It has long been suspected that the scenes, stories and situations people are exposed to through the medium of television can eventually distort their view of reality. Phenomena such as the desensitization to violence exhibited by children who watch hours of cartoon combat daily, or the shifting sense of body image experienced by women who only see slim, attractive models on screen serve to confirm the suspicion that television can alter one’s perception of the real world. Although these effects are undoubtedly disconcerting on a personal level, another consequence of televised media’s pervasiveness in modern society has recently emerged, and with it a series of serious implications for the criminal justice system. Dubbed the “CSI Effect” by increasingly incredulous prosecuting attorneys across America, a disturbing trend has developed within courtrooms in all corners of the country. According to proponents of the CSI Effect, Americans serving as jurors in criminal proceedings – having grown accustomed to the neatly presented, incredibly thorough, and utterly convincing forensic evidence presented in every 60-minute broadcast of wildly popular TV series like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – are now demanding the same level of exacting precision and overwhelming evidence during actual trials. As described by Michael Toomin, an experienced judge with the Cook County Criminal Court in Chicago, Illinois, today’s juries are increasingly “asking where’s the DNA, where’s the fingerprints? … (and) the TV dramatizations have had an eye-opening effect. Some [jurors] have come to anticipate and expect that kind of evidence” (McRoberts, Mills & Possley, 2005). By examining the prevailing scholarly literature on the subject of the CSI Effect, while also reviewing actual instances in which this phenomenon is believed to have influenced a jury’s verdict, an informed and objective stance on the impact of this trend can be properly developed.
¶ … CSI Effect in Criminal Forensics
It has long been suspected that the scenes, stories and situations people are exposed to through the medium of television can eventually distort their view of reality. Phenomena such as the desensitization to violence exhibited by children who watch hours of cartoon combat daily, or the shifting sense of body image experienced by women who only see slim, attractive models on screen serve to confirm the suspicion that television can alter one's perception of the real world. Although these effects are undoubtedly disconcerting on a personal level, another consequence of televised media's pervasiveness in modern society has recently emerged, and with it a series of serious implications for the criminal justice system. Dubbed the "CSI Effect" by increasingly incredulous prosecuting attorneys across America, a disturbing trend has developed within courtrooms in all corners of the country. According to proponents of the CSI Effect, Americans serving as jurors in criminal proceedings -- having grown accustomed to the neatly presented, incredibly thorough, and utterly convincing forensic evidence presented in every 60-minute broadcast of wildly popular TV series like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation -- are now demanding the same level of exacting precision and overwhelming evidence during actual trials. As described by Michael Toomin, an experienced judge with the Cook County Criminal Court in Chicago, Illinois, today's juries are increasingly "asking where's the DNA, where's the fingerprints? & #8230; (and) the TV dramatizations have had an eye-opening effect. Some [jurors] have come to anticipate and expect that kind of evidence" (McRoberts, Mills & Possley, 2005). By examining the prevailing scholarly literature on the subject of the CSI Effect, while also reviewing actual instances in which this phenomenon is believed to have influenced a jury's verdict, an informed and objective stance on the impact of this trend can be properly developed.
The CSI Effect has been cultivated in the public consciousness largely through the accumulation of anecdotal evidence, as prosecutors continue to offer new examples of defendants having been acquitted by jurors demanding full-fledged DNA analysis, crystal-clear fingerprint matches, and other staples of the televised perception of forensic evidence (Schweitzer & Saks, 2006). One such case relayed by Judge Toomin to the Chicago Tribune "recalled a recent drug case in which police seized a bag of cocaine under a brick in a gangway. When the defendant, who had previous drug convictions, denied the drugs were his & #8230; (and) jurors acquitted the man and, in later conversations with Toomin, wanted to know: 'Why didn't the police go in and get a fingerprint guy and take fingerprints off the brick?'" (McRoberts, Mills & Possley, 2005). While instances such as this clearly suggest that the CSI Effect is swaying jurors towards acquittal unless overwhelming forensic evidence is presented, an observable phenomenon such as this demands an empirical investigation to either confirm or refute its veracity. To that end, a growing body of research has been compiled -- combining both quantitative and qualitative focuses -- in an effort to assess the scientific merits of the CSI Effect as it pertains to actual criminal cases.
One such study, titled "A Study of Juror Expectations and Demands Concerning Scientific Evidence: Does the 'CSI Effect' Exist?," was the first empirical study of actual jurors designed to test the existence and extent of this phenomenon, and the authors engineered a statistical survey of 1,027 individuals who had been called for jury duty in a Michigan state court during over a duration of nine weeks in 2006 (Shelton et al., 2007). The authors of this study intended to test the legitimacy of a contention consistently raised by prosecutors, which holds that jurors are acquitting defendants en masse absent an unrealistic level of compelling forensic evidence proving their guilt. According to the findings of presented by this study, "the extent that jurors have significant expectations and demands for scientific evidence, those predispositions may have more to do with a broader 'tech effect' in popular culture rather than any particular 'CSI effect'" (Shelton et al., 2007), which serves to confirm the authors' original hypothesis that increased evidentiary demands by jurors represent a natural extension of society's expanded base of knowledge regarding a wide variety of subjects, including criminal conduct, law enforcement procedures, and forensic processes. In the estimation of the research team responsible for this pioneering study on the CSI Effect, a phenomenon whereby jurors expect utterly convincing evidence clearly exists, but it cannot be definitively attributed to the advent of television programs like CSI. Instead, the authors conclude that society's increased awareness of disturbing trends like false convictions, police misconduct during investigations, and other mitigating factors have compelled jurors to hold prosecuting attorneys to a much higher burden of proof than ever before. Findings such as this present an array of implications for the criminal justice system, but as the authors unequivocally contend, "any increased expectations and demands imposed by jurors on the legal system are legitimate, and constitutionally based, reflections in jurors of changes in popular culture and that the criminal justice system must adapt to and accommodate, rather than criticize or question, the jurors' expectations of and demands for scientific evidence" (Shelton et al., 2007).
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