CSI Episode #814 — “CSI: Drops’ Out”

[rat­ings]
Not too many things that made me laugh this episode.

1) The “GSR” test wherein they used sodium rhodi­zonate on a swab run across the sus­pected shooter’s hand. First of all the sodium rhodi­zonate is a test that looks for traces of lead. The solu­tion starts out slightly orange and It first turns pink/red when lead is present. After the addi­tion of dilute hydrochlo­ric acid it then turns purple/blue to con­firm lead was present. I’m aware of no col­or­less sodium rhodi­zonate reagents that turn instantly blue. For more infor­ma­tion see here. There is a test that does go from col­or­less to blue, but that’s a diphenyl­ben­zi­dine test and it tests for nitrates — which are present in GSR. Smokeless gun­pow­der is made up of nitro-organic com­pounds which will test pos­i­tive for nitrates.

2) When the two fired 38 Special pro­jec­tiles were shown on the com­par­i­son micro­scope, for the life of me it looked like a nose to nose com­par­i­son. I even backed up my DVR to see if I was see­ing what I thought I saw. I could see rifling marks on the pro­jec­tile on the left, but the pro­jec­tile on the right I couldn’t even see rifling marks, let alone the indi­vid­ual stria needed for a proper com­par­i­son analy­sis. For a proper com­par­i­son analy­sis, the pro­jec­tiles must be fac­ing the same direc­tion, not directly towards each other, or away from each other.