I have seen them do things that were impossible. One the I clearly remember was that the took a phot and did something to it to reveal details that were totally impossible because the photo did not have the resolution. Somewhat similar to taking a picture of the moon with your cell phone camera and enlarging it so that you can see the foot print of the astronauts.
I know exactly what you mean.
They take a blurry security camera photo of a person 100 feet away, that's probably 640x480 resolution, and "enhance" it to the point where they can read the bar code on the person's ID tag.
Another one of my pet peeves is when they rule out suspects based on which hand was used to stab someone, or how high/low the wound is, or what size shoe print they found. If I were going to kill someone, I'd make sure to wear worn down shoes of the wrong size, and then stab the person with my 'wrong' hand while slightly crouching.
Various computer scenes drive me crazy too. In one episode of CSI Miami, a woman was exchanging email with some criminals. They killed the crooks in a warehouse and then cloned the hard drive. So far, so good. Then they take it back to the lab and apparently plug it into their system and boot it, because it asks for a password and if they enter the wrong one three times, it will be erased forever! First, it's a cloned copy, they can make as many copies as they need. Second, no crime lab examines a hard drive by booting it. To top it off, they find the password on a key logger taken from the woman's computer, because apparently when you exchange encrypted email with someone, you use the password from their computer!??
That ranks right up there with being able to find information on a wiped hard drive. I'm sorry, but no. When a drive is wiped with even a single pass, the data is gone. If you take the platter(s) out and put then in hugely expensive machines, they
might be able to detect some residual magnetic patterns, providing that each area of the drive wasn't written to more than once.
You don't need to smash perfectly good hard drives with a hammer (as I've seen some people do) to get rid of the information on them. Just download a low level format/zero-fill program and run it. The data is gone forever and someone else can make use of the drive.
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silverr8c
12 years ago
I have another good one, and I have seen it on more than one show but do not remembers the shows I saw it on.
They see a hole in a wall or a bullet hole in a person and proclaim it is a 9 MM. The problem is the difference in size between a 9MM and a .38 special bullet is less than 3 thousands of an inch. I would say it is impossible to determine the difference of 3 thousands of an inch just by looking at it.
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ydobon-1
12 years ago
On Rizzoli & Isles, Jane Rizzoli test fires a gun, fishes the bullet out of the water tank, looks at it and declares it a match to one that they recovered from a dead body. She didn't even need a magnifying glass!
Also, do they really determine the time of death at the scene by sticking a thermometer with a metal spike into the victim's liver? It seems like that would be tampering with evidence. I know it's unlikely, but there's the chance that the hole made by the spike could disturb or mask something else on its way through the body & liver.
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silverr8c
12 years ago
Liver temp has been used to calculate time of death, they use formulas that include room temperature to come to a close estimate of TOD. I do not know if they still use that method, but delaying obtaining a liver temp may prevent them from ever getting the needed data. Eventually the temp of the liver will equalize with the temp of the room and at that point they will have lost the opportunity to collect the data. I guess they have to determine whether it is more important to get a temp reading or leave the body undisturbed.
PS I have never watched Rizzoli & Isles but that would have been a scene worthy a double face palm.
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ydobon-1
12 years ago
PS I have never watched Rizzoli & Isles but that would have been a scene worthy a double face palm.
It's mostly a buddy show with detective Jane Rizzoli being best friends with the coroner Maura Isles. Jane is a typical tomboy, while Maura is more uptight and socially awkward, often blurting out uncomfortable medical facts at embarrassing times. It's kind of like an all-female version of the show Bones.
The CSI stuff is only a small portion of the show, with much of it focusing on the characters themselves and the police investigation. However, the CSI science is often even more far-fetched than the CSI shows.
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