the phone company to accuse Deed of possessing child pornography, and Deed has to work out what to do when he finds it on his laptop.Meanwhile, Jo faces a conundrum when Diana asks her to look after her seven-year-old son when she is dead, which could be at any moment.