Elizabeth Lederer

Elizabeth Lederer is the Manhattan assistant district attorney assigned to prosecute the Central Park jogger case. She arrives certain of the boys' guilt, moving through precincts and interview rooms with brisk, controlled purpose, treating confessions extracted under pressure as solid ground. She believes she is doing careful, necessary work.

Farmiga plays Lederer's certainty as its own kind of performance — precise, unhurried, never cruel on its surface, which makes it more unsettling than outright malice would be. The show lets her conviction sit unchallenged in these early scenes, and Farmiga never signals doubt, forcing the audience to feel the machinery of the system through her calm.