ending, it was at least resolved so the family could claim and bury their relative. However, not everyone gets that chance.
Many thousands of bodies remain unclaimed, identified only by a medical examiner’s case number. The public’s expectations are often skewed by the media, and television in particular, which make it seem remarkably simple to track down identities using science. These expectations result from a phenomenon known as the “CSI effect,” an imaginary knowledge of scientific techniques gained from watching fictional television shows including CSI and NCIS . It imbues families of the missing with false hope and drives investigators crazy.
Here is a real case that demonstrates how strong an impact the CSI effect has had on the American criminal justice system. The victim in this case was a tiny woman who managed a small store. A robber entered the empty store as another man left. Once inside, he viciously beat the woman and left her for dead, took the store’s cash, and fled the scene.
The robber was identified in several ways: the man he passed on the way out of the store was a friend of the perpetrator’s family and had known the robber since he was a child. The victim looked at more than two hundred mug shots and picked the same perpetrator named by the witness as her assailant. And when police attempted to arrest the robber, he fled the city, returning months later when he thought things had cooled off. It should have been an open-and-shut case, but it wasn’t. In fact, the case ended with a hung jury and a mistrial.
After court adjourned, police spoke with the jury’s foreman, a construction supervisor who wanted to be a police detective, and, as it turned out, someone who was clearly in the grips of the CSI effect. He said that if the suspect had been in the store, he would have left fingerprints. Since the crime scene technicians didn’t find his fingerprints, he must not have been there.
He learned this from watching cop shows on television and convinced the other jurors he knew best. That jury turned loose a criminal based on an erroneous premise.
But inaccurate portrayals of evidence and how it’s collected make for colorful reading and viewing, so fiction prevails over fact most of the time. In one recent crime drama in which a body was exhumed, the coffin was dug up and opened right in the cemetery by the side of the opened grave. Even worse, a crime scene technician rummaged around inside—no medical examiner, no removal to the medical examiner’s office, no other witnesses, and probably no exhumation order.
Although it’s great to see science get its due on television and many have been inspired to seek scientific careers based on the interest these shows kick up, they do tend to distort reality. For example, the real-life NCIS has more than one lab person, and real labs specialize. One person cannot testify as an expert in firearms and ballistics, chemical analysis, DNA, explosive devices, tool marks, computer forensics, and so on. But much of the public believes one person can do it all.
So science, which now offers so many good and useful tools to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent, also presents valuable approaches to help trace missing persons and link a body to its identity. But there are a multitude of variables when it comes to what it is possible to do and what happens in the make-believe world of fiction, television, and movies.
Because DNA matches take seconds on a television program, viewers confronted with real-life cases expect DNA verification to be instantaneous and always possible. It is not. In fact, even though great strides are made daily to refine and speed up the evidentiary processes, it takes time to do them right. While the wait can be agonizing for families, making a positive identification is more important than making a speedy one.
When an investigator on a television show hacks into a secure federal computer system to search for a
Many thousands of bodies remain unclaimed, identified only by a medical examiner’s case number. The public’s expectations are often skewed by the media, and television in particular, which make it seem remarkably simple to track down identities using science. These expectations result from a phenomenon known as the “CSI effect,” an imaginary knowledge of scientific techniques gained from watching fictional television shows including CSI and NCIS . It imbues families of the missing with false hope and drives investigators crazy.
Here is a real case that demonstrates how strong an impact the CSI effect has had on the American criminal justice system. The victim in this case was a tiny woman who managed a small store. A robber entered the empty store as another man left. Once inside, he viciously beat the woman and left her for dead, took the store’s cash, and fled the scene.
The robber was identified in several ways: the man he passed on the way out of the store was a friend of the perpetrator’s family and had known the robber since he was a child. The victim looked at more than two hundred mug shots and picked the same perpetrator named by the witness as her assailant. And when police attempted to arrest the robber, he fled the city, returning months later when he thought things had cooled off. It should have been an open-and-shut case, but it wasn’t. In fact, the case ended with a hung jury and a mistrial.
After court adjourned, police spoke with the jury’s foreman, a construction supervisor who wanted to be a police detective, and, as it turned out, someone who was clearly in the grips of the CSI effect. He said that if the suspect had been in the store, he would have left fingerprints. Since the crime scene technicians didn’t find his fingerprints, he must not have been there.
He learned this from watching cop shows on television and convinced the other jurors he knew best. That jury turned loose a criminal based on an erroneous premise.
But inaccurate portrayals of evidence and how it’s collected make for colorful reading and viewing, so fiction prevails over fact most of the time. In one recent crime drama in which a body was exhumed, the coffin was dug up and opened right in the cemetery by the side of the opened grave. Even worse, a crime scene technician rummaged around inside—no medical examiner, no removal to the medical examiner’s office, no other witnesses, and probably no exhumation order.
Although it’s great to see science get its due on television and many have been inspired to seek scientific careers based on the interest these shows kick up, they do tend to distort reality. For example, the real-life NCIS has more than one lab person, and real labs specialize. One person cannot testify as an expert in firearms and ballistics, chemical analysis, DNA, explosive devices, tool marks, computer forensics, and so on. But much of the public believes one person can do it all.
So science, which now offers so many good and useful tools to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent, also presents valuable approaches to help trace missing persons and link a body to its identity. But there are a multitude of variables when it comes to what it is possible to do and what happens in the make-believe world of fiction, television, and movies.
Because DNA matches take seconds on a television program, viewers confronted with real-life cases expect DNA verification to be instantaneous and always possible. It is not. In fact, even though great strides are made daily to refine and speed up the evidentiary processes, it takes time to do them right. While the wait can be agonizing for families, making a positive identification is more important than making a speedy one.
When an investigator on a television show hacks into a secure federal computer system to search for a
Similar Books
