'CSI': Henry Thomas has a cunning plan

As Grissom would have said, "CSI" is all about the evidence. But what happens when that evidence is almost two decades old?

[These spoilers have been waiting a long, long time.]

Jeremy Kent (known to you Earthlings as former "E.T." child star Henry Thomas) has been in prison for 18 years for a murder he claims he did not commit. It seems there'd been a string of break-ins his neighborhood, but in one home the baddie ran across elderly Thomas Harret. Thomas met the business end of a hammer, and a young CSI named Catherine Willows helped put Jeremy away after finding his fingerprint on a rock used to break Thomas' window.

Jeremy took up law while in the big house, then learned his former lawyer had set him up by convincing another inmate to lie at trial. Classy! That means Jeremy gets a new trial, which in turn means Cath needs to re-examine all the evidence.

Henry Thomas, by the way, plays Jeremy as so sincere and so honest that it's impossible to believe he's guilty. That makes for some interesting viewing, because we see the CSIs as starting with an assumption -- Jeremy's guilt -- and working the evidence to fit it. Grissom would not have been pleased.

Cath re-prints the rock, and sure enough, Jeremy's print is on it. Ray, meanwhile, figures out a single shoeprint from the scene means someone threw an item over a nearby fence. Yep, it's the hammer, never recovered during the original case, embedded in a tree. And hey, apparently the tree's bark grew around the hammer fast enough that it preserved both blood evidence and fingerprints. The prints aren't Jeremy's, though.

Back at the lab, Archie has isolated engine noise from Thomas' 911 call. The quality is so good, in fact, that he can identify the type of vehicle, a '60s muscle car. Maybe Jeremy had an accomplice? I gotta say, I hate that the CSIs are counting on Jeremy's guilt instead of truly starting from scratch.

Doesn't matter, though, because Jeremy's high-school yearbook shows him and girlfriend Sabrina Littee posing in front of a Dodge Super Bee, the kind of muscle car that'd fit the engine noise. Sabrina's all grown up and a liar to boot: First she denies hangin' with Jeremy, and then she gets all squirrelly. Good thing Brass has a warrant for the car! Even better that Sabrina still owns it.

Cath finds a shard of glass in a piece of the seat, and boy howdy, it has blood evidence. Hodges matches the glass to Thomas' window, and Wendy says the blood is... Sabrina's. Sabrina's story is that she waited in the car, but came in just in time to see Jeremy hammering Thomas. The break-ins? Were to help Jeremy and Sabrina flee to L.A. because she was preggers.

Cath goes to confront Jeremy, who of course breaks down. He seems to implicate Sabrina as the murderer, but really he's bitter that in 18 years, she hasn't visited or brought their son. Well, good job, dude: Now she'll probably go to jail too, and sonny boy will have to live with his stepfather. And hey, how wrong was I for pegging Jeremy as the typical innocent behind bars?

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