MinnLawyer Blog

The Star Tribune has a piece today written by the superintendent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Tim O’Malley, (“Some love for forensic scientists“) making the bold statement that:

Police officers and prosecutors seem to get all of the credit — particularly on TV shows — when it comes to solving crimes, putting bad guys in jail and clearing those wrongly accused. But without the painstaking work performed by forensic scientists who analyze crime-scene evidence, I’m confident justice would be served far less often in real life.

The rest of O’Malley’s piece goes on to note that “recently, the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board awarded the BCA labs its most prestigious quality ranking.”

Congrats to the BCA – and certainly its scientists play a pivotal role in helping to solve many different types of criminal cases. And that evidence does not always help prosecutors. As O’Malley points out, the BCA, in conjunction with the Innocence Project of Minnesota and others, is about to embark on a $860,000 federally funded project to identify wrongfully committed inmates using new DNA testing techniques.

However, I can’t help balking at O’Malley’s premise that forensic scientists are the unsung heroes of crime solving on TV shows. Is he kidding? The entire highly popular CSI franchise is dedicated to glorifying the role of forensic scientists in the justice system. (When are they going to have a CSI-Minneapolis by the way?)  What about the series “Bones?” (which happens to be one of my personal guilty junk-TV pleasures.) Has O’Malley never seen an NCIS with Big Gulp slurping forensic scientist Abby Sciuto and medical examiner/trivia expert Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard often leading the team’s charge.

In fact, TV has a love affair with forensic science stretching all the way back to the 1970s with the crime drama “Quincy, M.E.” (A crime-solving medical examiner who lived on a houseboat, you can’t make up stuff like that. Wait, I guess you can …).

My point is that forensic scientists get plenty of credit on many TV shows — perhaps too much. There have even been articles written on what’s called the “CSI effect.” In essence, it means that TV viewers (which virtually all jurors are) have become spoiled by these high-tech shows. Thus, some jurors are surprised when the prosecution doesn’t present a forensic scientists to present DNA (or other forensic)  evidence showing to a scientific certainty that the defendant must be perpetrator.

In fact, when I interviewed a medical examiner for a video report last year, she said her biggest complaint about how forensic science was presented on TV was that shows made the forensic scientist take on the role of the lead investigator, going to crime scenes and pouring through the evidence. In real life, the scientists spends his/her time in a lab, not pulling hairs from a rug at a crime scene, chasing suspects and getting hit on his/her head with lamps.

So while I’m glad the BCA and its forensic scientists are getting some “love” in the form of professional recognition, I think TV gives them plenty of love already. Now how lawyers are portrayed on TV — that’s a whole different matter.