Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill — House of Lords, 2021-02-09
Topic: Law and Crime
Donald Thomas (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, may I say how much I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, in his warning against equating too closely the use of polygraphs in monitoring sexual offenders with their use on terrorist offenders, who obviously pose a very different problem? The Minister should consider that Sixty years ago, in 1961, I was proudly driving my red and black little Austin A40—new car, brand new wife—along the twisting road from Mold to Denbigh in north Wales. It was a snowy day, just like today—that is what reminded me of the incident. We were not in a hurry. I approached a bend well on my own side of the road at a reasonable speed. There was a car parked on the bend; a large lorry coming from the opposite direction at speed saw it late, swerved out to overtake it on my side of the road and, as he pulled back, his rear end hit my car I gave evidence in the Denbigh Magistrates’ Court and found it very stressful. A police sketch of the accident was produced which purported to show where my car had ended up, with a 30-foot, perfectly straight skid mark. I told the chairman of the Bench I thought my car had finished some 20 yards short of where it was shown on the plan. He said, "Don’t you appreciate this is a carefully prepared police plan of your accident?" I said, "Well, it is entitled ‘rough sketch plan’." Everybody laughed—except the chairman. The defendant was acquitted of careless driving, with the chairman commenting that the wrong person had been prosecuted —it should have been me. However, the lorry driver’s insurers paid me and my wife damages for personal injury without any questions The point of this lengthy reminiscence is that witnesses are giving evidence up and down the country in Crown Courts and magistrates’ courts every day, but nobody has ever thought to put a polygraph test on them as they are questioned. Your pulse may be racing, your blood pressure through the roof; you may be sweating, wishing you were anywhere other than perched in a witness box above the well of the court with myriad sceptical eyes looking you up and down—not because you are lying, but you may be afraid that someone, like the chairman of the Denbigh Bench, may not believe you. There are also those pesky lawyers paid to make you out to be a liar with their ridiculous version of the event. That is why the present Domestic Abuse Bill calls for special measures for victims and their witnesses and the present overseas operations Bill has a presumption against prosecution altogether, to save old soldiers the stress of recalling bad times The purpose of polygraph testing, as I said at our last meeting on 26 January, is to measure the physiological response of a person to questioning. It depends on the proposition that a person who lies will demonstrate it by changes in his blood pressure, perspiration, heartbeat and so on. I pointed out last time that these conditions are explicable by the stress of being questioned, by being thought to be lying, even by the state of your stomach-turning digestion, or by fear Because these physiological changes do not demonstrate that a person is lying, at least to the degree of certainty required for a conviction, evidence of the result of a polygraph test is excluded in court. It is therefore very good policy that, so far, the courts of this country have refused to accept polygraph results as admissible evidence We have already discussed whether such evidence should be used where terrorists are released from prison to monitor their continuing behaviour in the community. The purpose of this amendment is to probe whether the Government harbour any desire to go any further: whether this restraint will be maintained if the results of such a test appear to be relevant to a future terrorist trial in a court. That is when principle is put to the test—when there appears to be an indiscriminate danger to the public I support this amendment and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments on the proposal.