Barry_C wrote on Nov 20
th, 2007 at 2:27pm:
Quote: What happened to the old adage "It is better that 100 guilty people go free, than one innocent convicted?" This is what drives our criminal justice system, and why people are only convicted upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But, it is okay to "convict" someone of being a liar, drug dealer, thief, etc. based on what the pre-employment polygraph procedure results are. Which, as we know, is simply one man's opinion based on some squiggly lines on a computer screen.
Nobody is "convicted" during a pre-employment test, so you're way off base here. To call them "squiggly lines" is a bit of an oversimplification. You assume - with no science to back it up - that all those who claim to be false positives actually are. Some will be, yes, as that's the problem with an imperfect test. However, as I've said elsewhere (and can't continue to explain), because polygraph is better than chance, the process is more fair to the truthful than it would be without polygraph.
Mr. C.
When a person is told by a police or national security agency that he is lying, and summarily removed from further consideration for a job, and then is branded a liar and the results of that error ridden polygraph is then used to ban him from further jobs, and then when there is no way for a person to prove he was in fact telling the truth, I would equate that with being wrongfully convicted of a crime.
The criminal justice system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict someone of a crime, but only the opinion of someone who spent 8 weeks or so in a trade school to brand a person for life.
Of course, not all claimed false positives are in fact false positives, but when the polygraph field itself admits to somewhere between an 80 to 95 percent or so false positive rante, (read "the poly was wrong"), and when we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of applicants, then it is a very serious problem.
I'll stand by my assertions and opinion, and while they are not backed by science, at least they are logical.