The CSI Effect Essay Example for Free

The CSI Effect Essay Many T. V shows come on and influence the public that the things that take place on these shows are real. There is Law in Order SVU, 24, Bones and our favorite CSI that make people think that countless cases are open and close do to outrageous finding of DA traces. The CSI Effect is a theory that criminals are getting smarter. These shows give out numerous tactics on how many cases are cracked and suspects are arrested. The CSI Effect also results in various hang juries and miss trials due to lack of evidence. The jury is starting to need more evidence, because the influence they have from watching these television shows. I have seen a show on television called CSI Miami. On this particular show, there was a murder-taking place with no clue at all, on who committed the crime. They had recovered some DA, but there were no past data to make a match on a suspect. The detectives had someone in question on who it might be but no evidence to hold him to the crime. Out of nowhere, one of the detectives on the case was talking to the man in question and somehow saw up his nose a dot of blood no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. He then grabbed a q-tip and told the man to stand steal while he dug up his nose to retrieve the DA. The DA sample was too small to test, so they sent it out to the FBI who has a glucose blood enhancer to stretch the DA enough to run the match. Of course, the DA was a match. The show then goes off and another bad person offs the street. This story is what is changing the minds of criminals and way of thinking. Criminals are starting to clean their tracks. Detectives are closing in on criminal and finding that they are cleaning the whole crime scene. Once entering a house the place is washed down in bleach to cover all traces of DA. Some rapist are wearing condoms and making their victims take baths to clean off all traces of the criminal’s DA. Criminals are also taking extra measures to wear gloves and masks so they cannot be seen or leave any fingerprints. They are taking more precaution on having an alibi stating they were never around when the crime took place. The theory is that criminals are watching these shows and learning on how to maintain a criminal life style without being locked up. These shows are making the police jobs much harder to apprehend suspects. Another default with this CSI Effect is that it is making the courts harder the sentence criminals. Juries are starting to want more evidence from prosecutors and DA matches to prove the defendant’s guilt. There was a case with two detectives shot and killed in an undercover gun deal. On the evening of March 10, 2003, two New York Police Department detectives, James V.  Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews, were shot and killed in an unmarked police car while attempting an undercover purchase of a Tec-9 assault pistol on Staten Island. The case was significant not just because two officers had died but because the man who was eventually charged with the murders, Ronell Wilson, faced the possibility of becoming the first person in more than fifty years to be executed for a crime in New York State. The government’s theory was that Wilson, who was with an accomplice in the back seat of the car, shot the detectives during a robbery attempt. Among the evidence retrieved from the crime scene were hundreds of hairs and fibres, and prosecutors enlisted Lisa Faber, a criminalist and the supervisor of the N. Y. P. D. crime lab’s hair-and-fibre unit, to testify at Wilson’s trial, last winter. Under questioning in Brooklyn federal court, Faber said that she had compared samples of fabric from the detectives’ car with fibres found on gloves, jeans, and a baseball cap that Wilson had allegedly been wearing on the night of the crime. The prosecutor asked Faber to describe the methods and equipment she had used to make her analysis. Then she asked Faber what she had found. â€Å"My conclusion is that all of those questioned fibres could have originated from the interior of the Nissan Maxima, from the seats, and/or the backrests,† Faber said. She added that in her field â€Å"the strongest association you can say is that ‘it could have come from’ † the source in question. Faber’s testimony was careful and responsible—and not very significant. She could not say how common the automobile fabric that she had examined is, or how many models and brands use it. Nor could she say how likely it was that the fabric from the car would show up on Wilson’s clothes. Faber used no statistics, because there was no way to establish with any precision the probability that the fibres came from the detectives’ car. DNA tests had proved that blood from one of the detectives was on Wilson’s clothes, and based on this fact, as well as on testimony from his accomplice and from Faber, Wilson was convicted and sentenced to death. â€Å"Given how much evidence they had in the case, I wasn’t crucial,† Faber told me. The prosecutors liked the idea of fibre evidence in addition to everything else. Maybe they thought the jury would like it because it was more ‘CSI’-esque. †(thecsieffect) The fibres could have come from a different car and was not enough proof to prove the case, but due to the television show like CSI and others. The jury thought of the evidence as an open and shut case. Later on there was a sur vey taking asking were the decision that the jury gave influence by CSI and most of the jury said yes. This was a case were the prosecutors took a gamble and won. Most cases do not end like this. Most case there is not enough evidence to back up the case. The CSI Effect is only a theory, which means there are not enough facts to back up this case but enough intelligence for some facts to stand. For every sentence that is handed out because of evidence pointing in the direction of guilty, another case is a not guilty verdict due to lack of evidence. Some may say that television hit show CSI is the cause, but some may say that it is not the case. I say, with great detective work and as much evidence that one can gather, this CSI theory would not even be up for debate.