Some weeks 60 million people watch these shows. CSI. CSI Las Vegas. CSI New York. CSI Miami. For those of you who have been in a coma for the past decade, these are TV shows. They are fictional accounts of crime-solving heroics by forensic scientists. The crime lab characters work on only one case and solve mysteries within the hour. Criminals don’t have a chance at trial. Their guilt is established to a scientific certainty.

In 2004 CSI was nominated for the entertainment industry’s Saturn Award. For science fiction. There isn’t anything wrong with watching these shows. However, there is a real danger when viewers become jurors and expect real life to mirror Hollywood.

I remember when I was a kid I loved the cartoon Popeye. I wanted to be able to crush a can of spinach with my bare hands and beat up bad guys like Popeye did. I sure was disappointed when my mother bought me a can of spinach and I couldn’t reach around it with two hands. I was even more disappointed when we opened the spinach with a can opener and I saw and smelled the stuff.

It’s a little silly for a child to think that cartoons are real. As adults, we usually know better. I saw the movie The Astronaut Farmer, but I didn’t try to build a spaceship in the back yard. I enjoy James Bond movies, but you won’t see me in a fight on top of a moving passenger train.

For some reason, sensible people get jury summonses and forget that TV dramas aren’t real.

They expect DNA evidence in every case. If the defendant forged a check, his fingerprints should be on it. If a crime occurred outdoors, a satellite surely captured the entire event with aerial photography. The witness had to be lying, because she blinked and looked to the left as she spoke. Look at the loops in the handwriting on the confession—this confession was coerced.

Defense lawyers know this. We call it “The CSI Defense”. Their argument to the jury goes something like this: “The judge is going to tell you that the law forbids you from convicting my client unless the State proves his guilt to you beyond a reasonable doubt. And the judge will also tell you that you can have a reasonable doubt and acquit the defendant because of a lack of evidence.

In this case, the State has no fingerprint evidence, no DNA evidence, no aerial photographs of the crime in progress, and they didn’t call a single expert to analyze my client’s handwriting on the confession. Why didn’t they call an expert on blood spatter? Why didn’t they compare fiber evidence? If they had used even one of these proven techniques, they could have caught the real criminal instead of falsely accusing my client.”

And jurors buy this argument, because TV shows make it appear that every case can be proved in a laboratory.