MASKSFORDOCS, INMATE RELEASE AFTER ACQUITTAL, AND CSI THE TV SHOW - 085

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, Masks for Docs, Inmate Release after Acquittal and CSI, the TV show. I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

Welcome to episode number 85 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction. If this is your first time listening to this podcast, this is the part where I'd normally give shout outs to my amazing Patreon patrons for supporting this show. I have a few different support tiers at 20, 10 and $2 per month and I love my patrons, but right now as the COVID-19 pandemic becomes a critical strain on the world's healthcare system. I'm donating 100% of the money I get from my Patreon patrons to an organization called Masks for Docs. I'm sure you've heard the stories of frontline healthcare workers having insufficient PPE supplies. Heck, the N-95 masks I've been using at work were ones I bought a couple of years ago at CVS during the wildfires that we had here in California. But when it comes to personal protection equipment, the situation really is dire, especially because on a global scale we're starting to see countries horde PPE and medical supplies for their own citizens, sometimes blocking exports of those supplies, which I can understand, but it puts us in the United States in a precarious position.

Over the last several decades, the US has been largely unable to compete with overseas manufacturing prices, so American factories have folded and entire cities and towns crumble across the country as a result. And that's true for most physical products, not just medical supplies and PPE, but Masks for Docs is addressing the PPE shortage head on. They have one goal, get protective supplies into the hands of healthcare workers as quickly as possible. If you have supplies, you can donate them. If you are a maker or have a 3D printer, you can fabricate them. Or in my case, if you have the money that can be donated, that always helps to.

Conversely, if you are on the medical front lines and are in need of PPE, Masks for Docs, we'll get you matched with supplies. Masks for Docs are a community of volunteers from around the world, from the tech, business, design and nonprofit community and as it says on their guiding principles page, anything donated is given away, period. You can learn about this initiative by going to masksfordocs.com. Groups like this should give us hope. We are smart, strong, capable and kind. We will get through this by stepping up and doing what we can.

This week's first question comes from Rob Kerns and you can find his work at knightsfall.press and that's knight like knight takes king, checkmate. Rob writes, "Firstly, I want to thank you for all you do, both for the author and writer community as well as people in general as a police officer. I've been an avid subscriber of your podcast since I discovered you through your interview on Joanna Penn's podcast." Thanks, Rob, I appreciate that. "My question relates to the outcome of a trial. Here's the scenario. A person is arrested for a crime for the sake of conversation, let's say murder, and is remanded to custody while awaiting and during trial. During trial, the person is allowed to attend court in regular clothes, not a jail jumpsuit or uniform, and the jury acquits the person of the crime. As the defendant is standing there in the courtroom wearing a suit, will he or she be taken back into custody and returned to the jail to be processed out or will the defendant just have to appear there within a certain amount of time to fill out the paperwork and such? Thanks again regards, Rob."

Excellent question, Rob, and thank you for the kind words. The defendant will have to return to the jail to be processed out, but it would happen in a pretty short amount of time. Usually within just a few hours. When the defendants are in court for trial and they are wearing a suit, they're often wearing some sort of hindrance that will prevent them from escaping easily underneath their suit. So normally during the trial, the defendant is brought into the courtroom before the jury. They are seated at the defense counsel's table and their handcuffs are removed. The idea here is that if the jury were to see the defendant wearing any kind of restraints, like handcuffs or a belly chain, that would be prejudicial, so they remove those restraints before the jury ever comes in so they can't see them.

Now where I work, it's common for the defendant to have a locking leg brace on one of their legs underneath their suit so they can unlock it while they're seated to allow the leg to bend. But if they try to run it will lock out their leg making their run look more like a pirates peg leg waddle, so removing their leg brace will happen back at the jail. And also, they have to return any property they have, meaning the jail has to return the property they have of the defendants, usually the clothes they were wearing at the time they were booked and most importantly they will need their ID back, like their wallet with a driver's license or ID card or whatever. Plus the jail needs to cut them a check for whatever money the defendant might have on their commissary books, meaning the money they have in an account to buy things inside the jail, like a certain flavor of toothpaste or oatmeal or a packet of pop tarts, that kind of thing.

And then also upon the defendant's release, they're often given some sort of small transportation credit, whether that's a cab ride or a bus token or whatever to head off in whatever direction they might need, assuming they don't have any family or friends to pick them up. And lastly, taking the defendant back to the jail reduces the likelihood that a victim's loved one that disagrees with that verdict is immediately able to hurt the now acquitted defendant. So I hope this helps answer your question, Rob.

Roberts Lanka writes in from Latvia and Roberts writes, "hello Detective Richardson. I'm an English and literature major, freshman in LCC International University and I'm an aspiring author. One of the things we have to do for our detective-based literature class is to analyze different detective podcasts and yours was on the list. I loved episode 80 where you talked about how experience is the greatest teacher and I also appreciated all the detail you put into the episode. Topic we are currently studying in our class is police procedurals and I wanted to ask if you could go over how much of what's portrayed on TV, like CSI, is true and what are the main differences. Thank you and good luck in further episodes from over the pond. Latvia." Thank you so much Roberts and please thank your literature professor for including my podcast in the syllabus. That makes my teacher heart sing.

I also teach at the collegiate level, but even I don't tell my students that I have a podcast. So what is true and what isn't about television police procedurals, especially CSI. I'm going to focus on CSI in particular. This could be an entire university course on its own, so let's start with what CSI gets right. More often than not, the science portrayed on CSI is factual for the most part, at least it has been for the few dozen episodes that I've seen over the years. I can't say that is the case for all cop shows, but it tends to be accurate for the CSI shows at least. But that said, it rarely, if ever, looks the cool slick way in real life that it does on TV. Crime labs tend to look more like the chemistry classroom from high school or college and not some sleek office with perfect backlighting.

CSI definitely has an aesthetic that is pleasing to the eye, but real crime labs have more of a form follows function aesthetic with a dash of made by the lowest bidder thrown in. Now, the biggest things where shows like CSI go awry is when it comes to job functions. While it's possible for detectives to be assigned as a crime scene investigator in a forensic science unit, many of those working as crime scene investigators are not sworn police officers. Many are civilian employees and often this is because they are experts in a particular scientific field with university educations in science, not law enforcement. But regardless of whether you're a civilian or a police detective assigned as a crime scene investigator, your job is to, wait for it, investigate crime scenes. That's it. That's your job. What I mean by that is that it is not your job to interview witnesses or hunt down suspects. No car chases, no kicking down doors. That's someone else's job. Your job is to investigate crime scenes and then work in the scientific lab as well.

Now another issue that we may see with TV versus reality is when we actually apply the science, when it's actually used. For example, in the episode, You've got Male, which is season two episode 12, which you can stream through Hulu. The character, Warrick, spends hours and hours putting a shattered sliding glass door back together after two sisters are killed and the result of the glass jigsaw puzzle is them, the CSIs, deducing that one sister went through the sliding glass door while upright as if she walked through the door. So their expert opinion is that it was an accident. They knew the sister died as a result of this because in the beginning of the episode, the autopsy reveals the sister died from glass slashing her brachial artery.

So the real question, and this is where TV differs from reality, is why would they painstakingly pieced together an entire sliding glass door? What were they looking for and why would they spend the time and effort on this versus doing something more pressing and important for other cases? And what I mean by that is, how is determining the height of a point of impact in a shattered sliding glass door going to reveal anything meaningful without making all sorts of assumptions about the evidence at hand. That is reality. But CSI is storytelling and the pieces of evidence and the reveal of their meaning are simply plot devices to inform the viewer or reader of something new in the story and to keep the story moving. As viewers of TV cop shows, we enjoy how the story unfolds and how we are fed these fascinating details, fascinating because of how cleverly they're presented to us.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that because it's fiction. It's a fun story to watch. Just like watching two of the CSIs, Grissom and Sarah interview a suspected murderer, even though it's not their job or spending days on a giant glass jigsaw puzzle that really offers no evidentiary value except for what the show's writers say it means. It's a fun crime drama to watch, but shows like this lead the general public to believe that is how business is done in real life. That's where it becomes a problem, because those viewers get called for jury duty. It's called the CSI effect. Despite the jury instructions that are read to them by the court before they go into the jury room to deliberate, the CSI effect creates some unrealistic expectations when it comes to forensic science and what it reveals in a criminal trial. If you expect to heap of forensic science evidence, but the case relies more on witness testimony, then the CSI effect might lead a juror to believe that the prosecution didn't adequately prove their case.

And real quick, I often hear the term circumstantial evidence used in kind of a condescending tone that indicates, Oh, circumstantial evidence, Oh it's only circumstantial evidence is less valuable than other evidence. But I find it really important to point out right now that all forensic "evidence" is circumstantial. Blood found in Place A or gunshot residue found on Person Two, or a point of impact in a sliding glass door at 62 inches above the ground means nothing without making an inference about its meaning. Compare that to a witness testifying under penalty of perjury that says, I saw the defendant stabbed the victim several dozen times, which would be called direct evidence versus circumstantial. Are witnesses always truthful on the stand? No. Can their memory of a traumatic incident be skewed over time? Sure. So just be careful how you describe evidence as the definitions may mean something other than what you intended. Thanks again for the question, Roberts. Stay healthy over there in Latvia.

Thank you so much for listening this week. I know you guys are cooped up at home right now doing your part. So while you're there, go ahead and ask me a question. Send them to me by going to writersdetective.com/podcast. And you know what, now's the time to be working on growing your mailing list. It's the single most important thing you can do to build the moneymaking side of your author business. I use ConvertKit and for a limited time, like now through April 30th of 2020, as I record this, ConvertKits' free plan now includes an unlimited number of landing pages, unlimited emails to your first 500 subscribers, plus you get access to Creator Pass, which is two courses filled with the teaching and tools you need to build your business. It's all free, if you sign up through my affiliate link. All you need to do is go to writersdetectivebureau.com/ckfree to sign up right now. Thanks again for listening. Have a great week. Stay inside, stay healthy and write well. We are going to get through this together.

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