Factual error: The CSI staff repeatedly refer to the murder weapon as a tire iron. It is a crow bar or demolition bar. It had a nail pulling head, not a socket for the lug nuts.
Factual error: When Captain Brass is in the travel agency and talking to the woman who works there, they access the last bookings taken by the victim. 4 lines up from the bottom, "Bob R" seems to have booked a return trip to Paris in Germany, when in fact Paris is in France.
Factual error: In Kiss-Kiss,Bye-Bye, Stokes and Brown are watching surveillance footage when a Trans-Am pulls up on screen. They are able to get the license plate number and when they pull it up, the computer says it is a 1978 Trans Am. When looking at the rear end of the car on screen, it is from a 1979-1982 model where the licence plate was placed on the rear bumper. The 1978 model had the license plate mounted between the taillights.
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: 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: Brown and Stokes mix up enough ballistics gel to make a life-size dummy to test their theory. The entire production (getting a mannequin, making a mold from the mannequin, etc,.) takes place in one shift. Ballistics gel needs to cool in a fridge, or on ice, (32-41°F) overnight. That alone eliminates the possibility that it was done in one shift. http://www.recguns.com/Sources/XD3.html.
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.
Factual error: In the scene where Hodges describes the camera glass to Grissom, he states that camera lenses are curved on one side and flat on the other for a higher refractive index. The refractive index is a property of the glass and has nothing to do with its shape. Also lenses used in cameras can have any shape to them, with even a moderately good lens in a compact camera being made of several pieces of glass with few flat surfaces. This is not modern technology in camera lenses, they have been made like this for decades. Narrowing it down to a non-compact camera by Nikon, Canon or Leica is also wrong, as all manufacturers use these techniques.
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.
The Fallen - S14-E19
Factual error: DB Russell gives Mark Roberts a bottle of water to hold. In the blood he leaves his fingerprint on the bottle. Stokes is watching with another policeman the CCTV footage from the interview room. Stokes then says grab a screen shot of the water bottle. They zoom in and low and behold they get a totally clear fingerprint. No way to get that much clarity from a CCTV camera. (00:17:00)
Factual error: When Nick picks up the contact lens from the PI's body, you can tell from the way it bends while he is holding it with the forceps that it is soft and pliable, as if it had just come out of the eye. However, after 6-12 hours outside of an eye or a contact case (the amount of time David says the PI has been dead), a soft contact will dry out and become wrinkled and hard.
19 Down (1) - S9-E9
Factual error: Season 9, Episode 9 - 19, "Down": Towards the end of the episode they are searching along railroad tracks. A MetroLink train passes by. MetroLink serves the greater Los Angeles area, but does not serve Las Vegas.
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: At the time where they are looking into the moon and the time, they misstate the time the moon rose in 1997 and they state that the moon was waning, when it actually waxed in the middle of June in 1997. (00:33:00)
Factual error: Throughout the episode, people refer to the previous murder as occurring 14 years ago. That puts it in 1999, yet we know it was in 2000, thanks to photos and other evidence.
Living Doll - S7-E24
Factual error: When Nick and Katherine are examining the bloody prints in the bathroom, Katherine looks at the wall outlet and says there are no burn marks present, when smudges are visible around the socket, and the wall next to it.
