Dear TV Show Medical Examiners: Please Don’t Kiss the Corpse

In a darkened room, the glow of a computer screen lights up the face of a quirkily attractive young woman. She wears a nose ring and a studded leather jacket, but we know she is a scientist because of her furrowed brow and the commanding way she pounds the keyboard as she enters queries into a secret database on the dark web. Surrounding her workstation are machines that are testing things—DNA, satellite images, fingerprints, the atmosphere over Seattle. They too glow, in pulsing fluorescent colors. Soon she sits back in her chair triumphantly and barks, “Got him!” The men standing around her nod appreciatively—one murmurs “Finally!”—they have been waiting minutes for these results.

Another murder solved in the world of television.

In the real world it’s not so easy.

As a former death investigator with 23 years’ experience at New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, I am often asked whether anything about popular police procedurals is accurate. I’ve avoided watching these shows for years because I don’t like to be annoyed, but maybe it was time to revisit it? Maybe the continued popularity of reality TV has pushed scripted TV to itself become more real?

Hardly.

On one show, a woman missing for 20 years is found in the trunk of a car fished from a lake. There is a skull, some clothing, and a small wet mess of decomposed flesh. A gloved man fiddles around with the remains in the trunk, then murmurs something science-like to a detective, who announces, “The ME just positively identified her as Brittany.” How? Did the skull resemble her driver’s license photo?

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But wait, there’s a single loose tooth rattling around in the car trunk and within minutes, DNA is extracted and the profile is uploaded into CODIS, the national database of DNA profiles. They don’t get a hit or a match to their FS (favorite suspect), so they turn to genetic genealogy. Aha—50 percent of the genetic markers match to the FS and another person in a commercial database, so the killer must be his father. Arrest made; case wrapped up in 42 minutes of actual showtime. In most real forensic biology labs, they would be thrilled to have results in 30 days.

I get it. It’s TV, its entertainment. You have to move fast and wrap it up.

So, what’s the harm? People must know this isn’t real, that life and death are not like that at all. However, there is a name for what these shows do to viewer’s perceptions: CSI Syndrome or the CSI effect. Prosecutors complain that jurors want forensic evidence (especially DNA) for every case, whether relevant to the crime or not.

Say Joey D. runs up to Billy J. in Times Square during the afternoon matinee rush, screams “Die, you mutha-f***a” and shoots him in the head. Not 10 feet away are a couple of nuns from Our Lady of Perpetual Truth on 44th Street, who see the whole thing from two different views. One renders aid to Billy as Joey berates the other who has called 911: “Mind your damn business! I shoulda killed him years ago!”

Joey is arrested with the gun still in his hand and arraigned on first degree murder charges. He pleads “not guilty,” as one does. At trial, the nuns and police all testify to what they saw and heard. They easily identify him in the courtroom, largely based on the pentagram tattooed on his unusually high forehead.

The jurors are concerned. They want to know why DNA was not done. They have ballistics, of course. The bullet in Billy’s head was fired from the gun Joey held, bought just weeks before at his local Walmart. The receipt is still in his pocket. They have video too, of Joey running through Times Square toward Billy, who is notably waiting for the light to change before crossing the street—unusual in New York. There is eyewitness testimony from disinterested parties with good eyesight.

Still, the jurors wonder why there are no “forensics.” No DNA, no satellite views or carpet fibers. Every show they watch has lots of high-tech information that proves definitively whether or not a person is guilty of murder. Some studies have shown that CSI syndrome leads to a bias in favor of the defense, and district attorneys are concerned. It has been proposed that prosecutors educate the jury in opening statements, explaining that TV is not real life.

There’s a tough lesson for you.

Television crime shows can be incredibly annoying to those of us who actually do the work of death investigation: detectives, forensic pathologists and their investigators, criminalists. Civil servants with heavy caseloads, we don’t have shiny machines with blinking lights that spit out results like ATM receipts. We rarely dress well or even interestingly. And we never get a DNA identification in an hour.

Yet, oddly, I was enjoying my research. The shows I watched were fast-paced, full of semi-facts and attractive geniuses running through hallways and streets to catch bad guys with science. Like the hour-long procedural that worked the case of another body in a lake, this time a girl in a steel drum. This victim was identified by a highly artistic forensic anthropologist who sculpted a bust in clay of the girl based on her bone structure, right down to her curls and hairstyle. After 40 years dead she was identified in a day. Though this can be done in a few labs, it’s a usually a vague resemblance and time-consuming. Hairstyling not included.

The most fun, though, was when criminalists did a crime scene reconstruction using lasers and the bullet hole in the girl’s glove to determine that her shooter was 6 feet, 4 inches tall. Then they figured that the bullet traveled 200 feet into an office building, and based on the angles, they went into a private office, busted up the sheetrock, and found it in a wall. Her mother had also been shot but survived with a bullet left in her chest. They were able to match both projectiles to a gun, and it was solved. Sadly, the mother died from the surgical retrieval of said bullet. I was getting into the show. Until, that is, the CSI supervisor got back to the morgue to see the mother laid out on a steel table, ready for autopsy. The supervisor petted the face and kissed the forehead of the decedent.

No, no, no. Never.

Despite the sometimes-egregious offenses, I was getting sucked in. There was the excitement that I had felt at my years on the job, and the compelling desire to find the truth and get justice for the victims. The sense of mission was there. “We work for the families,” my boss Charles Hirsch, the father of modern forensic pathology once told me, “And there is nothing more important than that.”

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So, to the question: does TV get it right?

Yes, but…

TV writers exaggerate, speed up timelines, and use lots of pseudo-science and special effects to entertain us. But they shouldn’t pretend that all forensic scientists are quirky girls with troubled pasts or that DNA is necessary to solve every case. They shouldn’t make us believe that every crime lab has a Rodin who can sculpt a likeness of a victim faster than it takes to have a pizza delivered. They shouldn’t promote the fantasy that every department has millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech equipment. And for the love of God, they shouldn’t let anyone kiss the corpse.

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