Gathering the Facts at the Crime Scene

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Recommended: Firearms identification techniques

The excitement of watching a beautiful well-dressed medical examiner or forensic examiner in stiletto heels hovering over a homicide victim is quite thrilling for television. However, in the reality solving homicides is not as one would see on their favorite police show. As mention previous, the intrigue with police shows on television make it difficult to found a jury that have not seen those type show.

Therefore, the court system has a problem obtaining a guilty verdict because jurors wrongfully acquit guilty defendants when no scientific evidence has been presented, as they have seen on television. As Donald Shelton states in “the CSI Effect: Does It Exist” this so-called effect was promptly dubbed the “CSI effect,” laying much of the blame on the popular television series and its progeny (Shelton, 2008, p.2)

Shelton further states that a juror on complain that the prosecution had not done a thorough job because “they didn't even dust the lawn for fingerprints.” “Another, prosecutor said that, “jurors expect us to have a DNA test for just about every case and the most advanced technology possible, and expect it to be as it is on television ” (Shelton, 2008, p.2)

Homicide investigations are more wearisome. The investigator work do not play out in reality as it does on CSI Miami, the investigation are often quite long and not solved in a matter of hours as seen on television. Furthermore, as Davies (2008) states investigators in large cities, do have the luxury to work on one case at a time, and for those in smaller jurisdictions, a case a week would be extraordinary (Davies, 2008, p. 246).

In the real world investigators has a challenging task to establish the quilt of an accused person guilt beyond all doubt. In...

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...es Report: A CHALLENGE TO FORENSIC SCIENCE. Criminal Justice, 24(4), 4-11. Retrieved October 17, 2011, from ProQuest Criminal Justice. (Document ID: 1954576801).

Inbau, F. (1999). Firearms identification--Ballistics. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 89(4), 1293-1314. Retrieved October 16, 2011, from Research Library. (Document ID: 51287719).

Layton, J. (2005). How Crime Scene Investigation Works. Retrieved from http://science.howstuffworks.com 13 October 2011.

Saferstein, R., (2011). Criminalistics: An Introduction to Forensic Science for Ashford University, Tenth Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall

Schiro. G. (2001). Collection and Preservation of Blood Evidence from Crime Scenes. http://www.crime-scene-investigator.net/blood.htm

Shelton, D. (2008). The CSI Effect: Does It Really Exist? Retrieved from http://www.nij.gov

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