CORRECT ERRORS UNVERIFIED 239 (43%) FAIL: ALL ARE INTERROGATED, 105 (44%) 3 (1%) 131 (55%) 105 (44%) CONFESS. 313 (57%) PASS: NONE ARE INTERROGATED, 18 (6%) ZERO 295 (94%) NONE CONFESS. TOTALS: 123 (22%) 3 (0.5%) 426 (77%) Mr. Murray does report three cases in which he discovered that he had made a false-positive error. These were cases in which there were two possible suspects; the first person tested had failed his test but Murray was suspicious of the result and broke his own rule by going on to test the other suspect. In each of the three cases, the second person tested also failed, was interrogated, and confessed. In one case, for example, the first suspect was an old lag, an habitual criminal whom Murray had happened to test on two previous occasions for other crimes. Both prior times, this man had failed, had been interrogated, and confessed. On this third occasion, he again failed the lie test but this time he continued to maintain his innocence. For this reason, Murray tested the other suspect, obtained a confession, and discovered that the habitual criminal was innocent of this third crime and that his third lie test had been in error. Murray concluded, however, that he had made only these 3 errors in 552 lie tests, an accuracy of 99.4%. It is important to see that Murray would have obtained much the same apparent confirmation if, instead of the polygraph, he had used for his lie test just the flip of a coin! About half of the coins would have come up 'heads' indicating deception (43% of them, if we use Murray's statistics.) About half of these purportedly deceptive subjects would have been guilty and many of the guilty ones, perhaps 105 of
evidence and who oppose the relatively small group of scientists on the other side of the issue, opposing the admissibility of polygraph evidence. At the hearing, Dr. Honts rejected any proposal which might undermine the accuracy of polygraph evidence. Basically, according to him, those proposals lacked scientific support or were only supported by low quality studies or publications. According to Dr. Honts, only the studies conducted and articles published by the proponents of polygraph evidence are high quality and deserving of consideration by this court. The bias in Dr. Honts’ perspective is illustrated by the fact that highly regarded and peer reviewed journals (as identified by Dr. Honts) publish the studies conducted by and the articles written by the opponents of polygraph evidence admissibility. Also, although Dr. Honts struggled to avoid admitting the obvious, a recent report on polygraph examination reliability and validity issued by the National Academy of Science (“NAS”) questioned the quality of all of the available studies regarding polygraph accuracy including those in which Dr. Honts participated or on which he relies. After culling through hundreds of studies, the NAS panel used approximately fifty (50) studies for its review, including several of those in which Dr. Honts participated and/or which he deemed “high quality” as compared to the “low quality” of those challenging his position. However, the NAS noted: Virtually all the available scientific evidence on polygraph test validity comes from studies of specific-incident investigations, so the committee had to rely heavily on that evidence. . . . The general quality of the evidence for judging polygraph validity is relatively low: the substantial
the polygraph as a lie detector). Dr. Honts recognized the existence of countermeasures and agreed that, if successful, they go undetected impacting the validity of the polygraph examination and conceded that he trained in approximately thirty (30) minutes, in the laboratory, students to employ countermeasures with a success rate of 40%. However, he gave little credence to the idea that countermeasures are a general concern in determining the accuracy of polygraph examinations. It seems to be Dr. Honts’ opinion that only with his training on countermeasures can they be successfully employed and impact the accuracy of a polygraph examination’s results. This self-centered reasoning is another example of why the court attributes little weight to Dr. Honts’ opinions on reliance on the studies undertaken to test accuracy, as well as calling into doubt the results of a given polygraph examination. If successfully employed, countermeasures (about which much has been written and disseminated to the public) go undetected and sabotage the result of the examination. Recognizing the problems with the studies attempting to test the validity of polygraphs, the fact that lying does not produce a set of verifiable physiological responses, and the other environmental and situational factors impacting these examinations, the NAS report concluded that estimates of polygraph accuracy is overstated and that “[t]he evidence is insufficient to allow a quantitative estimate of the size of the overestimate.” The NAS reached the following conclusion in attempting to estimate the accuracy of polygraph examinations: Notwithstanding the limitations of the quality of the empirical research and the limited ability to generalize to real-world settings, we conclude that in populations