Think we're exaggerating? Trust us, some of Hollywood's effects on the world are far stupider than that. Such as....

Cinema and literature can change our lives in noble and profound ways. They can, but usually don't. For every Uncle Tom's Cabin that can take credit for a net benefit to the human race, you have a Jaws, which made a generation of Americans afraid to even climb into their swimming pools for fear a great white was hiding in there.

6 The CSI Effect

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Seen in: CSI

Impact on real life: Murderers are being set loose on the streets.

To put it simply, some experts believe that the growing popularity of the CSI franchise has created unrealistic expectations among juries, who see on TV that a single skin cell is all you need to create a 3D hologram of the suspect's face, and assume that if you don't have that, then he must not have done it, right? Therefore you have jurors who think they need to vote "not guilty" in every case that doesn't have 100 percent indisputable DNA evidence (which it turns out is pretty much all of them all of them).

Take Robert Blake, a man accused of murdering his wife: Over 70 witnesses testified against him, including a few Blake had approached and offered money to kill his wife. The only thing the prosecution didn't have was forensic evidence, but there was no way a jury would acquit a man based on such stupid reasons like "there was no black-light semen."



Poor girl: Raped by an entire circus.

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But of course, because we here at Cracked don't tell you about reasonable reactions and logical responses, that is exactly what they did. Robert Blake walked free, probably ticking off a mental note: You can get away with murder as long as you don't jerk off all over it.

Similar fuckery occurred in the case of Robert Durst, whose lawyer got him acquitted by convincing the jury that Durst dismembered his neighbor in self-defense. Forensic evidence on the head would totally prove it, too. If only somebody could find it...