Florida Polygraph Association past president George Slattery claims that polygraph "testing" has been proven to be nearly 100% reliable in a 23 October 2002 South Florida Sun Herald article by Diana Marrero titled "Figure in Rilya case takes plea deal." The article is about the case of Leo Epson, the son of one of missing 6-year-old Rilya Wilson's caretakers, "who accepted a plea deal in his fraud case Tuesday in exchange for his word that he will tell investigators what he knows" about the missing girl. The article states in relevant part:


Quote:

Epson, 39, originally faced up to six years in prison, but prosecutors wanted him to plead guilty and serve 364 days in jail, followed by five years of probation, in exchange for a statement verified by a lie detector test. Over prosecution objections, Circuit Judge Daryl Trawick discarded the jail time, cut probation to two years, and gave Epson this choice: Take a lie detector test or perform 200 hours of community service. Epson chose the community service. Prosecutors say that without the lie detector test, they won't be able to verify his statements. "We thought it was important that a lie detector test be used," Griffith said. Though polygraphs are not admissible in court, they are commonly used as a tool to ensure the person agreeing to provide information for a plea deal is telling the truth. A lie often means the deal is off. "For him [Epson] to say, `I'll talk but I won't verify it' makes no sense to me," said George Slattery, a Miami polygraph examiner who routinely conducts tests for law enforcement agencies and says polygraphs are proved to be nearly 100 percent reliable.

Challenge to George Slattery: support your claim that polygraphs are nearly 100 percent reliable. The National Academy of Sciences has recently concluded (at p. 168 of its report, The Polygraph and Lie Detection) that "[t]here is essentially no evidence on the incremental validity of polygraph testing, that is, its ability to add predictive value to that which can be achieved by other methods."