James Ewinger reports for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in “Judge OKs Lie Detector Tests in Sex Case”: With a Summit County judge’s decision to admit lie-detector evidence, a New York law student may end up setting legal precedent even before he takes a bar exam. Sahil Sharma, 26, is charged with a single count of … Read more
In “Freed After 22 Years,” Jonathan Casiano and Mark Mueller of the Newark, New Jersey Star-Ledger report on the case of Byron Halsey, from whom it now appears police extracted a false confession to the molestation and brutal murder of two children after he wrongly failed a polygraph examination. DNA evidence exculpates Halsey and has … Read more
WorldNetDaily.com reports in a story titled, “Polygraph for Sandy Berger to be Studied” Excerpt: A spokesman for President Bush says a demand by Republicans for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to follow through on former White House insider Sandy Berger’s promise to take a polygraph test regarding the classified documents he took from the National Archives … Read more
Despite a 2003 finding by the National Academy of Sciences that “[polygraph testing’s] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies,” an internal memorandum to employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory posted on the blog, LANL: … Read more
Historian Ken Alder discusses the nexus between America’s atomic weapons program and the lie detector in “America’s Two Gadgets: Of Bombs and Polygraphs,” Isis, 2007, 98:124-137.
In “DoD researches high-tech ways to find liars,” published on 28 April 2007 among in the Army Times, among other places, Associated Press reporter Susanne M. Schafer writes on current research at the Defense Academy for Credibility Research (DACA, the former Department of Defense Polygraph Institute): FORT JACKSON, S.C. — An eerie image of a … Read more
In a 28 April 2007 editorial cryptically titled, “Wired Policing Stresses Voices, More,” the Daytona Beach News-Journal skewers local law enforcement agencies’ reliance on voice stress analyzers: As the urban legend goes, police interrogating a suspect put a colander on the suspect’s head, run wires from the colander to a copy machine, make a meaningless … Read more
On Tuesday, 10 April 2007, polygraph examiner Jack Trimarco was a guest on Los Angeles radio station KNX 1070’s “Money 101 with Bob McCormick” program. A half-hour, 27 mb MP3 podcast is available for download. Mr. Trimarco uttered a glaring falsehood about human physiology that stands in need of correction. About seven minutes into the … Read more
Writer Ian Williams raises the question in “The New Salem Witch Trials,” a stinging commentary on the British government’s harebrained scheme to use voice stress analysis to assess the truthfulness of applicants for social welfare benefits.
History professor Ken Alder, author of The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession, was interviewed for episode 108 of Bat Segundo Show, an Internet podcast, which may be downloaded as a 30 mb MP3 file. A serious interview follows the (rather corny) comic introduction.