CSI: “Post Mortem” Episode Recap

Brief summary:

While investigating an elderly woman’s murder, Grissom receives a miniature crime scene replica; Greg attends a hearing to ascertain his culpability in a teenager’s accidental death.

I really enjoyed this issue, mainly because one of my favorite characters, Greg Sanders played by Eric Szmanda, was the focus of one-half of the plotline this evening. Greg Sanders is standing trial for his running over the victim, Demetrius James, from the “Fannysmackin’” episode a few weeks ago. The story is that Greg comes across the group of thugs that were beating up tourists. In trying to save the victim he ends up running over one of the teens with his SUV, and is then later dragged from his car and beaten to inches of his death.

The drama in the courtroom is pretty good. Expected emotional outburts from the victim’s mother and brother occur. However, his brother seems to be the real thug in the family and continually threatens Greg. Once in the bathroom things seem like they could have gotten out of hand until an unexpected guy comes into the bathroom to wash his hands and the thug’s brother leaves.

The really annoying part of the courtroom is that one of the jurors feels like it’s his opportunity to be Perry Mason and question every detail. I’m all for this type of activity and questionning by a juror, but I got the impression that this guy was somehow connected to the mob of Fannysmackers, if not one of them. Also, the presiding “judge” is running for some political office and is taking this 15 minutes of fame to make a point and get some votes. At the end he brings up the fact that Greg had been taken to dinner to celebrate his recent case win and the lady he was with ordered a bottle of wine. The judge then asked if alcohol had been a factor in the death of the teen. This is where Greg’s character really stood out, he didn’t bend under pressure and very scientifically dissected the alcohol, his body weight and time to confirm that there would have been no alcohol in his system at the time of the event. YOU GO GREG! The case ends with Greg’s actions being deemed “excusable” and he was free. The thug brother then taunts him in the garage with his car and Greg is served papers for a civil suit against him by the victim’s family.

The lesser plotline involved the death of an old lady that was selling her prescription pain meds to support her other bad habits: smoking, cutting coupons, cherry cordial alcohol and video poker. This plotline was pretty standard, until another exact, scale model of the murder scene was delivered to the house. If you remember, this occured once before on the episode with Danny Bonaduce being a rockstar that was murdered and a scale model was left at the scene. Looks like they’ve got a serial murderer, or at least a serial modeler on their hands.