This is what happened in a Massachusetts crime lab, where chemist Annie Dookhan was accused of identifying samples based on what they were suspected to be, rather than running tests to determine what they were, and even of adding cocaine and heroin to samples so that they would test positive. Dookhan was sentenced to three to five years in prison, and many of the drug cases she was a lab technician for are likely to be thrown out, as any samples she could have tampered with cannot be retested.
So far, of the 34, cases she worked on over the 8 year period, more than have been dismissed. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal , in there were homicides alone in Las Vegas, which would leave hundreds of unsolved crimes a year.
Which brings us to the next major point of contention: the technology. While many of the instruments used and tests performed on samples are real, their uses and results are often overly simplified.
For one thing, as wonderful as modern technology is, it still takes time to run tests on samples. In fact, many instruments typically take minutes, not seconds, to test a single sample. Additionally, some tests take longer due to the number of tests requested daily; for instance, DNA can take weeks to identify due to backlogs of evidence.
Most instruments produce some form of a graph, which means reading the results also takes expert knowledge.
As a result, the show contains many gross simplifications. A mixture separated into its parts by gas chromatography. The lines shown in the Mass Spectrum indicates that the sample is cocaine. Many of the tests on the show are presumptive, such as the Kastle-Meyer test. In real life this test indicates that blood may be present, not that a sample is definitively human blood. Other substances may also result in a positive Kastle-Meyer test, such as animal blood residues.
She goes on to explain: "This 'implicit bias' is something labs have been struggling with, and procedures preventing bias are now mandated. The issues with CSI 's accuracy don't stop at how involved the criminalists are in the investigations at hand.
It applies its same "this will look cool on TV" mentality to the actual investigative work they do, as well. Shen uses the example of an investigation from the season 1 episode "Pledging Mr. This is an incredibly cool method, but according to Shen, it's too showy to be believed.
Shen calls the model lake "a good example of taking a vague theory and turning it into an interesting but unlikely, if not impossible, forensic adventure.
Another big problem with the way CSI translates the job from the real world to the TV world is the clothing worn by the characters on the show. Designer clothes? Crime scene investigators follow cases from start to finish and conclude investigations within a few days.
Crime scene investigators cannot only pull up DNA, but they can tell whether it came from tears, saliva, and sweat or cremated remains. Crime scene investigators conduct DNA testing while munching snacks or joking with colleagues.
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