CSI NY Episode # 506 “Enough”

For a more in depth plot review, please read here.

CSI NY has always been my least favorite of the three fla­vors. CSI Las Vegas was the orig­i­nal, and always seemed to be a lit­tle more focused and true to the foren­sic sci­ence. CSI Miami is the “action” based eye-candy ver­sion. With mul­ti­ple inset scenes, CSIs run­ning around with guns, and hi-tech wiz­ardry in place of real foren­sic sci­ence. CSI NY was the more of a gritty cop show with some foren­sics thrown in for extra pizazz.

This episode how­ever was dif­fer­ent. They focused on some real issues fac­ing foren­sic labs, such as bal­anc­ing the bud­get — do we get new equip­ment, or hire new peo­ple (in this episode the man­power ques­tion was brought up by Adam get­ting a pink-slip). Later in the episode Mac is lit­er­ally yelling at the Chief of Detectives for deter­min­ing 7 peo­ple from the crime lab that are going to get the axe due to bud­get rea­sons, with­out con­sult­ing with Mac first. Mac fur­ther goes on to explain to Stella that los­ing Adam has a greater neg­a­tive impact on the city than los­ing those auto­mated DNA ana­lyz­ers the lab has been wait­ing for.

Mac is absolutely right. The last thing a police depart­ment should do dur­ing bud­get cuts is to fire lab work­ers. It takes months/years to get a lab worker trained, and longer still to gain enough expe­ri­ence to be a fully pro­duc­tive mem­ber of the lab. Lab staff are also gen­er­ally trained on a one-on-one basis with senior lab employ­ees, fur­ther adding to the costs asso­ci­ated with train­ing lab­o­ra­tory per­son­nel. Once let go, trained lab­o­ra­tory peo­ple are highly sought after by other crime labs, rather than hav­ing to hire and train some­one from scratch. Police offi­cers on the other hand are trained in bulk, in a mat­ter of weeks, and should be sac­ri­ficed first if peo­ple must be fired due to bud­get reasons.

To briefly sum­ma­rize the episode, a drug related shoot­ing was wit­nessed by a woman. Three drug deal­ers gunned down a man, and Maggie wit­nessed the whole thing. Reluctantly she agreed to give a state­ment to Mac sev­eral months ago, under the promise that she wouldn’t have to tes­tify in court. Mac said based on her infor­ma­tion, he would get enough evi­dence that she wouldn’t have to tes­tify. Fast-forward a while, and she gets a sub­poena from the pros­e­cu­tor in the case. While walk­ing home on night, just days before the trial, Maggie is jumped by the three men on trial, told not to tes­tify, and her faced is carved up to give her a “reminder.” Well Maggie decides she’s going to tes­tify anyway.

A cou­ple of days later, at nearly the same time in three dif­fer­ent loca­tions, each of the three defen­dants is gunned down with the same gun each one had used in the orig­i­nal homi­cide that Maggie witnessed.

It’s then that Mac and team start their investigation.

While inves­ti­gat­ing one of the mur­der scenes, play money is dis­cov­ered. Mac deter­mines the papers are too thin for a board game, and are designed for rolling papers. It looks sim­i­lar to Monopoly money, but appar­ently it is laced with dif­fer­ent types of drugs, depend­ing on the play money denom­i­na­tion. Important for the plot to be sure, but more impor­tantly for me it led to the best one liner all sea­son in any of the CSI fran­chises. Referring to one of the mur­der “vic­tims” Mac holds up a cou­ple of the bills and says it’s “Game Over.” And it cuts to open­ing cred­its. Masterfully done.

And for the first time in CSI episode his­tory, they had me fooled. I was con­vinced it was the broth­ers who killed the three mur­der “victims.”

Forensic points of inter­est this episode:

Broken glass frag­ments from car

Broken glass bot­tles recov­ered from nightclub

National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) entry

Limonene traces on one firearm

Broken glass frag­ments from car:

Glass frag­ments were recov­ered on the ground near one of the “vic­tims” who was shot while in the back seat of his car while actively enjoy­ing the ser­vices of a pros­ti­tute. Stella grabs a rather large piece of glass and cor­rectly iden­ti­fies Heckle marks on the glass. Heckle marks are stress marks cre­ated when a pro­jec­tile per­fo­rates glass. If cre­ates lines that turn 90 degrees in their direc­tion, when look­ing at the cross-section of the glass. The rule is that the side oppo­site of the projectile’s entry side, runs per­pen­dic­u­lar. The prob­lem is that the “vic­tim” was shot through a side win­dow, which due to safety reg­u­la­tions have to be tem­pered glass. Tempered glass breaks up into many, many tiny pieces when it is hit or chipped. While the sci­ence was accu­rate in this case, good luck find­ing a piece of glass that large to work with in real life. Windshield glass sure, but not tem­pered glass.

Broken glass bot­tles recov­ered from nightclub:

The bro­ken glass bot­tles from the night­club shoot­ing needed to be reassem­bled before latent print or DNA exam­i­na­tion could be per­formed. To do so, Adam put the glass frag­ments onto a stan­dard flatbed doc­u­ment scan­ner. The scan­ner “reads” in the glass frag­ments (in 3-D mind you on a sin­gle pass) and then piece by piece tells Adam what pieces to glue together in the cor­rect order to recon­struct the bot­tle. Amazing! They must have had an extra one of these devices lay­ing around in Miami and shipped it up to New York.

National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN) entry:

Since we didn’t end up with an instant DNA hit this episode, we opted for choice num­ber two, a NIBIN hit. The actual process for enter­ing a pro­jec­tile into NIBIN take a bit of time, at least 5 min­utes with a skilled oper­a­tor. During this process mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal pho­tographs are taken of each land impressed area on the pro­jec­tile. Those pho­tographs are then uploaded, and after a few hours (up to 4) a search result will return with a list of pos­si­ble matches. This cor­re­la­tion list must be looked at by a trained per­son, to deter­mine if there is a hit or not. Unlike the manufacturer’s lit­er­a­ture, the oper­a­tor needs to look at least to cor­re­la­tion can­di­date #50 to be remotely sure they don’t miss a match. Needless to say that 5 min­utes of entry, can lead to 30 min­utes of view­ing the cor­re­la­tion list, for each pro­jec­tile entered.

The hit rate for pro­jec­tiles nation­ally is some­where under 1%. Less than 1% of pro­jec­tiles entered into the sys­tem actu­ally result in a hit. The hit rate for car­tridge cas­ings is roughly ten times are much, and the amount of time for entry, and cor­re­la­tion list review is sig­nif­i­cantly less. The end result is that nearly all labs have stopped enter­ing pro­jec­tiles into the NIBIN sys­tem, as the return on the invested labor is so little.

Damaged pro­jec­tiles (like those recov­ered from bod­ies for exam­ple) are even more dif­fi­cult to enter into the sys­tem, and “pris­tine” test fires are pref­er­en­tially cho­sen to enter into the sys­tem. The sys­tem doesn’t com­pare test fires to other test fires. It will com­pare test fires to evi­dence pro­jec­tiles, and evi­dence pro­jec­tiles to evi­dence pro­jec­tiles, but in this episode the log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of events would have been that the sys­tem com­pared test fires to test fires.

In this case, all 3 firearms had pro­jec­tiles pre­vi­ously entered into the sys­tem, and the sys­tem was able to quickly match things up to the right firearm quickly. Not likely. Unlike other com­par­a­tive foren­sic dis­ci­plines, firearms iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is still very much a prac­tice per­formed by humans because the com­puter tech­nol­ogy just isn’t there yet.

Limonene traces on one firearm:

Lindsay gets the bright idea to swab one of the firearms and ana­lyze the swab for trace evi­dence. OK I’ll let that one slide. Generally we don’t see any such ini­tia­tive from lab work­ers, but regard­less, her inquiry nets us some impor­tant infor­ma­tion. One of the revolvers in the case has traces of Limonene on it. Limonene is a chem­i­cal com­monly found in cit­rus fruits, wood pol­ish, and appar­ently pesticides.

Initially the team assumed one of the shoot­ers was Kevin, Maggie’s brother who works with fruit. But all three brother had good alibi’s for the time of the murders.

It’s then that Mac remem­bered that one of the lawyers had recently had his offi­cer sprayed with pes­ti­cides to com­bat his roach prob­lem. It turns out the three lawyers rep­re­sent­ing the three “vic­tims” shot and killed their own clients. The clients had safely given the weapons they used in the orig­i­nal homi­cide that Maggie wit­nesses to their lawyers. That way the guns wouldn’t ever be recov­ered, and the lawyers couldn’t turn in the firearms or tell on their clients due to con­fi­den­tial­ity requirements.

But when Maggie got cut up, the lawyers had enough. They took mat­ters into their own hands and shot and killed their clients with the client’s own guns.

No con­fes­sions were made, and we were left with the impres­sion that the lawyers were going to work the sys­tem and get off scot-free.

We ended up with an episode that per­fectly bal­anced a crime-drama show with enough foren­sic bits to keep it inter­est­ing.  As always the “Hollywoodization” of the foren­sic aspects are in place to keep the episode mov­ing for the TV audi­ence.  If inves­ti­ga­tors had to wait hours or weeks for foren­sic results to be com­pleted, it would hardly be the same show.

This episode also showed Mac being a car­ing super­vi­sor.  It’s very rare that pub­lic employ­ees are actu­ally fired due to bud­get rea­sons, but it’s hap­pened before in the past.  The state of Oregon cleared out many of their crime lab peo­ple a few years ago in the post 9/11 bud­get crunch many gov­ern­ments faced.  It helped the state in the short run, but in the long run it’s going to make it hard for the state to replace lab peo­ple.  The foren­sic sci­ence com­mu­nity is rel­a­tively small, and there is a lot of net­work­ing that goes on, both for case con­sul­ta­tion rea­sons, as well as ques­tions about where are good places to work.  Experienced lab peo­ple are going to be a lit­tle cau­tious when con­sid­er­ing going to work in places that are known to axe peo­ple.  Which means such places will have to hire brand new peo­ple and train them, turn­ing them­selves into a “train­ing lab.”  Those peo­ple who are trained very often imme­di­ately start look­ing to work for other labs that are pay­ing a lit­tle more, but don’t have to pay the high price of train­ing new people.