Question

The popular CSI character Gil Grissom likes to say "the evidence doesn't lie" but does it present the truth?

ps. this is a law question

Answer 1

The hero of the TV crime series Crime Scene Investigation  (CSI ), scientist and crime lab supervisor Gil Grissom, personifies a near-to ideal image of science: brilliant,earnest, and always seeking to remain objective, yet at the same time sensing that his human nature sometimes tempts him into bias.

While Grissom himself fights this temptation to the point of leading a life virtually devoid of what most of us consider the pleasures of human existence, such as family life, social activities, or sex, he is aware that he cannot turn himself into a fully disinterested, objective, infallible servant of science.

This quote of Gil Grissom has become so famous that it has entered many realms of popular culture (e.g. one can buy it printed on - non-CSI  merchandise - T-shirts, see Cafe press 2011). For some social science observers, it has become a symbol of one of the variants of the so-called "CSI  effect", a tendency prevalent among stakeholders and public to assess the inferences that can be made on the basis of DNA evidence as higher than inferences made from other kinds of DNA evidence. The CSI effect, whose educational variant articulates itself, for example, in jurors or judges refusing to convict a suspect if no DNA evidence is presented; or in jury members insisting that all available evidence must be analysed for DNA traces, irrespective of the investigative clues that can be reasonably expected from them.

Indeed, regardless of whether or not one agrees with these authors on the point of the CSI  effect working to the advantage of prosecutors, it is evident that media representations of forensic technologies have had an impact on how powerful, reliable and (in)dispensable the latter are perceived.

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