#csi effect

A mistrial can occur for several reasons: lack of jurisdiction, incorrect jury selection, a deadlocked or a hung jury,  death or illness of a necessary juror or an attorney, or a fundamental error so prejudicial to the defendant that it cannot be cured by appropriate instructions to the jury.

A mistrial would never occur when the jury say not guilty to the defendant because of a lack of forensic evidence due to the CSI effect. And the defendant couldn’t be tried again because Double Jeopardy prohibits an individual from being tried twice for the same offense.

And then it turns out that Eric Trump was using the teddy bear to smuggle cocaine. Whoopsie.

*

But seriously, I want to highlight not only this cartoon but the entire line of argument behind it and, so far, at least a dozen others. This ‘Unless the evidence is found right away, there is no there there’ argument.

Bullshit. Criminal investigations take time. When you’re talking about corruption or conspiracy or any non-violent crime instead of murder or rape there’s much less emphasis on timeliness. The more complex the crime or series of crimes is, the longer the investigation needs to be.

This is just common sense, but it’s in the interest of the people trying to downplay the story to pretend otherwise. I don’t know if Ramirez et al are motivated by a genuine fondness for Trump or if they just feel the impulse to defend anyone that The Other Side (Democrats) goes after, but they have hitched their wagon to the ‘Russia is a ruse’ train and they need to hope that other people will buy this.

And it might work. Not just because the American public has a short attention span and little to no concern about crimes committed before some arbitrary point in the past, but because TV shows and movies have conditioned us to believe that investigations and trials are a simple A-B-C formula where breakthroughs and progress occur at a consistent rate.

Think of it as the brother of the CSI effect. Call it, I don’t know, the Law & Order effect. The belief that unless new evidence in an investigation is reported at a certain point after the last breakthrough that the story was a false lead all along.

And there are real cases of this. George W. Bush going AWOL for a year or so? That report CBS did was discredited, and people acted as if that meant the entire story was bunk.

Unfortunately, I have to disagree with that publication considering I did my undergrad thesis on how television affects public perception of the criminal justice system. I even used my own experiences in the paper since I was an avid watcher of CSI and alike shows and compared it to my internship at a Sheriff’s Office.

Perry Mason is usuallyconsidered the worst accurate lawyer show, though CSI has a whole phenomenon named after them called the CSI Effect.Just after two years of CSI being onthe air, media outlets began reporting ofthe existence of the “CSI Effect”. The effect being such that frequent viewers of the show CSI and other similar forensic themed television shows, acquire anunrealistic perception of the access and utility of forensic scientificevidence, and they gained a false sense of expertise in the methods thatinvestigators use to solve crimes. Per the National Institute of Justice, jurors expect DNA and fingerprint evidence onevery case presented by the prosecutor and for it to look like TV. When itdoesn’t, jurors are more likely to wrongfully acquit guilty defendants.

The American Bar Association is an organization that strives to advance the field of law and all other fields connected to the law through resources and setting codes of ethics for those who practice law to follow. Their journal, Jurimetrics, showcases...

(more…)

Hello Earthlings!! Watson here with a little bit of a PSA. 

TV really changes public perception on crime scene investigations and forensic science. You beauties all know what I am talking about. The CSI franchise and spin-offs, Criminal Minds, NCIS, Bones, Dexter… there are so many crime shows out there, and they all have unrealistic portrayals of what actually happens in a crime scene. 

I just want to outline some things that crime shows portray that might not be true, and how it can affect a criminal investigation and the trial that comes after. 

The first thing that is problematic is the workload. Most shows have investigators process the crime scene, collect evidences, analyze them, but also conducting raids, pursuit, arrest, interrogation, and solving the crime itself (all within an hour too). Realistically, scene investigators will only investigate the scene, they are not even involved in the analysis of the evidence to help preserve objectivity of scientific evidence (those generally get sent to labs for analysis). CSI personnel definitely have nothing to do with suspect arrest and interrogation, that is all left to uniformed officer and detectives. 

Also crime shows tend to have high-tech magic as science. There are technology and machineries featured in the show that just simply do not exist today. Or if it does, it has unrealistic processing timeline. And when there is a result, TV likes to have absolute certainty while real CSI-ers tends to avoid using “match” to introduce the concept of probability uncertainty. 

“How does the CSI Effect affect real life?” you wonderful people might ask. It influences the standard of proof for prosecutors during a trial. Jurors now demand more forensics evidence, and have unrealistic expectations for the capability of forensic technology. It means that when there are no evidences present, there are higher chance of acquittals. It also means that jurors put a lot more confidence in forensics without understanding the science behind it. This is problematic when expert witnesses do not explain the probability of science failing.