Court Opinion

ID: 9553711
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 19:33:42.270092+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:32:06.826255
License: Public Domain

*270F ADELE Y, J.,
specially concurring.
The result in this case is unobjectionable because the petitioner requested the polygraph test in connection with the specific disciplinary charges, the governmental agency conducting the hearing offered the test results and petitioner made no objection on the merits of the reliability or usefulness of those specific results at the administrative hearing. The issue was not preserved for review on the merits of whether a decision may be based upon testimony about the results of polygraph in general or of this polygraph in particular.
The panegyric to the polygraph which is sung in the lead opinion is not joined by me. The praise is neither presented as if it were dicta nor based on an analysis of appropriateness for admission which relies upon the facts and circumstances of this case. Since I do not agree with the blanket proposition that reasonable persons would invariably, or most usually, find polygraph results sufficiently reliable to be determinatively considered in the conduct of their affairs, concurrence in the result in this case is far enough to go. I specifically do not agree that the legislature’s enactment of a licensing law for polygraph examiners in 1975 provides any more guarantee of accuracy than I would agree that licensing of any other profession guarantees either the efficacy of professional conduct or the accuracy of the tools and techniques employed by a practitioner to arrive at professionally desired outcomes.
Scientific reservations about polygraphs as truth testers recounted in State v. Brown, 297 Or 404, 687 P2d 751 (1984) and State v. Lyon, 304 Or 221, 744 P2d 231 (1987) cannot be so easily reconciled with admission of the operator’s opinion of the results into evidence as the lead opinion in this case concludes. In Brown and Lyon, the law is that polygraph results may not be used to convict or to avoid conviction as a criminal. However, the current opinion seems to say that, once convicted, the polygraph may be used to justify extraordinary restraints in addition to the sentence of imprisonment. This is no case requiring us to adopt diverging rules with an anomalous appearance. In any event, no scientific or adversarial record made at the hearing level is present in this case to support adopting a divergent rule.
*271I concur in the result because no objection on the merits of use of polygraph results as evidence is preserved in the record.