Factual error: In a number of episodes people are shown eating and drinking in the laboratories. For instance, in "Miss Willows' Regrets" Nick and Greg are seen eating fried chicken in the lab, and in "Overload" Sara eats a sandwich while watching Grissom experiment with her deli pickle. There are other examples. No reputable laboratory (which this is supposed to be) would allow its staff to eat or drink while in the lab. It is basic scientific protocol to prevent contamination of samples or the person picking up toxins on their food.
Factual error: The CSI doesn't prioritize cases by importance, and have samples from big cases go first like they do on the show. They don't have the lab in house like on the show. It's too expensive. They have to send samples from even the most important cases, to labs where it takes weeks to months to test DNA to keep down costs. They also have to do this to make sure DNA testing is done correctly. DNA has to be tested multiple times because mistakes can be made.
Suggested correction: This entry is half correct and half incorrect. It is true that DNA is not as accurate as the show depicts and no lab would run it one time. However, some CSIs do have a lab "in house" as in some units that's their "office" so to speak. Not true of all of them, but is for some. While law enforcement won't openly admit this; they do put a rush sometimes on high profile cases as they have a reputation to maintain and it won't look good to the public if results aren't coming back quick enough.
Cool Change - S1-E2
Factual error: There are some majors problems with the "jumper's" crime scene. The girlfriend bashes the boyfriend on the back of his head. He bleeds out all over the balcony (she cleans up the blood with towels) but the body leaves absolutely no blood behind on the carpet (It's white\off white so blood would stain badly). She drags his body across the carpet and carpet fibers get stuck in his watchband by the adjustment knob. Dragging a body across the carpet would snag fibers on the opposite side. The CSI crew experiment and conclude the boyfriend was pushed. The blow to the head killed him instantly (coroner's report): therefore, the girlfriend would have dumped the body. Dumping a dead body over a rail would provide a different trajectory than pushing a live person and would not have matched their experiments. Finally, the boyfriend is fairly muscular and heavy. The girlfriend is petite. It would be an extremely difficult task to stand a lifeless body up at the balcony rail and flip him over. (If she could have lifted him up and over the rail, she should have been able to carry him to the balcony instead of dragging him.)
Blood Drops - S1-E7
Factual error: The show falls into the Hollywood myth on polygraphs. Jesse is given a polygraph test after pleading guilty to the 4 murders. He answers all questions, except the last one, honestly. The 4 traces on the polygraph show no real movement on these questions. On the final question, Jesse lies and all 4 traces spike. If polygraphs actually did that, they would be admissible in court. But the reality is, it is the opinion of a highly trained operator that decides if there is a lie. The average person could not look at a polygraph results and point out a lie. There is no huge, visible spike. The producers could have replaced the 4 traces with a red\green light: Green is an honest answer and red a lie.
Factual error: Grissom and Catherine are looking through a microscope and discussing a microscopic specimen (heart of frozen body). In reality they would not see anything as all microscope objectives are missing on this instrument (the microscope nose-piece is totally empty.). (00:21:00)
Factual error: When Gris and Teri are looking at the bones that were found in the desert and discussing an electric saw, Teri is talking about the medial condyle of the femur but the bone they are looking at is the tibia (seen by the flatness of the tibial plateau - the femoral condyles are much more rounded, and the triangular shape of the shaft of the bone). It makes no difference to the story but having gone to the lengths to get the scaphoid and cuneform in the right place, it would have been nice not to get two major bones, that look completely different, mixed up.
Factual error: Several problems surround the electrocution death and the investigation. First, there is the insinuation that the boots should have protected the victim from the electrocution because of the rubber soles. Regular shoes and standard work boots will not protect anyone from electric shock. You are still grounded. You have to wear special electrician's boots to insulate you from electric shock. These boots cost about triple standard work boots. Second, the CSI crew found a nail embedded in the boot. They theorized that is how the boots were grounded out. The problem there is the nail had to be pushed all the way through the sole and through the insole for it to work (the close up of the boot showed the nail in all the way). Even if the nail was barely through the insole, the victim would have felt the nail poking him at every step. With the nail all the way through, he wouldn't have even walked two steps before puncturing his foot on the nail. Third, there is the nail itself. When Grissom is examining the boots trying to find why they failed (failed to prevent the electrocution), he poses the question "What is the most common item found during construction?" The answer is a nail, and the nail in the boot appears to be a roofing nail. The construction site is for a multi-story prison. Nails aren't used in the construction of multi-story urban buildings: concrete and steel are. Carpenters come in after the building is erected and work on the interior, but there are no roofing nails.
Factual error: In the episode where the worker got electrocuted in a construction site the main character, before replaying the victim's fall, says that "terminal velocity is 9.8 seconds squared". What he should have said was that acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared.
Factual error: When they are explaining why a nail was hammered into the electrocuted workman's boot, it is said that cars are protected from lightning strikes because they are insulated from the ground by their tires. Actually, tires conduct electricity, because they contain carbon (see: http://cartalk.cars.com/Columns/Archive/1994/November/11.html). Cars are actually protected from lightning by the Faraday Cage effect, which is explained on http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/~kskeldon/PubSci/exhibits/E3/. Not a mistake CSI scientists would make.
Factual error: Grissom sets up a little experiment to see if the deceased's blood is conductive to electricity. All are amazed when the blood does conduct electricity. All blood is naturally conductive. As a matter of fact, cardiac output is measured as a function of blood conductivity.
Factual error: In the scene where Grissom is talking to the coroner about the bully who was shot, they talk about how the bully had "Dextrocardia" which is why all his organs are a mirror image of normality e.g. heart on right and liver on left. In actual fact Dextrocardia is only when the heart is on the right rather than left, the actual condition Grissom should have said was "Situs Inversus" not "Dextrocardia."
And Then There Were None - S2-E9
Factual error: Ballistics expert Bobby Dawson mispronounces the word "Koch" in the term "Heckler and Koch". He pronounces it "kotch" instead of the correct, "koch" (rhyming with lock0. A ballistics expert would know the correct way.
Factual error: The treasury officer stated that the couple was from "Las Vegas County". Anyone from the government (local/county/state/federal) should know Las Vegas is in 'Clark County'. Sara (who works for LVMPD/Clark County) did not react at all.
Factual error: The CSI crew set up an experiment. They put some chloroform into the tire, set the bus on a dynamometer (or some other testing platform) and wait for the tire to fail. The tire fails in the experiment in the exact same amount of time as it did in real life. Problem: They have no idea how much chloroform was used and it would be impossible to match it by luck. More chloroform used would equal quicker failure. Then, there is the heat. The tire traveling over the hot asphalt road would build heat faster then on their testing platform. More heat would mean a quicker failure, too.
Factual error: Sara calculates the time needed to sabotage the tire at a minute to a minute and a half. That is, remove the valve core, allow the majority of the air to escape (cannot pour anything into the tire while the air is escaping) pour in enough chloroform to sabotage the tire, replace the valve core, and air the tire to pressure. Even with an industrial air compressor, it would take over 2 minutes to air that tire to full pressure.
Factual error: When Grissom calls Greg into his office to ask him about his Scandinavian heritage, Greg says his grandfather was kicked out of Norway for getting his grandmother pregnant before they were married. Norway did not kick people out of country for that reason. Anyone who does family research will see that 7 out of 10 times a child was born out of wedlock or illegitimate, and nothing was done about it. It is recorded in the church records and that is it, there were lots of reasons this happened that children were born to unwed parents. Main reason was that they applied to be married and the marriage was disapproved of for one reason or another. Europeans are not as prudish as Americans about this stuff. A lot of Scandinavians nowadays live together, have kids and never get married.
Factual error: Grissom does a quick analysis on the rough diamonds (chemical or laser) and immediately identifies the region of origin for the diamonds. He and Catherine then postulate that the diamonds are conflict diamonds. There is no way to identify the country or region of origin through any type of analysis. The United Nations and the world's diamond industry are looking for a way. http://www.reliefweb.int/library/documents/conflictdiamonds.htm http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/010212/7907sci1.html http://www.whitefirejewelry.com/wfbb/viewtopic.php?p=88&sid=b0e62206a64d98c81e53b600e053582f.
Factual error: Grissom sees an information card for a 17th century suit of Japanese armour (just the card, not the suit itself), and immediately deduces that the suit must actually be from the 19th century, because the Japanese military was formed in the 1860s. That military was westernised, and did not wear armour. There was nothing on the card that falsely referred to that military as being established earlier, or indicated that the suit belonged to it. There was a reference to the "military class", but that was historically correct, and meant the Samurai.
Factual error: They talk about the type of tubes used in HIV tests. There are no special tubes specific for HIV testing alone. It is one generic tube that can be used for a multitude of tests including HIV. It did not seem as though Greg knew that she had gone for HIV testing before he ran the tests, so he should not have concluded that it was the type of tube used for HIV testing, only Catherine or Warrick should have made that connection.
Factual error: Brown and Stokes are investigating a mysterious fatal accident involving a Jeep and a downed power line. They state that the driver would have been safe if the Jeep had made contact with the power line because the tires would have insulated the Jeep from the electrical current. Wrong. First, a car is a Faraday cage, that is an electrical current would pass on the outside of a car on the way to the ground. As long as you don't touch the outer surface, you are safe. Second, tires are (almost always now) steel belted radials and conduct electricity nicely. Lastly, it was an open top Jeep. The power line made contact with the roll bar thereby electrifying the inner surface of the Jeep. The driver is in contact with the inner surface. This is a list, from one year from one utility company, of people that died from contact with power lines. You will see that tires exploded from the contact and some caught fire. http://www.sigalarminc.com/HistoricalNotes.htm.
