OKLAHOMA CITY – It’s called the CSI Effect, a name for jurors’ unrealistic expectations of the types of forensic evidence that attorneys, mainly prosecutors, should be able to produce to prove their case.

It’s supposedly fostered by the multiple versions of CSI and Law and Order television shows, with Cold Case and Without a Trace thrown in for good measure.

Some Oklahoma defense attorneys say it’s a real phenomenon, one that has upped the evidentiary ante in criminal cases.

Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said potential jurors may have a certain level of expectation when they first walk into a courtroom due to such programs.

It’s up to prosecutors to educate them that much of what they see on TV is not realistic or its utilization is limited, he added.

“There are not fingerprints in every case, no matter what the suspect may have touched,” Prater said. “DNA is not left at every scene; if it is, many times it’s degraded to a point where it cannot be identified.”

Prater said that much of the technology featured on CSI is real, but finite.

“The extent to which it can realistically be used in most criminal cases, is limited,” he added.

In some cases jurors must be told there is no fingerprint or DNA evidence and prosecutors will rely on eyewitnesses or other evidence, Prater said.

Has Prater seen any lingering effect on jury verdicts?

“Occasionally there are individual jurors that still expect it, even though we’ve told them this science won’t be presented in this particular case,” he said. “If we’re not able to satisfy their curiosity, they’re not going to say we established our burden beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Prater believes that CSI and similar programs have been a kind of double-edged sword.

“I think they’ve raised the level of sophistication of your average citizen as to the criminal justice process and potential evidence that they could see in any given case,” he said. “We do have to overcome the limitation of that science as it relates to the way that science is portrayed on TV. That is the negative side of it.”

A positive side effect Prater sees is the number of students going into forensic fields as a result of CSI and its competition.

He said a new forensics program at the University of Central Oklahoma will lead to better-trained police officers, technicians and the like.

“Going into the area of forensic science is more of an area that’s viewed as being really cool,” Prater said.

Veteran Oklahoma City criminal attorney Irven Box, a former prosecutor, said he noticed a change in what juries see as valid evidence after the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial, one of the first major cases that millions of viewers watched each minute of, on a daily basis.

“From that point, I started noticing a difference in jurors’ viewing police and police work, and then of course CSI comes along, and it also added to the effect,” Box said.

Before the Simpson trial, he said, a police officer or forensics expert could get on the stand and say they knew the moon was made of green cheese, and jurors believed it.

That changed with the Simpson trial and shows like CSI, he said.

“I saw jurors questioning the ability of the police,” Box said. “I think they now expect the police to be able to do those things that we see CSI do in a matter of minutes in a one-hour episode.”

Box said he tried a case a year after the Simpson case, during which jurors asked why the police had not done certain things that they had seen in that celebrity trial, particularly certain types of forensics evidence and DNA. He said the person was acquitted.

Box thinks that overall, the changes in jurors’ perceptions have been more of a positive for the defense side.

“It’s made it more difficult for prosecutors to get a case based on circumstantial evidence and without forensics and the tools that science has now,” he said.

“I think it’s probably made the police and prosecutors better, because they know now that the general public knows that certain things can be done, or at least they perceive they can be done, through forensics.”

As Box pointed out, defense attorneys will challenge the fact that certain tests were not done in cases where a person’s liberty is at stake.

Oklahoma City has also experienced what Box called the “Gilchrist effect,” a reference to questionable forensic work and testimony from former police chemist Joyce Gilchrist, who was fired after criticism and investigation of her methods put the results of many cases in doubt.

“The Joyce Gilchrist effect put things backward,” he said. “Prior to that time, I believe that if a forensic scientist from the police department got on the stand, they believed everything.”

Early on, Box said, defense attorneys had few if any forensic experts on their side to challenge, for example, the hair-sample comparisons made by prosecution experts like Gilchrist – comparisons Box said were near junk science.

Defense attorneys now have those experts, he said.

Box said the national work of the Innocence Project, which has resulted in the exoneration of many wrongfully convicted individuals, including two Ada men whose stories are outlined in John Grisham’s The Innocent Man, has also had an effect.

More than 200 individuals have been exonerated by the project’s work, chiefly through DNA evidence.

“I think that jurors now question, and demand more,” Box said. “I think that if it’s not there, then I think the prosecutor is going to be deficient.”

Jurors’ expectations can sometimes be unrealistic, Box believes.

For example, in his own 30-some years in the criminal justice system, Box said he has not had many cases made or lost due to fingerprint evidence.

“Most people think you get fingerprints from everything,” he said. “Well, you don’t. They’re just not there.”

Likewise, he said, DNA seldom is the decisive factor in a case, unless it deals with crimes such as rape or homicide.

Criminal defense attorney Billy Bock, Oklahoma City, has a different take on the CSI issue.

“I have not had it affect any of my cases where jurors have expected more than they’ve gotten, or less, and had questions about that,” Bock said.

He said that 10 or 12 years ago attorneys would ask potential jurors whether they preferred Law and Order, which was considered a more conservative, prosecution-oriented program, or The Practice, which focused on a criminal defense firm and was considered more liberal in tone.

“I don’t do that, necessarily, anymore,” he said. “I don’t know whether it really helped or didn’t help.”

Bock said it has been his experience that jurors take their job seriously.

“Every trial I’ve ever had, when jurors have come back, I’ve seen evidence of some of them crying or really, really upset,” he said. “I don’t mean upset like they’ve been arguing, but upset because it plays such a toll on a person to sit in judgment over another person’s life.”

Educating jurors about their side of the case is the job of the prosecuting and defense lawyers, Bock said.

Bock mentioned a recent case tried by a friend in which foot prints were found in the snow near some cocaine. He said a man was found nearby in the street and arrested on a drug charge due to that circumstantial evidence.

If that case was part of a CSI episode, he said, evidence would be presented not only of the footprints, but the exact shoe size, type, style, and the year they were made or bought.

In the real case, Bock said, no pictures were even taken of the footprints, and the man was not convicted.

“I think jurors want to get information,” he said. “But it’s up to the lawyers to be advocates of what’s out there.”

Jurors in real-life cases may hear from several experts on both sides, Bock said, but no one has the capability to present cases as they are outlined on television.

At the same time, Bock describes himself as a CSI fan.

“I look at my wife and I’m like, ‘That would make my job so hard, or so easy,’” he said. “It could disprove people, also.”

Bock said it’s fine with him for jurors to have high expectations of attorneys.

“Potentially, there’s a problem with the unrealistic expectations of the way that evidence is out there,” he said. “Maybe I, as a defense lawyer, would be able to say, ‘You didn’t do this, you didn’t do that,’ and I wouldn’t hesitate to say, ‘Why didn’t you fingerprint this?’ But then it’s up to the prosecutor to say, ‘Is there any way to have fingerprinted that tape?’ And if there was, then maybe they should have done that. But if there wasn’t, then the jurors just need to weigh that accordingly.”

Bock said he can see from a prosecutor’s standpoint where they may not like CSI and similar shows, “because they think the public has made the bar higher for them to prove cases beyond a reasonable doubt.”

However, if cases are investigated and processed fully and correctly from the foundational police work onward, he said, that improves things for both sides.

“It benefits the whole system when good police work is done,” Bock said.