Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. This is
Speaker 1: part two of our series on Marie LeFarge. If you
Speaker 1: haven't yet listened to last week's episode, I would go
Speaker 1: back and start there. Marie LeFarge arrived at the gravesite
Speaker 1: of her husband, Charles Lafarge, wearing mourning clothes. She twenty
Speaker 1: four years old, was by all accounts, a striking woman,
Speaker 1: with long, dark hair tucked under her hat and a
Speaker 1: complexion that looked particularly elegant against her all black wardrobe.
Speaker 1: It might have looked, at first glance to an onlooker
Speaker 1: that she was at her husband's gravesite for his funeral, or,
Speaker 1: perhaps more realistically, in this case, to pay her respects
Speaker 1: to vietly placed flowers down on the grave of a
Speaker 1: man who had passed away from illness a year earlier.
Speaker 1: But no, Marie LeFarge was wearing black at her husband's
Speaker 1: grave because his body was being exhumed as part of
Speaker 1: a trial. Her trial, she was accused of murdering her husband,
Speaker 1: and her case had captivated the country. There were literally
Speaker 1: hundreds of spectators crowding the grave as it was dug up,
Speaker 1: with the judge of the region Lubersac supervising the digging.
Speaker 1: Savvy venders were selling smelling salts. As soon as Charles
Speaker 1: Lefarge's coffin was pride open, those salesmen began pulling in
Speaker 1: a hefty business. A sea of handkerchiefs were lifted to noses.
Speaker 1: In unison, Marie LeFarge swooned and seemed so faint that
Speaker 1: someone shouted that court should be postponed for the day.
Speaker 1: The jury decreed that the trial should continue to proceed.
Speaker 1: When Marie LeFarge had first been charged with the murder
Speaker 1: of her husband, local apothecary men had tried to test
Speaker 1: her husband's body for arsenic, but they were completely unfamiliar
Speaker 1: with the latest scientific method, a chemical test for identifying
Speaker 1: arsenic created by the Scottish doctor James Marsh. Not only
Speaker 1: had the local men used old fashioned, inexact methods, but
Speaker 1: their test had been completely bungled anyway, a glass tube
Speaker 1: had broken halfway through, so the judge had determined a
Speaker 1: new test would be performed, the Marsh test done by
Speaker 1: professional chemists in full view of the court, so no
Speaker 1: errors would be made. This time around. Unfortunately, by this
Speaker 1: point Charles LaFarge's body had decomposed to the point where
Speaker 1: a newspaper described it as paste rather than flesh. The
Speaker 1: experts were forced to use a spoon to scrape what
Speaker 1: they could into small pots. Those pots were swiftly transported
Speaker 1: to an open air laboratory in tool where a group
Speaker 1: of chemists were going to be faced with the most
Speaker 1: high stakes experiment of their careers. With the court, a
Speaker 1: crowd of spectators, and the nation waiting, these chemists scurried
Speaker 1: around their charcoal furnaces. They painstakingly added the proper chemical
Speaker 1: reagents and set up a piece of porcelain at exactly
Speaker 1: the right distance from a flame. And then they held
Speaker 1: their breath, probably both from the stench of Charles l
Speaker 1: Lefarge's remains and from the anticipation of what they were doing.
Speaker 1: The Marsh test was deceptive in its seeming simplicity, though
Speaker 1: the chemistry involved wasn't particularly complex, there were a number
Speaker 1: of factors in its methodology that had to be absolutely
Speaker 1: perfect in order for the test to work, and the
Speaker 1: French chemists and toul who had read about the procedure
Speaker 1: in translation were performing it for the first time. Finally,
Speaker 1: after a day of waiting and anticipating, the chemists returned
Speaker 1: to the Palace of Justice. They turned to the judge
Speaker 1: and the jury and announced they had reached their scientific
Speaker 1: conclusion as to whether there was arsenic in the body
Speaker 1: of Charles Lafarge. Marie LeFarge looked as those who were
Speaker 1: about to fame as she and the rest of the
Speaker 1: room waited to hear the determination that would all but
Speaker 1: seal her fate. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood.
Speaker 1: The evidence against Marie LeFarge was building a very compelling
Speaker 1: case against her. She had been miserable in her marriage
Speaker 1: to Charles Lafarge. She was lied to and forced to
Speaker 1: live in his decrepit, crumbling estate out in the country,
Speaker 1: far from her friends and her well connected social scene
Speaker 1: in Paris. On the first night she had arrived, she
Speaker 1: had barricaded herself in her bedroom and threatened to kill
Speaker 1: herself with arsenic if he didn't release her from the marriage.
Speaker 1: Less than six months later, her husband was dead. Marie
Speaker 1: had ordered arson from an apothecary. A few days before.
Speaker 1: She sent her husband a cake in the mail, a
Speaker 1: cake that he seemed to become ill immediately after eating,
Speaker 1: and Marie had procured arsenic again. Once her husband was
Speaker 1: back home. She had sent Charles's clerk, Denis Barbier, to
Speaker 1: get a sizeable amount of arsenic, allegedly to kill the
Speaker 1: rats that still ran about their home. When the investigators
Speaker 1: had arrived after Charles's death, they found a bag of
Speaker 1: arsenic buried in the garden, seemingly hidden away from private eyes.
Speaker 1: A servant told the magistrate that Marie LeFarge had told
Speaker 1: him to bury it on her account so law enforcement
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to find it, presumably, and the friend
Speaker 1: of the family who worked as a housekeeper, Mademoiselle Braun,
Speaker 1: had seen Marie LeFarge putting white powder into broth that
Speaker 1: she was preparing for Charles. And then there was the
Speaker 1: case of the missing jewelry. Years before Charles's death, back
Speaker 1: when Marie was still unmarried, she had visited a friend
Speaker 1: of hers, the Vicomtesse de Leotto. Not long after the visit,
Speaker 1: the Vicomtesse noticed that some of her diamonds were missing.
Speaker 1: Though she and her husband didn't have Marie investigated, they
Speaker 1: were always suspicious, and once news of this massive murder
Speaker 1: trial hit newspapers. The Vicomte reached out to investigators and
Speaker 1: let them know that perhaps Marie's room should be searched
Speaker 1: for diamonds, and what should they have found right in
Speaker 1: Marie's room but those very jewels. Of course, stealing jewels
Speaker 1: is unrelated to the possible murder of one's husband, but
Speaker 1: it painted a damning picture of an am a moral
Speaker 1: woman who would steal and possibly even murder out of
Speaker 1: resentment for the fact that her lot in life had
Speaker 1: led her to marriage with a broke iron master. But
Speaker 1: of course, with regards to the actual murder, when Marie's
Speaker 1: case was going to trial, there was one piece of
Speaker 1: evidence more damning than anything else. Investigators on the site
Speaker 1: had tested Charles's body for arsenic. They tested the cup
Speaker 1: of broth Mademoiselle Bron had put aside, and they tested
Speaker 1: the little white box that Marie LeFarge had claimed contained
Speaker 1: gum arabic. They had determined arsenic was present. Sure, they
Speaker 1: the local men in Brieve had not been expert forensic chemists,
Speaker 1: and they hadn't used the more sophisticated March test. And yes,
Speaker 1: a tube had broken, but they had found arsenic, and
Speaker 1: that had to mean something, but did it? At the trial,
Speaker 1: Marie Lefarge's defense council cleared his throat one morning in
Speaker 1: court and read out a letter that had come directly
Speaker 1: from Paris. There was a rarefied air around the letter.
Speaker 1: People knew it was important. It was from a man
Speaker 1: who was nothing short of a scientific celebrity. Metuophila was
Speaker 1: the dean of the Paris medical Faculty, and he served
Speaker 1: on a number of influential committees. He edited important medical
Speaker 1: journals and less important but still interesting. He had a
Speaker 1: beautiful singing voice and would often hold musical salons that
Speaker 1: were considered centers of culture. The defense council began to
Speaker 1: read the let letter that Orphila had sent to court.
Speaker 1: You ask me, he wrote, if it is sufficient proof
Speaker 1: of the presence of arsenic in the digestive organs, if
Speaker 1: the liquor produced by boiling them in distilled water yield
Speaker 1: when treated with sulfurated hydrogen a yellow precipitate. He was
Speaker 1: describing the old method, the non marsh method for finding arsenic.
Speaker 1: I answer no, he said. Orphela referenced a previous case
Speaker 1: where the yellow precipitate that is so often mistaken for
Speaker 1: arsenic had been something completely innocuous. The test that those
Speaker 1: men had done in brief Orphela concluded was completely meaningless.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty, an English doctor writing about the case
Speaker 1: reached the same verdict, stating no weight can be attached
Speaker 1: to the report of the brief commission, the members of
Speaker 1: which evidenced the grip josest ignorance of the truths known
Speaker 1: to the merest tyro in legal medicine. They had found arsenic,
Speaker 1: maybe sure, but factoring in the old, unreliable method and
Speaker 1: the broken too, the entire thing was bunk. And if
Speaker 1: there was no proof that Charles Lafarge had actually been
Speaker 1: poisoned with arsenic, then there was only circumstantial evidence of
Speaker 1: a woman who might have been unhappy in her brief marriage,
Speaker 1: but wasn't a murderer. And so those were the circumstances
Speaker 1: that led to the judge ordering a second examination of
Speaker 1: Charles LaFarge's body. This time, experts from Limoge would take
Speaker 1: whatever samples they could from the decomposed corpse, used their
Speaker 1: spoons to scoop it into jars and use the marsh test,
Speaker 1: which could detect even the tiniest train of arsenic By
Speaker 1: this time, the trial had become a sensation. If you
Speaker 1: were imagining something out of the musical Chicago, where an
Speaker 1: accused murderess becomes an object of tabloid celebrity, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: be far off. People crowded into the courtroom to get
Speaker 1: a glimpse of the young widow dressed all in black,
Speaker 1: who was known to swoon and to require smelling salts
Speaker 1: at various points during the proceedings. As the trial went on,
Speaker 1: Marie LeFarge would begin to be carried into courts on
Speaker 1: a setae. So delicate were her sensibilities and so finally,
Speaker 1: with anticipation as high as it possibly could be, the
Speaker 1: Lamoge Commission issued their report. Using the incredibly scientific Marsh test.
Speaker 1: They found no arsenic in Charles LaFarge's body. Marie and
Speaker 1: her counsel both burst into tears. She was vindicated, at
Speaker 1: least for now. With the scientific consensus that Marie LeFarge
Speaker 1: was actually innocent, the events of the preceding year began
Speaker 1: to tell a slightly different story. Sure, Marie had been
Speaker 1: unhappy when she had arrived at her husband's crumbling estate
Speaker 1: to find that he had lied about his financial situation,
Speaker 1: wouldn't you be Yes, She had threatened suicide that night,
Speaker 1: but she had been overwhelmed, foolish, embarrassed, childish. Her husband
Speaker 1: Charles had responded kindly, and from that point on he
Speaker 1: and Marie began to get along. It was at least amiable,
Speaker 1: something that slowly developed over the weeks into friendship and
Speaker 1: then maybe even devotion. Of course, Marie's mother in law
Speaker 1: was suspicious and resentful of her from the start. Marie
Speaker 1: wrote in her memoirs that when Charles was away, he
Speaker 1: would write sweet love notes to Marie in his letters home.
Speaker 1: For a time, it was an evening tradition that Marie
Speaker 1: would read Charles's letters out loud, but she noticed how
Speaker 1: her mother in law stiffened and bristled when she read
Speaker 1: anything sweet or romantic. Marie stopped reading those parts. The
Speaker 1: fact that Charles had gotten sick after eating cakes they sent, well,
Speaker 1: Marie's mother in law had baked those cakes. She was
Speaker 1: the only one in the family who baked the desserts,
Speaker 1: and if the cakes had been replaced or tampered with
Speaker 1: by the time they reached Charles in Paris, there was
Speaker 1: no evidence it was Marie who did that. It could
Speaker 1: have been anyone at that point. In fact, it seems
Speaker 1: unlike Marie would have poisoned the cakes at all, because
Speaker 1: she wrote in her letter to Charles that he should
Speaker 1: invite her favorite sister over while he was in Paris,
Speaker 1: where it seems really likely that she could have shared
Speaker 1: the cake. You don't want to suggest your favorite sister
Speaker 1: go over to a house where poisoned cake is lying around.
Speaker 1: As for ordering arsenic, Arsenic was used as rat poison,
Speaker 1: and le Glandier their home was full of rats. They
Speaker 1: scampered everywhere, ate Marie's clothes. It's completely reasonable that Marie
Speaker 1: would try to make it so that the home that
Speaker 1: she lived in might be slightly improved. And then when
Speaker 1: Charles came home ill and bedridden, the rats were bothersome.
Speaker 1: They made noise and kept Charles up when he needed
Speaker 1: bed rest. If Marie had actually planned on poisoning her
Speaker 1: husband with the arsenic, then why would she have told
Speaker 1: him about every step she was taking to get arsenic
Speaker 1: and get rid of the rats. She told him when
Speaker 1: she sent his clerk, Denny Barbier to get the arsenic,
Speaker 1: and she showed Charles how much had come when Barbier
Speaker 1: had returned, there was nothing sneaky about it. Well, what
Speaker 1: about the arsenic that was buried in the yard when
Speaker 1: the investigators came. In Marie's memoir, she says, a young servant,
Speaker 1: panicked by the thought of either Marie or anyone else
Speaker 1: in the household being accused of arsenic poisoning, had buried
Speaker 1: it without telling Marie. When the investigators interrogated the servant boy,
Speaker 1: they had intimidated him. They had threatened him with the
Speaker 1: scaffold unless he told them that he had buried the
Speaker 1: arsenic on Marie's orders. By then, the investigation had already
Speaker 1: set its sights firmly on Marie, who had been accused
Speaker 1: by Charles's suspicious family members who hated her from the start.
Speaker 1: But sometimes people get cholera, Sometimes people die of cholera.
Speaker 1: The matter of the Vicomtess's missing diamonds was a little
Speaker 1: more complicated, But even then Marie had an explanation. You see,
Speaker 1: when the investigators were given the tip and arrived to
Speaker 1: search Marie's rooms for the jewels, well they hadn't actually
Speaker 1: needed to search at all. Marie Lafarcee told them outright, yes,
Speaker 1: she did have the Vicomtessa's diamonds and told them exactly
Speaker 1: where they were. She hadn't stolen the diamonds from her friend.
Speaker 1: Her friend had given them to her to sell to
Speaker 1: help her friend out of a tricky financial situation. The
Speaker 1: Vicomtess was being blackmailed by an ex lover, and she
Speaker 1: had asked Marie to secretly sell some of her diamonds
Speaker 1: to pay him off. The Vicomtesse had not expected her
Speaker 1: husband to even notice that the jewels were gone. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, Marie kept the diamonds safe in her room
Speaker 1: while she figured out what to do with them. When
Speaker 1: Marie was arrested for the alleged jewel robbery, she wrote
Speaker 1: to her friend, May God never visit upon you the
Speaker 1: evil you have done to me. Alas I know you
Speaker 1: are really good but weak. You have told yourself that
Speaker 1: I am likely to be convicted of an atrocious crime.
Speaker 1: I may as well take the blame of one which
Speaker 1: is only infamous. I keep our secret. I left my
Speaker 1: honor in your hands, and you have not chosen to
Speaker 1: absolve me. The story is a little far fetched, I admit.
Speaker 1: While waiting for the murder trial to proceed, Marie was
Speaker 1: actually tried and found guilty for stealing the jewels. In
Speaker 1: the end, it was her word against her friends, and
Speaker 1: the Vicomtesse maintained that there had been no ruinous blackmail plot.
Speaker 1: But even if Marie was guilty of stealing her friend's diamonds,
Speaker 1: as Marie had pointed out in her letter, that crime
Speaker 1: was merely infamous as opposed to the atrocious crime of murder.
Speaker 1: And the chemists came back with the marsh test and
Speaker 1: absolved Marie LeFarge of murder. There was no arsenic in
Speaker 1: Charles LaFarge's body, and so no matter how likely a
Speaker 1: suspect Marie Lafarge was, it was going to be very
Speaker 1: difficult for a jury to convict her. Still, the prosecution
Speaker 1: was convinced that Marie Lafarge was a murderess, and they
Speaker 1: were determined to do everything they could to win their case,
Speaker 1: even if the defense was already doing a metaphorical victory lap.
Speaker 1: After the test results. Wait a moment, the prosecution said,
Speaker 1: there was one test that said there was arsenic and
Speaker 1: another that said there wasn't. That's not very definitive at all. Sure,
Speaker 1: the Lamoege Commission had used the brand new Marsh test,
Speaker 1: but it was famously tricky, and they had done it
Speaker 1: for the first time, there's no guarantee that they did
Speaker 1: it right. The prosecution had an idea, a Hail Mary,
Speaker 1: a tiebreaker test done by none other than the celebrity
Speaker 1: of the French chemistry world, met to Orphila himself. By
Speaker 1: this point, there was nothing left of poor Charles LaFarge's
Speaker 1: body but something I read described as a milkshake like
Speaker 1: preparation of organ mash. But Orphila was the expert. If
Speaker 1: anyone in France could do the Marsh test and do
Speaker 1: it absolutely correctly, it was him. Orphila was a distinguished
Speaker 1: looking man, with a bald head and fuzzy tufts of
Speaker 1: hair circling his temples. Contemporary drawings of him highlight his small,
Speaker 1: sharp nose and thin, serious lips. When Orphila entered the courtroom,
Speaker 1: I imagine his celebrity brought the room to a hush.
Speaker 1: The undisputed expert on arsenic poisoning stood before the judge
Speaker 1: and the jury. He had tested the remains of Charles Lafarge,
Speaker 1: all the organs that his team had managed to extract
Speaker 1: from the decomposing corpse. They had done the Marsh test
Speaker 1: and done it correctly. Before Orphila offered his conclusion as
Speaker 1: to the fate of Charles Lafarge, he gave the court
Speaker 1: some context. Over years of experimentation, he had determined that
Speaker 1: human bones contain trace amounts of arsenic, and that sometimes
Speaker 1: arsenic can also be found leeched from the soil, and
Speaker 1: so he had been extraordinarily careful in his analysis of
Speaker 1: Charles LaFarge's body to ensure that his samples taken from
Speaker 1: the organs were unspoiled and did not include any bone
Speaker 1: or soil. So what was the conclusion arsenic meteu Orphila
Speaker 1: had found arsenic in Charles Lfarge's organs half a milligram,
Speaker 1: an amount so tiny it could have only ever been
Speaker 1: detected using the marsh test. The courtroom erupted. The defense
Speaker 1: scrambled and tried to call one of Orphila's rivals, a
Speaker 1: man named Francois vincent Resbail, to the courtroom to offer
Speaker 1: a counter annal, but Rispel didn't make it in time.
Speaker 1: He arrived at the court four hours after the jury
Speaker 1: had reached its verdict. Orphila's testimony sealed Marie LaFarge's fate,
Speaker 1: and she was found guilty of the murder of her
Speaker 1: husband and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, though
Speaker 1: the labor would later be commuted. Marie Lafarge, twenty four
Speaker 1: years old, would spend the next twelve years of her
Speaker 1: life in prison. In eighteen fifty two, she became ill
Speaker 1: with tuberculosis, and she was released from prison on the
Speaker 1: orders of Napoleon the Third. She died a few months later.
Speaker 1: That was forensic toxicology and action. Orphila had found arsenic,
Speaker 1: and so it meant that Marie Lafarge was guilty. But
Speaker 1: did it and did Orphila actually find evidence that Charles
Speaker 1: Defarge was poisoned? The question was a little more complicated
Speaker 1: than it had appeared that day in the courtroom. The
Speaker 1: chemist Francois Raspel, possibly guilty over arriving at court a
Speaker 1: few hours too late to offer his own testimony, would
Speaker 1: spend years publicly challenging Orphila and criticizing both his methods
Speaker 1: and his results. Orphila had claimed he found half a
Speaker 1: milligram of arsenic in Charles Lefarge's remains. Respel determined that
Speaker 1: amount to be a hundredth of a milligram, and there
Speaker 1: were a number of points in Orpheli's testing where a
Speaker 1: small amount of arsenic might have snuck in. For Arphela's
Speaker 1: final test, the one where he had found the arsenic,
Speaker 1: he had sent one of his assistants to a neighboring
Speaker 1: town to get some reagent. That reagent hadn't been tested
Speaker 1: for arsenic before it was used in the experiment, and
Speaker 1: it's conceivable that it was contaminated. As for Orphila's claim
Speaker 1: that human bones naturally contain arsenic, well they don't. Actually,
Speaker 1: we know that now, and the fact that Orphela believed
Speaker 1: that they did indicates that there was some point in
Speaker 1: his earlier testing procedure where phantom arsenic was able to
Speaker 1: sneak in. Two years after Marie LeFarge was found guilty,
Speaker 1: another woman, Madame Lacoste, was accused of murder by arsenic.
Speaker 1: Of course, the famous Marie LeFarge case was the closest
Speaker 1: point of comparison, and the courts invited a chemist named
Speaker 1: Monsieur Chevalier to testify. Chevalier had been one of two
Speaker 1: of Orphela's assistants during the Lafarge investigation. For this new trial,
Speaker 1: a juryman asked Chevalier was the quantity of arsenic found
Speaker 1: by you in this case equal to that which served
Speaker 1: as a ground for conviction in the LeFarge case. Chevalier
Speaker 1: thought for a while and then answered, extremely carefully, I
Speaker 1: cannot reply to a question so put, he said, finally,
Speaker 1: what was said to be the poison found in the
Speaker 1: body of Lafarge was imponderable. It was so infinitesimal that
Speaker 1: it could not fulfill the conditions of a standard comparison
Speaker 1: when we use words more or less. The jury was dumbfounded.
Speaker 1: They declared Madame Lacoste innocent. Marie LeFarge heard the news
Speaker 1: of Madame Lacoste's exoneration while she was still in prison. Allegedly,
Speaker 1: Marie remarked, my ghost has saved her. Whether or not
Speaker 1: Marie LeFarge actually was guilty of murdering her husband, and
Speaker 1: whether or not Charles Lafarge was even poisoned with arsenic
Speaker 1: are both mysteries that, barring new information or a historian
Speaker 1: with Sherlock holmesy in powers of deductive reasoning, will probably
Speaker 1: elude us. But in the aftermath of the trial and
Speaker 1: in recent years, a number of theories emerged. The theory
Speaker 1: I find interesting, although again not necessarily convincing beyond a
Speaker 1: reasonable doubt. But interesting is that Charles Lafarge actually was poisoned,
Speaker 1: but by his clerk, Denny Barbier. According to some sources,
Speaker 1: Charles Lafarge, our victim, had been somewhat of a more
Speaker 1: nefarious character than he had been made out to be.
Speaker 1: In the wake of his death, some claim that Lafarge
Speaker 1: wasn't merely an iron master who fell into debts, but
Speaker 1: that he was also a forger, as in he used
Speaker 1: forged bills of exchange in order to procure advances. His
Speaker 1: right hand man in that endeavor was Denie Barbier. According
Speaker 1: to one unverified claim, when Barbier heard that Charles was
Speaker 1: close to death, he was heard saying, now I shall
Speaker 1: be master here. If he had been working on shady
Speaker 1: dealings with his boss and was nervous that those crimes
Speaker 1: might be revealed, it's plausible he had a motive to
Speaker 1: do away with Charles LeFarge, especially when he imagined he
Speaker 1: might be the one to take over Charles's business after
Speaker 1: he died. Barbier also had access to all of Charles's
Speaker 1: food and drink, and he had been the one who
Speaker 1: procured the arsenic that Marie had asked for to kill
Speaker 1: the rats. Barbier easily could have kept some or all
Speaker 1: of it for himself and given Marie something harmless in
Speaker 1: its place. The Edinburgh Review published an examination in eighteen
Speaker 1: forty two, two years after the trial, laying out the
Speaker 1: case against Barbier. According to them, Denis Barbier quote lived
Speaker 1: by forgery and was the accomplice of LeFarge in some
Speaker 1: very shady transactions by which that unhappy man sought to
Speaker 1: cover his insolvency. Barbier had also conceived a violent hatred
Speaker 1: against Madame LeFarge, as her presence was likely to hinder
Speaker 1: his nefarious practices and weaken his hold over his companion
Speaker 1: in crime end quote. They continue to explain that Barbier
Speaker 1: had unrestricted access to everywhere in the house that Arsenic
Speaker 1: was found. If Denis Barbier committed this foul crime, they concluded,
Speaker 1: he escaped without any punishment save that which would be
Speaker 1: inflicted by an outraged conscience. In the end, the marsh test,
Speaker 1: exact as it might have been, simply couldn't tell us everything.
Speaker 1: That's the story of Marie LeFarge, but keep listening. After
Speaker 1: a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more
Speaker 1: about how the legacy of science in courtrooms continues to
Speaker 1: affect us today. In two thousand and four, USA Today
Speaker 1: reported on a phenomenon that seemed to be affecting the
Speaker 1: ways juries rendered their verdicts. It's called the CSI effect,
Speaker 1: and according to researchers, what was happening was that the
Speaker 1: average person doing jury duty started watching a lot more TV,
Speaker 1: specifically a lot more crime TV like CSI, and in
Speaker 1: shows like CSI, DNA and other forensic evidence is ubiquitous
Speaker 1: and air tight. The CSI effect, then, is the alleged
Speaker 1: phenomenon that jurors expect forensic evidence in any trial, and
Speaker 1: when it's not present, either because it wasn't available or
Speaker 1: prosecutors thought it wasn't necessary, jurors are more likely to
Speaker 1: acquit even when there's plenty of other compelling evidence that
Speaker 1: someone committed a crime. The CSI effect has definitely informed
Speaker 1: the way that legal professionals today build their cases, but
Speaker 1: it's also just as possible that watching crime television shows
Speaker 1: might be more responsible for jurors wanting to convict more often.
Speaker 1: Professor Tom Tyler at NYU argues that television shows offer
Speaker 1: stories of catharsis and closure of justice being done, which
Speaker 1: jurors would try to replicate with a conviction. Tyler suggests
Speaker 1: that increased rates of acquittal might have to do not
Speaker 1: with police on television, but with the public's decreasing confidence
Speaker 1: in police in the real world. Noble Blood is a
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Speaker 1: Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz,
Speaker 1: with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick,
Speaker 1: Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is
Speaker 1: edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali,
Speaker 1: with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke,
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.