CSI NY #504 “Sex, Lies, and Silicone”

The capa­bil­i­ties of the NY CSI team con­tinue to amaze me.

This episode cen­ters around a pow­er­ful polit­i­cal “fixer” get­ting killed, and the polit­i­cal fall­out after. Think Jodie Foster’s char­ac­ter in “Inside Job” get­ting killed, and the fear all of her polit­i­cal secrets and dirt get­ting leaked.

Our vic­tim is found with some Japanese syn­thetic skin par­ti­cle stuck in a prong on her bracelet, and her wal­let and Blackberry are found down the street. A sin­gle blond hair is found in her nylons.

The NY team man­aged to get a pic­ture of a pos­si­ble wit­ness from a “Big Brother Camera” down the street from the mur­der. To CSI NY’s credit, the image was at least a lit­tle grainy. Unlike Miami which will usu­ally zoom in enough to be able to read the fin­ger­prints off some­one, and then get an instant AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) hit. I hear next sea­son Miami is going to use a cell­phone snap­shot to “read” someone’s DNA pro­file to get a CoDIS (Combined DNA Index System) hit, but I digress.

Eventually Flack searches the suspect’s house after deliv­er­ing of one of the best lines in CSI his­tory: “That’s why God cre­ated warrants.”

Onto the foren­sic aspects:

1) The syn­thetic skin was found in the victim’s bracelet. It wasn’t amaz­ing enough that the mate­r­ial was iden­ti­fied. No, Adam was expected to fig­ure out “why it was there”! Forensic sci­en­tists don’t do the “why’s”, they do the “what’s”, “where’s” and some­times “how’s”.

If an inves­ti­ga­tor asked me “why” some­thing was found where it was, I’d hand him the report and say, “That’s your job detec­tive. Go out and detect.”

2) The blond hair (later dis­cov­ered to be years old human hair from a corpse, now recy­cled as part of a doll’s wig) pro­vided the CSIs with a DNA pro­file (and of course the patented CSI instant CoDIS hit).

I’m no DNA expert, but I always thought you couldn’t get a DNA pro­file from a hair unless there was a fleshy bulb attached to the root. This is why dur­ing rape inves­ti­ga­tions, inves­ti­ga­tors yank out pubic hair from sus­pects (not cut). They don’t do it JUST to be mean.

3) Based on the iso­topic ratios found in the hair, they were able to deter­mine the per­son at one time attached to the hair had either been in or was from Boston.

What???

Isotopes are the same types of atoms that have dif­fer­ent masses. This means they have the same num­ber of pro­tons and elec­trons, but dif­fer­ing num­ber of neu­trons. While deter­min­ing an iso­topic ratio is rel­a­tively straight for­ward, assum­ing the cor­rect kind of mass spec­trom­e­try is avail­able, it’s the next step of iden­ti­fy­ing where a par­tic­u­lar ratio would occur on the map is a bit of a stretch.

So the amaz­ing CSI NY data­base col­lec­tion can add iso­topic ratios to rare bird fecal mat­ter and endan­gered pri­mate DNA.

I’m not aware of any crime lab that can per­form iso­topic ratio analy­sis to pin­point on a map where some­thing came from.

5) (I’m skip­ping 4 because 3 counts for two). After being beaten up, Hawkes runs bio­log­i­cal evi­dence he col­lected him­self from one of the assailants dur­ing the beat­ing. Analysts gen­er­ally can’t run their “own” sam­ples from when they were vic­tims of a crime. Hurts the image of impar­tial testing.

The only other com­ment I have is that the sus­pect is never going to see the inside of a court­room. Someone is going to make sure he doesn’t tes­tify about what he read from the dead fixer’s pri­vate files. He’s either going to be freed on a tech­ni­cal­ity, par­doned by the gov­er­nor, or end up get­ting killed in jail wait­ing for trial.