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TV Show CSI Affects Real Life Crime; - taught killer how to destroy evidence
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Topic Started: Jan 31 2006, 01:56 PM (277 Views)
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Jan 31 2006, 01:56 PM
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Rock Star From Mars
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I've often wondered if these crime shows help criminals hide their crimes better. I used to watch a lot of Forensic Files episodes on Court TV, and I learned a lot about how to hide evidence.
Investigators begin seeing CSI effect at crime scenes - Houston Chronicle
TV Dramas Teach Criminals How to Cover Up
TV Dramas Teach Criminals How to Cover Up
Houston Chronicle (excerpts): - Potential killers get tips, say L.A. sheriff's officials
CLEVELAND - When Tammy Klein began investigating crime scenes eight years ago, it was virtually unheard-of for a killer to use bleach to clean up a bloody mess.
Today, the use of bleach, which destroys DNA, is not unusual in a planned homicide, said the senior criminalist from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Klein and other experts attribute such sophistication to television crime dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which give criminals tips on how to cover up evidence.
It appears the popular show and its two spinoffs could be affecting how some crimes are committed.
"They're actually educating these potential killers even more," said Capt. Ray Peavy, also of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and head of the homicide division.
A man charged in a recent double-homicide in northeast Ohio was a CSI fan and went to great lengths to cover his tracks, according to an affidavit filed by Trumbull County prosecutors.
Jermaine "Maniac" McKinney, 25, allegedly broke into a house, killed a mother and daughter and used bleach to remove their blood from his hands, prosecutors said. He also allegedly covered the interior of a getaway car with blankets to avoid transferring blood.
From another source linked to above,- Cases where suspects burn and tamper with evidence seem to be increasing, said Chuck Morrow, chief of the criminal division in the Trumbull County Prosecutor‘s office.
.... Sophisticated planning and concealment of evidence are aberrations, not the norm, said Larry Pozner, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Yet, in the six years since CBS, which did not return phone calls seeking comment, introduced "CSI," there‘s been a trend of fewer clues like hair, cigarette butts and the killer‘s blood left behind at crime scenes, Peavy said.
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Sep 13 2006, 06:19 PM
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Rock Star From Mars
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Real corpse found on 'CSI' set - Sept 13, 2006
Dead bodies are an everyday occurrence on the set of "CSI: NY" -- except when they're real.
On Tuesday, Sept. 12, an actual mummified body was found inside of a Los Angeles building where the show was filming an episode that just happened to center on the discovery of a mummified body, reports People.
A source close to the production says that the body "was discovered by a building engineer who checked on the tenant because he had not paid rent for the month." Production was underway on the seventh floor of the building, only two floors above where the body was found.
Regular castmembers Gary Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes weren't on the set at the time, only day players and stunt people.
An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause of death.
"CSI: NY" premieres its third season on CBS on Wednesday, Sept. 20.
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Dec 29 2008, 07:07 PM
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Rock Star From Mars
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More Get Away With Murder, Despite Technology - By Karen Hawkins
Associated Press Sunday, December 28, 2008; Page A10
CHICAGO -- Despite the rise of DNA fingerprinting and other "CSI"-style crime-fighting wizardry, more people in this country are getting away with murder.
FBI figures show that the homicide clearance rate, as detectives call it, dropped from 91 percent in 1963 -- the first year records were kept in the manner they are now -- to 61 percent in 2007.
Law enforcement officials say the chief reason is a rise in drug- and gang-related killings, which are often impersonal and anonymous and thus harder to solve than slayings among family members or friends. As a result, police departments are carrying an ever-growing number of "cold case" homicides on their books.
"We have killers walking among us. We have killers living in our neighborhoods," said Howard Morton, executive director of Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons. "It is a clear threat to public safety to allow these murders to go unsolved."
The clearance rate is the number of homicides solved in a year, compared with the number of killings committed that year. The solved killings can include homicides committed in previous years.
The number of criminal homicides committed in the United States climbed from 4,566 in 1963 to 14,811 in 2007, according to the FBI. The clearance rate has been dropping pretty steadily over the past four decades, slipping under 80 percent in the early 1970s and below 70 percent in the late 1980s. In cities with populations over 1 million, the 2007 clearance rate was 59 percent, down from 89 percent in 1963.
Detectives say homicides generally become harder to solve as time goes by, as witnesses die and memories fade. Yet cold-case detectives say their units are often understaffed. And local police are getting less help for cold cases from Washington. Funding for the main federal program for such cases was cut 40 percent from 2005 to 2007.
Richard Walton, author of "Cold Case Homicides: Practical Investigative Techniques," attributed the falling clearance rate to a "significant change in crime patterns."
Many slayings nowadays are gang- and drug-related killings -- often, drive-by shootings that involve a burst of gunfire so indiscriminate that killer and victim don't know each other.
"And that makes it difficult for investigators," Walton said. "With the gangs and the drugs, we don't have that ability to establish motive, opportunity and means."
Also, gang-related killings are increasingly going unsolved because witnesses are too scared to help police, said Dallas Drake of the Center for Homicide Research, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization. Gangs have played on people's fears by warning them -- via underground DVDs, in some cases -- against "snitching."
In the Chicago suburb of Aurora, local and county authorities are working with the FBI on a cold-case program to battle the perception that gang members are untouchable. So far, there have been more than 30 arrests and at least five convictions.
Among the unsolved killings in Chicago is the 2003 drive-by shooting of 19-year-old Filmon Tesfai, an aspiring doctor who was gunned down two days before he left for the University of Illinois. Police say that the slaying was probably a case of mistaken identity and that Tesfai did not know his killer.
"This is not an easy thing to carry in your head," said his father, Zerai Tesfai. "It's the worst thing that's happened in my life."
DNA has clearly revolutionized crime-fighting, enabling police to solve decades-old crimes. Walton pronounced it "arguably the greatest identification tool to come down the pike."
Nevertheless, DNA and other physical evidence solve only about 30 percent of cold cases, said James Adcock, an assistant professor at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. Finding witnesses and getting them to talk still plays a major role.
In fact, detectives warn that technology can be both a blessing and a curse, saying jurors who have watched shows such as "CSI" come into court with unrealistic expectations of what science can do.
"They think we can pull a rabbit out of our hats," said Houston police Sgt. Mike Peters. "Technology is great, but it's the ability to get people to talk that's important. That solves cases."
Technology can also be expensive. In 2005, the National Institute of Justice awarded $14.2 million to law enforcement agencies through the Solving Cold Cases With DNA program. In 2007, only $8.5 million was awarded.
Lt. John Slenk of the Michigan State Police said it took a couple of million dollars to solve the 1979 slaying of Hope College student Janet Chandler in 2006. Those costs included paying four full-time officers over three years and interviewing 500 people in 18 states.
Six people are serving time in Chandler's murder. Since there was no DNA that could be used, solving Chandler's killing came down to wearing down witnesses and suspects. Detectives interviewed their prime suspect 18 times before he was arrested, Slenk said.
For their part, the Tesfais have not given up hope that police will find their son's killer.
"They are breathing fresh air. My son is underground," Zerai Tesfai said. "Someone, somehow, has to make a closure for this."
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Jul 28 2009, 02:27 PM
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Rock Star From Mars
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CSI Myths: The Shaky Science Behind Forensics
Excerpts:- Forensic science was not developed by scientists. It was mostly created by cops, who were guided by little more than common sense. And as hundreds of criminal cases begin to unravel, many established forensic practices are coming under fire. PM takes an in-depth look at the shaky science that has put innocent people behind bars.
....As DNA testing has made it possible to re-examine biological evidence from past trials, more than 200 people have had their convictions overturned. In approximately 50 percent of those cases, bad forensic analysis contributed to their imprisonment.
On television and in the movies, forensic examiners unravel difficult cases with a combination of scientific acumen, cutting-edge technology and dogged persistence. The gee-whiz wonder of it all has spawned its own media-age legal phenomenon known as the “CSI effect.”
Jurors routinely afford confident scientific experts an almost mythic infallibility because they evoke the bold characters from crime dramas.
The real world of forensic science, however, is far different. America’s forensic labs are overburdened, understaffed and under intense pressure from prosecutors to produce results.
According to a 2005 study by the Department of Justice, the average lab has a backlog of 401 requests for services. Plus, several state and city forensic departments have been racked by scandals involving mishandled evidence and outright fraud.
But criminal forensics has a deeper problem of basic validity. Bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, and hair, fiber and handwriting analysis sound compelling in the courtroom, but much of the “science” behind forensic science rests on surprisingly shaky foundations.
Many well-established forms of evidence are the product of highly subjective analysis by people with minimal credentials—according to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, no advanced degree is required for a career in forensics.
And even the most experienced and respected professionals can come to inaccurate conclusions, because the body of research behind the majority of the forensic sciences is incomplete, and the established methodologies are often inexact. “There is no scientific foundation for it,” says Arizona State University law professor Michael Saks. “As you begin to unpack it you find it’s a lot of loosey-goosey stuff.”
Not surprisingly, a movement to reform the way forensics is done in the U.S. is gaining momentum. The call for change has been fueled by some embarrassing failures, even at the highest levels of law enforcement.
After the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, Spain, the FBI arrested Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield and kept him in jail for two weeks. His incarceration was based on a purported fingerprint match to a print found on a bag of detonators discovered near the scene of the crime.
As a later investigation by the Justice Department revealed, the FBI’s fingerprint-analysis software never actually matched Mayfield to the suspect fingerprint, but produced him as an “unusually close nonmatch.”
Lacking any statistical context for how rare such similarities are, investigators quickly convinced themselves that Mayfield was the prime suspect.
From page 2 of that article:- Fingerprints are believed to be unique, but the process of matching prints has no statistically valid model. And forensic examiners are often working in an imperfect world, where prints taken in a police station on an ink pad are compared to prints left at a crime scene, which may be smudged or partially captured.
Yet, as University of California–Los Angeles law professor Jennifer Mnookin has written, “fingerprint examiners typically testify in the language of absolute certainty.”
A 2006 study by the University of Southampton in England asked six veteran fingerprint examiners to study prints taken from actual criminal cases. The experts were not told that they had previously examined the same prints. The researchers’ goal was to determine if contextual information—for example, some prints included a notation that the suspect had already confessed—would affect the results.
But the experiment revealed a far more serious problem: The analyses of fingerprint examiners were often inconsistent regardless of context. Only two of the six experts reached the same conclusions on second examination as they had on the first.
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Aug 26 2009, 03:05 PM
Post #5
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Rock Star From Mars
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Lady uses information she saw on the TV show "Law and Order SVU" to catch a bad guy:
A 'LAW & ORDER' KIND OF HEROINE -FAN USES 'SVU' TO NAIL 'THIEF'- August 25, 2009
A 24-year-old Midtown receptionist outsmarted a career criminal and even outdid the cops investigating his alleged thieving -- thanks to her addiction to "Law & Order: SVU."
Justine Faeth, an executive assistant at City Lights Media, was in the company's lobby at 6 E. 39th St. on June 15 when smooth-talking ex-con Kevin Moore, 50, walked in at around 1:30 p.m., authorities say.
Moore distracted Faeth by asking for a glass of water, and after drinking half of it, blew his nose in a tissue, put the rag in the paper cup and left it on the front desk, she said.
Unbeknownst to Faeth, Moore had allegedly swiped an iPod, cellphone and wallet before fleeing out a back door.
After realizing what had happened, Faeth said, she remembered her favorite TV show -- and turned into a real-life version of its heroine, Detective Olivia Benson (played by Mariska Hargitay).
"When they are trying to get DNA from a suspect on 'SVU' and that person is unwilling to give them a sample, they trick them into drinking water and then use that as evidence," Faeth told The Post yesterday.
"I knew to save the cup at least for fingerprints -- the show taught me that," she said. "It's amazing what you can learn on a TV show."
So the worker said she made sure the cup remained set aside until the cops came.
But Faeth said she was shocked when uniformed officers weren't interested in her evidence, telling the amateur sleuth that they do DNA tests only for murder and rape cases because of lack of funding.
So Faeth tossed the cup and tissue in the garbage.
Then the next day, after reviewing surveillance footage from the building, detectives from the Midtown South Precinct asked Faeth if she still had the cup and tissue, she said.
Fortunately, the cleaning crew had not collected her trash.
After running the DNA collected from it through their database, cops got a match with Moore, who was in their system from his past crimes, authorities said.
"I was really disappointed when they refused to take it at first, but at least they got him in the end," Faeth said.
Moore -- suspected of pulling off as many as 10 similar robberies -- was busted Aug. 21 and charged with burglary and grand larceny, according to a spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
Police officials said it was unclear if the uniformed cops had told Faeth they could not take the evidence.
"We do not know that the officer said that," Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said.
Either way, Faeth clearly helped nab Moore, whose thievery dates to the early 1980s.
In his latest alleged string of robberies, Moore hit the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio, where cops say he pretended to inquire about lessons.
Moore has also been charged with a July 15 robbery at Boom Fitness, a Park Avenue gym.
After taking a tour of the pricey gym, Moore returned, sneaked back into the office and grabbed a wallet and cellphone, law-enforcement sources said.
Moore first went to prison for burglary in 1983 and was convicted again in 1988, 1989, 1995, and 2003, according to the Department of Correction's Web site.
Faeth said she was pleased her cop-show obsession led to some actual crime fighting.
Although she watches many police dramas, she said "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" is her favorite.
"It's pretty addicting. I pretty much have seen every episode," she said. "It's intense, the story lines are good, and there are a lot of twist and turns."
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