In 2006, over 100 million people in the United States tuned in to watch either CSI or any if the other forensic and criminal investigation related television show each week (CJSG). Since then, the number of viewers has increased rapidly, as well as the amount of television shows with the same type of theme. As a result of the increase of these television programs, researchers are discovering a new phenomenon called the ‘CSI Effect’ that seems to be fueling an interest in forensic science and criminal investigations nationwide. This effect is actually the ability of criminal justice themed television shows to influence and increase victims’, jurors’ and criminals’ ideas about forensics, DNA testing and methods, and criminal investigations (CJSG). Although the connection between the CSI Effect and a criminal’s mind is a growing problem, the CSI Effect influencing jurors in the United States by causing unrealistic expectations for definite forensic evidence, creating an increased ‘knowledge’ about forensic science and by creating an expectation for criminal cases and trials to be equivalent to what happens on popular criminal justice television shows is a much bigger issue.
A juror who has no experience with or background knowledge on the subject of forensic science is a rarity in this day and age. In 2006, 70 million people watched one of the three versions of CSI in one week and 30 million watched the original CSI in one night (Shelton). Thanks to these popular television shows people are beginning to think they have certain knowledge about the way a case should be investigated and what scientific evidence needs to be provided in court. The worst thing about the CSI Effect is that “jurors think they have a thorough understanding ...
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Since the airing of the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the other televised series that followed have led jurors to compare fiction with reality. The shows have changed the view on the real world of forensic science as the series have a world of forensic science of their own. For this paper the televised series titled Bones by forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs will be used as an example for comparison. In the series Bones Dr. Temperance Brenan arrives at the scene of the crime to examine the skeletal remains found in the scene of the crime equipped with one or more forensic kits. Upon momentarily examining the skeletal remains Dr. Brenan is able to determine the gender, ethnicity, and age. When this type of scenario is compared to nonfictional
Jurors have unrealistic ideas of evidence processing. ”Such programs give the impression that forensic laboratories are fully staffed with highly trained personnel, stocked with a full complement of state-of-the-art instrumentation and rolling in the resources to close every case in a timely fashion.” (Houck 85) Forensic laboratories face funding deficits, not enough suitably trained staff and the consistent advancement of technology. University of Maryland forensic scientist Thomas Mauriello estimates that about 40 percent of the forensic science shown on CSI does not exist. Carol Henderson, director of the National Clearinghouse for Science, Technology and the Law at Stetson University College of Law, told a publication of that institution that jurors are “sometimes disappointed if some of the new technologies that they think exist are not used.” (Houck 87) Investigators often have to explain to victims that it is not possible to collect a sample of...
Since its debute, Kimberlianne Podlas discusses how “CSI has been attributed with causing a rash of unjustified acquittals, exerting on trials what is called the CSI Effect.” This refers to how CSI influences or impacts a jury’s interpretation of a case. She goes on to say that, “Even though forensic evidence is prevalent on CSI, it is a factor in only a small portion of real-life cases.” Additionally, “many of the techniques shown on CSI do not exist, and this has led “forensic scientists to complain of the near infallibility of forensic science after watching a few episodes of CSI.” The CSI Effect has caused these viewers of the program, who have gone onto become jurors, to expect the presentation of forensic evidence in order to prove their cases, and without it, they are unlikely to reach a guilty verdict. This has led prosecutors to expect the need to present forensic evidence as a prerequisite to conviction. Even with eyewitnesses and other findings to offset this lack of forensic evidence, many unjustified acquittals have resulted from this mindset as jurors do not believe a case can be proven beyond reasonable
Crime is a common public issue for people living in the inner city, but is not limited to only urban or highly populated cities as it can undoubtedly happen in small community and rural areas as well. In The Real CSI, the documentary exemplified many way in which experts used forensic science as evidence in trial cases to argue and to prove whether a person is innocent or guilty. In this paper, I explained the difference in fingerprinting technology depicted between television shows and in reality, how DNA technology change the way forensics evidence is used in the court proceedings, and how forensic evidence can be misused in the United States adversarial legal system.
In Richards Willing’s “CSI effect” the author tells the reader how, as a result of crime scene shows’ popularity, the misconceptions they create, and the combining of real life events with TV fantasy, crime scene shows have affected jurors and the oucomes of court cases. The shows’ popularity has increased peoples’ interest in forensic science and has caused workers and students to transfer into the field. The second effect crime scenes created is the misconception concerning when to use forensic tests, as well as misconceptions about the speed and accuracy of forensic workers and machines in tracking and identifying the culprit. Willing tells of a murder trial in Arizona in which the defendant’s bloody coat was listed as evidence, but was not tested. Although the defendant had already told investigators that he was at the scene of the crime, with the jacket, jurors asked for forensic DNA evidence linking the defendant to the bloody coat and to the crime scene. The juror’s exposure to crime scene shows had given them knowledge of forensic tests, but not knowledge of the proper use of the tests. Crime scene shows mix real life with TV fantasy. According to willing’s studies, highly attractive forensic workers and stunning suspects, along with very neat crime scenes on crime scene shows deemphasize the real life violence and brutality of crime. Similarly, tv reality shows have influenced people’s ideas about real life and real relationships through the effects of image, misleading information, and popularity.
The book Acquittal by Richard Gabriel states, “juries are the best judges in the system. They are not elected, they don't have the high-powered microscope of appellate review or the stern, disapproving-schoolmarm precedent looking over their shoulder, and they have no interest in the outcome of the case.” For this reason, we can come to the conclusion that the use of juries in a trial is the best for all involved in the legal system. While juries, “are the best judges in the system”, lawyers, jury consultants, and jury scientists are the reasons they are viewed this way. It is their job to make sure that not only their client, but everyone has a fair and unbiased trial.Making sure that “the best judges in the system” are fair and unbiased takes a lot of planning, research, and effort. You must research the jurors, understand how they think, what their morals are, and how they would view this case. “It is a constructed reality, cobbled together by shifting memories of witnesses, attorney arguments, legal instructions, personal experiences, and beliefs of jurors.”(Gabriel
Forensic evidence can provide just outcomes in criminal matters. However, it is not yet an exact science as it can be flawed. It can be misrepresented through the reliability of the evidence, through nonstandard guidelines, and through public perception. Forensic science can be dangerously faulty without focus on the ‘science’ aspect. It can at times be just matching patterns based on an individual’s interpretations. This can lead to a miscarriage of justice and forever alter a person’s life due to a perceived “grey area” (Merritt C, 2010) resulting in a loss of confidence in the reliability of forensic evidence.
Forensic psychology is an area of psychology that has been rapidly gaining popularity in recent years. Entertainment media’s fascination with the intersection of crime and psychology has fueled the growing interest in the field. According to Jane Tyler Ward, PhD, forensic psychology can be defined as psychology that “emphasizes the application of research and experimentation in other areas of psychology to the legal arena.” Although forensic psychology is popular right now, it was not until 1962 that a court case set the precedent that properly trained psychologists could provide expert testimony (Page 20). Additionally, forensic psychology was not APA (American Psychological Association) certified until 2001 (Page 16). The field of forensic
In the following literature review, scholarly and peer-reviewed journals, articles from popular news media, and surveys have been synthesized to contribute to the conversation pertaining to forensics in pop culture in the courtroom and the overall criminal justice system. This conversation has become a growing topic of interest over just the past few years since these crime shows started appearing on the air. The rising popularity of this genre makes this research even more relevant to study to try to bring back justice in the courtroom.
To conclude, the perception of crime is greatly impacted by how media portrays victims of crime, criminals and law enforcement officials are viewed. Often media organisations over-dramatize crime problems to gain consumer attention.
This article questions as to whether jury trials still have the capacity to maintain that those being heard by jury can still have the right to a fair trial. In 2014, a Queensland murder trial was aborted after a juror had admitted to another juror, that they themselves researched the case on Facebook, this shows that jurors who do conduct their own research into cases that they are sitting on can have a detrimental impact on the case. Though jurors conducting their own research is not a modern occurrence, during a UK double-murder trial of 1994, jurors used a Ouija board to contact the victims’ spirits, who had then subsequently informed them that the accused murder was guilty. One of the main reasons as to why the aspects of the crime or the criminal history of the accused is kept hidden from the jury is to prevent the opinions of the jurors from becoming tarnished. Elizabeth Byrnes’ article, Mark Nolan, an associate Professor of Law at the Australian National University believes that there is a real risk of jurors including both inadmissible evidence and admissible evidence that is not known to either the prosecution or the defendant, this would then introduce “[...] inherent injustices and illegalities”.
In recent years, however, such programs as CSI that follows detectives at the Las Vegas Police Department Crime Scene Investigations Bureau as they solve puzzles and catch criminals. Perhaps one of the most well known shows with a forensic psychology theme, CSI has a large impact on viewers perceptions of forensic psychology. On one hand, the increased popularity of forensic psychology because of the show is good and more people are taking an interest in forensic psychology as a career. On the other hand, the forensic psychology that viewers see every week on television may not be exactly the same as forensic psychology in reality. Particularly programs such as CSI also overstate the ability of “hard” evidence (also known as forensic evidence), such as fingerprints and DNA, to provide evidence of definite innocence or guilt (Trask, 2007). They often disregard other components of the investigative process, such as police questioning, despite these being equally valid to establishing guilt (Nolan, 2006). This over-reliance on forensic evidence, due to the importance of forensic science being dramatized by television crime dramas, is also known as the CSI
“South Africa ditched juries amid fears of racial prejudice among jurors and a reluctance on the part of many people to serve” (Fuchs), which most likely brings up the problem we have here in the U.S. Law professor Peter Van Koppen provides a perfect example of a common situation and compares it to our criminal justice system which sums up my stance on the ruling out of jury trials in the U.S., “Van Koppen pointed out that you wouldn 't want a panel of lay people acting as doctors. So, why would you want regular people deciding the fate of defendants? The work done by a jury isn’t that different from the work of a scientist like a doctor, he wrote. ““A scientist must make inferences about states of affairs that cannot be observed directly, inferring from the evidence that can be observed. And that is precisely what a jury must do: make a decision about the guilt of the defendant based on the evidence presented at trial. That is a scientific enterprise that surpasses the intellectual aptitude of most laypersons who are called to jury duty””
Forensic Psychology, which is occasionally referred to as Legal Psychology, originally made its debut in the late 1800’s. A Harvard Professor, Professor Munsterberg, introduced the idea of psychology and law with his book, On the Witness Stand in 1908. Since the inception of the idea of psychology and law there have been proponents, as well as though that have spoken against the theories proposed by Munsterberg’s, along with other scientists, theorists, and psychologists that believed that Forensic Psychology had no standing to be linked to topics of law. This literature review will attempt to identify scholarly articles that trace the origins and the movement that led to Forensics Psychology becoming a specialty within the field of psychology. I will also attempt to explain What is Forensic Psychology as well as the part it plays within the legal system.
Van den Bulck, J. (2004) “Research note” the Relationship between Television Fiction and Fear of Crime” An Empirical Comparison of Three Casual Explanations” European Journal of Communication Vol. 19, Issue 2, p.239-248.