On this week’s episode of CSI: Miami, entitled “Bad Seed,” the team goes after a major agricultural giant after a young woman is rushed to the ER unconscious. She soon dies after her kidneys shut down, which caused her body to undergo complete organ failure. Dr. Woods immediately believes that the young woman has been poisoned because of how quickly she died and calls in the CSI: Miami team.

At first the main suspect is the woman’s boyfriend, Ethan, who tells Delko he was planning on proposing to her soon. He even carried the ring in his pocket.  The forensics team tests everything in her apartment for any sort of poison, yet they are running blind at this point because they don’t know exactly what killed the woman.

While Delko is following up with the boyfriend, Ethan collapses and has to be hooked up to a machine that will breath for him.

It is learned that the woman died from a deadly strain of E-coli and the CSI: Miami team go to the restaurant where the couple ate about a week ago, only to learn that E-coli isn’t produced in a kitchen and that if they were poisoned, the bacteria would have to come from the grower of the produce.

They discover the farm and the cows are owned by a huge company called Bixby and that the company is using a special type of corn that has been manufactured in their labs using a type of bacteria to helps it digest easier.  This corn is not only a breeding bed for E-coli, but also this particular strain of bacteria produces botulism, which is what killed Ethan.

Horatio confronts the CEO of Bixby who knew about the risk, but felt it was worth it to keep the prices down and to be able to produce more cattle and crops. Unfortunately, because of legal leverage allowed by law he can’t prosecute the agricultural giant, but he records the conversation to provide evidence for Ethan’s family to file a lawsuit. ­

This is one of those very true-to-life episodes of CSI: Miami that makes you cringe at our legal system. It plays it real close to the same type of legal leverage that the big insurance and drug companies control. This was another excellently written script with the same mystery and intrigue that we’ve grown to expect from this show.