CSI Episode # 817 — “For Gedda”

(3 votes, aver­age: 5.00 out of 5)
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I will try not to put too many spoil­ers in this par­tic­u­lar review, but if you haven’t seen the episode, please don’t con­tinue read­ing. For those of you who are going to read any­way, but didn’t see the episode, a good review is located here.

The bulk of the episode cen­tered around a CSI being inves­ti­gated for a homi­cide. The pulled in the day shift CSIs, so there wouldn’t be as much conflict/emotional attach­ment to the sus­pect. Of course the day shift got it all wrong, and it was up to Grissom and the night crew to fig­ure out what really hap­pened. Even the sus­pected CSI admit­ted the evi­dence all pointed to him.

Since the night crew didn’t believe their friend could be guilty of the crime, they took it on them­selves to look back over the evi­dence, and per­form fur­ther exper­i­ments in order to show the day crew got it wrong. If the sus­pect wasn’t a CSI, he would never have had the “state” look back over the evi­dence and catch the mis­takes the orig­i­nal crew made, he would have just been charged and found guilty of homicide.

This was the most faci­nat­ing part of the case to me. The idea that another team of CSIs would be allowed to look over the evi­dence — I just don’t see it hap­pen­ing in real life (but then this is a TV show).

Real life exam­ple. I’m work­ing for a local police depart­ment when there is a request sent in from the county attorney’s office to re-analyze evi­dence processed by another local crime lab. At first the lab admin­is­tra­tion thought it would be fine to help the county attor­neys out, but quickly saw the error in their ways. The county attor­neys office said they didn’t have faith in the results of the other crime lab (for a par­tic­u­lar type of analy­sis). Then end result would have been (most likely) two results with the same con­clu­sion, but now the defense can point out that the county attor­ney had it re-analyzed because THEY didn’t even have faith in the orig­i­nal analy­sis. At worst there would have been duel­ing experts and bad blood between two local crime labs. If the county attor­ney wanted to “wit­ness shop”, they need to pay an inde­pen­dent expert to per­form the re-analysis.

So that’s really what ended up sav­ing this CSI from a false homi­cide con­vic­tion, inde­pen­dent re-analysis. This is what defense attor­neys try to do when the case points one way, but the foren­sic results say some­thing else. Remember that while “the evi­dence doesn’t lie”, the evi­dence doesn’t speak either. It’s up the foren­sic exam­iner to speak for the evi­dence, and a foren­sic exam­iner is human and capa­ble of mistakes.