Crime Scene Investigation

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Every week more than 60 million Americans turn their television sets to tune to the popular crime investigation drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation or one of its countless spin offs, which have become increasingly popular among the American public (Shelton, n.d.). The show has been a top rated drama since it was first aired in 2001, it has received several Emmy nominations, and many even claimed it has lead to the considerable increase in college students studying forensic science. Recently however, despite its many achievements several newspapers and magazine articles began warning about the impact the shows influence is having on our criminal justice system; they referred to the phenomenon as the CSI Effect. Max Houck, Director of the Forensic Science Initiative at West Virginia University, explains the CSI effect as “basically the perception of the near-infallibility of forensic science in response to the TV show” ( Podlas, 2010, p. 99). The concern among criminal justice experts and prosecutors is that the so called CSI effect creates unrealistic expectations that every case must be solved with high tech forensic tests, which they believe, has a significant impact on juror decision making. Exposure to the dramatized and fictional depiction of crime solving portrayed by these television shows has had a significant impact on viewer’s conception of reality, which has negatively altered the expectation of jurors and influenced jury verdicts. In order to comprehend the impact of television crime dramas on the criminal justice system, it is important to understand how the CSI effect operates. The relationship between entertainment programming and viewer beliefs is based on the media theory of cultivation. The cultivation theor... ... middle of paper ... ... more than twelve million people tuning in to watch CSI (Shelton, n.d.), and with science and technology continuing to evolve so rapidly, we will continue to see a substantial influence on American criminal justice through their impacts on potential juror expectations. Our criminal justice system should seek to adapt to these changes as supposed to fight them, the way the system is set up juror verdicts are expected to be a reflection of our society’s values. With those value will change and jury verdict will reflect those changes in popular culture. In adapting to such changes, we must invest in funding and training law enforcement to collect and analyze scientific evidence. While we adapt to those changes it is crucial that the jury is carefully instructed about the nature of such evidence as well as properly selected by a Voir Dire process to identify biases.

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