Does CBS’s CSI affect how juries deliberate? Evidently so, or at least they do enough that prosecutors and defense attorneys are starting to ask potential jurors whether or not they regularly watch the program. Could watching CSI really affect the outcome of a trial? After casually watching the Robert Blake murder trial, I think so.

For those of you living in caves, actor Robert Blake was accused of fatally shooting his wife on May 4, 2001. He was also charged with soliciting two Hollywood stuntmen to kill her. Blake had the motive, the means, and a rather ironic alibi (he says that he was retrieving his hand gun).

However, these days, for CSI-viewing juries such evidence is not enough. As on CSI, today’s TV watching juries look for the kind of certainty featured on CSI and its spin-offs where crimes are solved conclusively in less than an hour. The Blake jurors asked “Where was the conclusive gunshot residue on Blake’s hands, or a fingerprint on the murder weapon?”

The Blake jurors were dismissive of all of the circumstantial evidence despite the fact that murder cases have historically been built on such evidence (albeit not on TV dramas). Worse, even though 11 of the 12 believed that he had tried to hire a hit man, the lack of TV-style high-tech evidence kept them from convicting him of murder.

Perhaps CBS should run a scroll during the show indicating that the show is a work of fiction. Sad, but true.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2005 at 4:09 am by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.