CSIIf I Had A Hammer
Original Air Date: April 23, 2009
Nicola – Associate Staff Writer
nicola@thetwocentscorp.com
Jeremy Kent is innocent. That’s how he tells it, anyway. He goes before a court to say that nearly twenty years before he was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, almost entirely because of the testimony of his cellmate who was instructed to do so by their mutual lawyer. The court agrees that he never got a fair trial, and therefore they’re giving him his chance now.
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[photo: CBS]
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Jeremy Kent is innocent. That’s how he tells it, anyway. He goes before a court to say that nearly twenty years before he was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, almost entirely because of the testimony of his cellmate who was instructed to do so by their mutual lawyer. The court agrees that he never got a fair trial, and therefore they’re giving him his chance now.
ReplyDeleteThe crime took place in 1991. The murder of an old man named Harret who called 911, saying his house was being broken into. This was Catherine’s first solo case, so she’s in charge of this one. She leads Ray and Nick through a reevaluation of the crime scene.
There was a rock that supposedly had Kent’s print on it that was probably used to smash the window. The murder weapon was never found, but Catherine suspected that it was a hammer. There was a shoeprint outside near the fence that matched Kent’s size but none of his shoes. Catherine thinks that Kent broke in to rob the place, found Harret, and killed him. It’s not much, but evidently it was enough to convict him.
Archie and Greg get to work on the 911 call, using the sophisticated technology of now to discover new evidence. They isolate the sound of a car engine and wonder if it could be Kent’s car.
Meanwhile, Catherine’s been subpoenaed by Kent so he can ask her about her investigation. Kent drills Catherine about her situation at the time of the crime. He tries to insinuate that Catherine was influenced by her pregnancy and therefore did shoddy work on the case.
Riley examines the blood-stained rug for blood that might have been missed before that could have come from the suspect. What she founds is an outline of a hammer on the rug. Just like Catherine thought!
Kent talks to Catherine about the rock, which didn’t have enough points to conclusively match to Kent by today’s standards. He tells her he’s going to move to have it excluded from the new case. Catherine decides to reexamine the rock in the hope the she might find something that will more conclusively link Kent to the crime scene. The whorl in the middle is definitely his, and he looks pleased.
Meanwhile, Ray is looking over the footprint found outside. It looks like Kent jumped in order to make that sort of impression in the ground. Was he tossing the murder weapon into the neighbor’s yard? Catherine searched the yard, but she didn’t look up. They search the gutters and Ray finds a pair of binoculars. But Catherine finds the real prize: a hammer embedded in the tree with the tree growing around it. And it looks like that murder weapon may have a print in blood on it. It’s Harret’s blood!
Hodges does some magic analysis on the weapon and is able to prove that the hammer has been in the tree all this time, so Catherine didn’t plant it.
Things don’t look good for Kent, do they? Ah, but there’s always a twist.
And then Nick drops the bombshell: the two prints on the handle of the hammer don’t match Kent.
Nuts.
Catherine just thinks this means he had an accomplice. So she goes back to Kent and tells him about the fingerprint on the rock. He confesses to robbing the other houses but says when he got to Harret’s house, Harret was already dead.
Catherine is discouraged, so she seeks counsel from Brass. He tells her he shouldn’t doubt herself, that he pegged Kent as the bad guy from the beginning.
Catherine calls the team together to go over the evidence. Nick presents the theory that Kent could have killed Harret but might have had an accomplice who tossed the hammer. It would have been he who touched the hammer last. They wonder why Kent wouldn’t have given his accomplice up and wax philosophical for a moment.
Archie has more info about the engine in the 911 call. It wasn’t Kent’s car, but it could have been the accomplice’s. This is supported by the fact that there are two car doors slamming in the tape.
Going through Kent’s old yearbooks, they find a picture of him with a Sabrina Littee and a car that matches the sound in the 911 call. The car belongs to Arthur Littee, Sabrina’s father. Brass goes to talk to her and she says that she let Kent use the car now and then. She said she was home that night and gets a bit defensive. Brass gets offensive and gives her a warrant for the car.
Catherine and Ray begin to dismantle the car and find a tiny shard of glass with blood on it. The glass is analyzed a million times and it is concluded that the glass came from the broken window. The blood is analyzed a billion times and it is concluded that it’s female blood, perhaps Sabrina’s.
Sabrina meets Brass with her lawyer/husband. He’s a bulldog! But Sabrina wants to talk. She says Kent got her pregnant and he was robbing houses to get money so they could move away. She waited in the car during the robberies, except for at Harret’s. She says that Kent killed Harret, but Brass says the evidence says otherwise. It was her prints in the blood, so it’s likely that she killed him. But it doesn’t matter, because felony murder says that even accomplices can be charged with murder if it happens during a felony.
Catherine goes to deliver the grim news to Kent. Kent can’t believe Sabrina sold her out! Catherine wants to know why he reopened the case when he had to know that they’d find all this evidence. It seems that Kent just got sick of paying for the crime all by himself.
It’s always fun to see how far we (and when I say we, I mean the technological geniuses who write for this show) have come in the past few years. I wish we could have heard more about the “ancient” techniques, but it was nice to see a bit of comparison. Although, isn’t there a show for this already? I believe it’s called Cold Case Files?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pack for a trip to Vegas. Let’s hope I don’t meet the CSIs, or if I do I’m alive at least…
So yes she threw the Hammer but did she actually hit the poor man in the head?
ReplyDelete