Each week millions of people around the country watch “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and its spin-offs “CSI: Miami” and “CSI: NY.” I don’t blame them. It’s on television 18 hours a week, on CBS or the syndication networks, Spike and A&E. It’s also some of my favorite television. But today, I am going to tear apart the shows.
I was watching “Good Morning America” and they said that lately anyone who watches the “CSIs” have been dismissed from jury duty. This is also known as the “CSI Effect.” Lawyers and district attorneys feel that if a juror is a fan they will have too high of an expectation for the evidence in a trial. They think a jury will expect to see a piece of evidence that was used in the show and if they do not see that evidence, they will most likely decide on a not guilty verdict.
What I don’t understand is why people would automatically assume that if it’s on television, it has to be real. Yes, some aspects of the shows are similar to reality because they have a real CSI write some parts of the script, however, there are some aspects of the show that do not resemble reality.
Let me start with the evidence. In one of the episodes in the first season of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” two people died from being stabbed by a knife. One of the CSIs, Warrick Brown, played by Gary Dourdan, wanted to find out what kind of knife was used.
To do this, he dumped plaster into the stab wounds. After a few hours, the plaster dried and he removed the plaster from the body and vóila: a perfect mold of the knife.
This is impossible to do. If we were to dump plaster into stab wounds, the plaster would just continue moving in the body. An impression of the knife would be impossible. In other words, there is no “wall” in the body that can stop the plaster from flowing to the rest of the body.
In addition, the shows are unrealistic when it comes to identifying a fingerprint or DNA sample. In the show it can take less than five minutes to run a fingerprint through AFIS, a database for fingerprints, and a DNA sample through CODIS, a database for DNA.
I also noticed that in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” in particular, they do not properly collect evidence. Normally, CSIs would need to be physically covered to prevent cross contamination.
However, the female CSIs on the show would come to crime scenes wearing tank tops with their hair down. In real life this would cause contamination because their skin cells and hair follicles could fall and contaminate the evidence.
I understand that this is just a television show. It’s exactly that, a television show. I don’t understand why people would trust and believe it so much that they would base a real life trial on an episode of “CSI.”
If lawyers and district attorneys continue to dismiss potential jurors because they watch the “CSIs,” there will be no jurors left. I’m not asking for them to make a show that is 100 percent accurate or for everyone to stop watching the show because being an avid fan, I can’t do that myself.
However, I am asking that they stop comparing the evidence collected on television with the evidence collected in reality. If everything on “CSI” was real, real cases would be solved in an hour. Since that is impossible, I suggest that as a society we stop comparing real life with a television show.
Nila Priyambodo, a sophomore journalism major, is news editor of the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at npriyambodo@ulv.edu.
