Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (80 page)

In 2004 Mattel introduced the Juice Box, a personal, handheld, candy-colored video player for kids. But the Juice Box didn’t play DVDs—kids (or their parents) had to buy the special $10 discs especially made for the device (titles included episodes of
Scooby-Doo
and
SpongeBob SquarePants
). To keep the device affordable (it retailed for $70), Mattel had to scrimp on technology: While regular video runs at 30 frames per second, Juice Box videos ran at 10 frames per second, producing a choppy image on a screen less than three inches wide, and in black and white. Industry experts say that despite its limitations, what ultimately forced the Juice Box off the market within a year of its introduction was the increasing popularity of built-in DVD players in cars and minivans.

In the early 1990s, the next big thing in electronics was supposed to be virtual reality. Wearing a special helmet, a person would be able to inhabit lifelike imaginary, computerized worlds. But the only virtual-reality product ever released was a dud: Nintendo’s
Virtual Boy video game system. The $180 machine looked like a pair of binoculars perched on a tabletop tripod. There were two problems with the setup. First, it wasn’t adjustable, resulting in lots of neck cramps; second, it was impossible to play with eyeglasses on. On top of that, the games weren’t in color—that would have pushed the price to more than $500, so they were rendered in a fuzzy black, red, and blue display which created a 3-D effect. The image was so difficult to see that headaches due to eye strain were common (the Virtual Boy had a built-in feature that made it turn off every 15 minutes to give players a chance to rest their eyes). Only 14 games were made for the system, including
Virtual Bowling
and
Virtual Fishing
. Only about 700,000 were sold, making it the biggest flop in Nintendo history.

Televideo Interactive debuted in 1987 with Captain Power, the first of what was supposed to be a line of toys that interacted with TV shows. The toys were spaceships and military command centers that kids put in front of the TV during action sequences of
Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
broadcasts. The toys fired at the screen, and the screen fired back, causing the spaceship to light up, shake, and make noise. If an “enemy” from TV scored a “hit,” it would eject the pilot figure from the spaceship. The show itself was a live-action, high-budget production with lots of special effects…but it was a failure. Why? Because the show was no fun to watch without the toys (which cost upwards of $50), and the toys were no fun without the show, which featured a cast of no-name actors and aired in most markets in a seldom-watched 6:00 a.m. Sunday time slot.

1.
Drew Allison Carey

2.
Richard Tiffany Gere

3.
Jeffrey Lyn Goldblum

4.
Quincy Delight Jones

How real are the TV shows that focus on police and lawyers? A few go all out for accuracy, while others get laughed at by the professions they portray. But they’ve all had an impact on society…both positive and negative
.

F
AMILIAR FORMULA
If there were no cops, prosecutors, or defense attorneys, the television airwaves would probably be far less crowded. Over the past 60 years, these professions have dominated primetime schedules. Why? Both offer formulas ready-made for drama: A brand-new conflict is presented to the protagonists each week, promising to be full of mystery, intrigue, and…predictability. Viewers can rely on the fact that near the end of the viewing hour, one crucial piece of evidence will appear and lead to the capture of the elusive killer, or to the acquittal of the wrongly accused defendant. Then comes the philosophical musing that wraps everything up neatly, providing a clean slate for next week’s episode.

Real life is rarely so cut-and-dried. And while some may argue that cop and lawyer shows are merely entertainment, actual cops and lawyers claim these shows can make their already-difficult jobs even harder.

The “
CSI
effect” occurs primarily inside the courtroom. Its first incarnation was referred to as the
Perry Mason
effect, based on the popular fictional defense attorney’s trademark ability to clear his client by coercing the guilty party into confessing on the witness stand. During Mason’s TV heyday, from the 1950s to the ’80s, many prosecutors complained that juries were hesitant to convict defendants without that “Perry Mason moment” of a confession on the stand—which in real life is very, very rare.

After
Perry Mason
went off the air, a new kind of law enforcement program appeared: the scientific police procedural (which started with
Quincy, M.E
., a drama about a crime-solving medical examiner that aired from 1976 to ’83). But few cop shows have
matched the success of
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
, which debuted in 2000 and has spawned two successful spin-offs. A 2006 TV ratings study in 20 countries named
CSI
“the most watched show in the world.”

Along with similar shows such as
NCIS, Diagnosis: Murder
, and
Bones
,
CSI
focuses on forensic evidence and lab work as the primary means of catching killers. These dramas may be “ripped from the headlines,” but when it comes to telling an entertaining story, certain liberties must be taken by the writers:

• On television shows, detectives work one case at a time; in the real world, they juggle a deep backlog of cases.

• Experts who perform scientific analyses are rarely the same people who do the detective work and make arrests, unlike TV where one team tackles every aspect of the investigation. (And few real forensic scientists ever drive a Hummer to a crime scene.)

• The almost instant turnaround of DNA tests is what TV writers refer to as a “time cheat,” a trick necessary to get the story wrapped up. In reality, due to the screening, extraction, and replication processes (not to mention the backlog), DNA tests can take months. And the results are rarely, if ever, 100% conclusive.

• Just about every murder investigation on TV leads to an arrest and conviction. In the real world, less than half of these cases are solved.

“If you really portrayed what crime scene investigators do,” said Jay Siegel, a professor of forensic science at Michigan State University, “the show would die after three episodes because it would be so boring.”

The main problem caused by the
CSI
effect: Juries now
expect
conclusive forensic evidence. According to Staff Sergeant Peter Abi-Rashed, a homicide detective from Hamilton, Ontario, “Juries are asking, ‘Can we convict without DNA evidence?’ Of course they can. It’s called good, old-fashioned police work and overwhelming circumstantial evidence.” In the worst-case scenarios, guilty people may be set free because a jury wasn’t impressed with evidence that—as recently as the 1990s—would have led to a conviction.
In fact, many forensic experts find themselves on the stand explaining to a jury why they
don’t
have scientific evidence. Some lawyers have even started asking potential jurors if they watch
CSI
. If so, they may have to be reeducated.

Shellie Samuels, the lead prosecutor in the 2005 Robert Blake murder trial, probably wishes that her jury had been asked beforehand if they were
CSI
fans. Samuels tried to convince them that Blake, a former TV cop himself (on
Baretta
), shot and killed his wife in 2001. Samuels illustrated Blake’s motive; she presented 70 witnesses who testified against him, including two who stated—under oath—that Blake had asked them to kill his wife. Seems like a lock for a conviction, right? Wrong. “They couldn’t put the gun in his hand,” said jury foreman Thomas Nicholson, who along with his peers acquitted Blake. “There was no blood spatter. They had nothing.” The verdict sent a clear message throughout the legal community: Juries will convict only on solid forensic evidence.

This new trend affects cops, too.
CSI
-watching detectives tend to put unrealistic pressure on crime scene investigators not only to find solid evidence, but also to give them immediate results. Henry Lee, chief emeritus of Connecticut’s state crime lab (and perhaps the world’s most famous forensics scientist), says that, much to the dismay of the police, his investigators can’t provide “miracle proof” just by scattering some “magic dust” on a crime scene. And there is no machine—not even at the best-equipped lab in the country—in which you can place a hair in at one end and pull a picture of a suspect out of the other. “And our type of work always has a backlog,” laments Lee, who’s witnessed the amount of evidence turned in to his lab rise from about five pieces per crime scene in the 1980s to anywhere from 50 to 400 today.

The
CSI
effect doesn’t stop at science—the entire judicial process is being presented in a misleading fashion. Mary Flood, editor of a Web site called The Legal Pad, asked a dozen prominent criminal lawyers to rate the most popular shows. Her findings: “Generally, they hate it when
Law & Order’s
Jack McCoy extracts confessions in front of speechless defense lawyers. Not real, they say. They go nuts over the
CSI
premise of the exceedingly well-funded, glamorous
lab techs who do a homicide detective’s job. Even less real, they say. And they get annoyed when
The Closer’s
heroine ignores a suspect’s requests for a lawyer. Unconstitutional, they say.”

In the real world, it’s usually neither the crusading prosecutor nor the headstrong cop who solves the case. Most criminals, cops admit, are their own worst enemies. Either they don’t cover their tracks or they brag to friends about what they did, or both. People tend not to think clearly when they commit crimes. But in the past few years there has appeared a new kind of criminal: the kind that watches
CSI
…and learns.

In December 2005, Jermaine “Maniac” McKinney, a 25-year-old man from Ohio, broke into a house and killed two people. He used bleach to clean his hands as well as the crime scene, then carefully removed all of the evidence and placed blankets in his car before transferring the bodies to an isolated lakeshore at night, where he burned them along with his clothes and cigarette butts—making sure that none of his DNA could be connected to the victims. One thing remained: the murder weapon, a crowbar. McKinney threw it into the lake…which was frozen. He didn’t want to risk walking out on the ice to get it, so he left it behind. Big mistake: The weapon was later found—still on the ice—and linked to McKinney, which led to his arrest. When asked why he used bleach to clean his hands, McKinney said that he’d learned that bleach destroys DNA. Where’d he learn that? “On
CSI
.”

Using bleach to clean a crime scene was almost unheard of until
CSI
used it as a plot point. Now the practice is occurring more and more often. “Sometimes I believe it may even encourage criminals when they see how simple it is to get away with murder on television,” said Captain Ray Peavy, head of the homicide division at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. It’s difficult enough to investigate a crime scene with the “normal” amount of evidence left behind.

So should these shows be censored? Should they tone down the science or, as some have argued, use
fake
science to throw criminals a red herring? “The National District Attorneys Association
is deeply concerned about the effect of
CSI
,” CBS News consultant and former prosecutor Wendy Murphy reported. “When
CSI
trumps common sense, then you have a systemic problem.”

But not everyone agrees. “To argue that
CSI
and similar shows are actually raising the number of acquittals is a staggering claim,” argues Simon Cole, professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine. “And the remarkable thing is that, speaking forensically, there is not a shred of evidence to back it up.”