Associated Press writer Joshua Goodman reports on a lie detector-based game show expected to premier on the Fox network:

Lie Detectors Lie Behind Colombia TV Hit

Wednesday, August 08, 2007
By JOSHUA GOODMAN, Associated Press Writer

BOGOTA, Colombia —
Have you ever cheated on your wife? Stolen money from your boss? Do you consider yourself a better person than your mother-in-law?

Coming soon to U.S. television is a game show that has already taken Colombia by storm. Similar productions are being sped up in Brazil, France and Britain. The concept: watch people squirm while they’re being interrogated.

The format of “Nothing But the Truth” is as simple as it is cruel: If the participants truthfully answer 21 increasingly invasive questions, they walk away with $50,000.

Tell a lie, though, and the lie-detector test they took backstage betrays them before a studio audience packed with unsuspecting friends and loved ones.

Caracol TV bought the concept from Los Angeles-based producer Howard Schultz, who also sold a pilot to the Fox network that is expected to air in a few months. In Colombia, it is getting top ratings, and feeding a boom in the use of polygraph tests.

Since the show first aired in May, the phone hasn’t stopped ringing at True Test, one of about 200 companies in Colombia that charge about $65 a test to customers that include airlines, banks, multinational companies _ and the occasional bickering couple.

“I went from receiving five inquires a week to ten a day,” said True Test owner Juan Villota. “Pooling together money from all the polygraph examiners in Colombia could never buy you that kind of publicity.”

The truth-be-told boom is surpassed only by the controversy over the polygraph tests, which use a blood-pressure cuff and electrodes to measure changes in a person’s stress level when asked sensitive questions.

Actually, there is little controversy about lie detectors among those who are informed about polygraphy. There is broad consensus amongst scientists that polygraph “testing” has no scientific basis.

An exhaustive 2003 study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that the tests have too many false results to be relied upon as job-screening tools.

The American Polygraph Association, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, says polygraphs aren’t perfect, but are still highly valuable when combined with other vetting techniques. The trade group tried unsuccessfully to get Caracol to pull the program, fearing it could reinforce old stereotypes of the polygraph as a pseudoscientific truth machine.

That the polygraph is a pseudoscientific truth machine is not a “stereotype.” It’s the truth. What the American Polygraph Association fears is that the polygraph will become associated in the public mind with titillating trash television.

“It’s the sort of abuse we’ve been trying to stamp out for years,” said Donald Krapohl, president of the trade group, which urges examiners to abide by a strict ethical code that rejects the kind of intrusive questioning viewers see on the show.

Nonsense. Many APA members market so-called “fidelity testing,” in which examinees are intrusively questioned about their sexual behavior while attached to a polygraph instrument. The APA has no policy forbidding its members from conducting such “tests.” The APA is concerned solely about the polygraph’s public image.

But the network stuck by its guns.

“My job is to produce entertainment, not play public prosecutor,” said Cristina Palacio, the Caracol executive who bought the show from Schultz.

Entertainment is perhaps the most legitimate application of polygraphy. But just as those who watch a magic show understand that magicians don’t really make things disappear into thin air, polygraph operators don’t really detect truth or deception.

To the producers’ surprise, the program has proved to serve as a catharsis for some conscience-plagued contestants.

Before coming on the program, English teacher Lidia Villamil was hiding from her family the dirty little secret that she learned the language while serving a five-year prison sentence in the United States for being a drug courier.

“I feel relieved, at peace with God and my family,” Villamil said following her prime-time confession.

Schultz, the creator of such reality TV hits as MTV’s “Next” and ABC’s “Extreme Makeover,” said the huge success of “Nothing But the Truth” in Colombia has encouraged networks in other countries to speed production of their own versions.

The U.S. Congress in 1988 banned lie detectors in employment matters for all but a few security firms and the government, but the lawmakers didn’t anticipate the tool’s use for entertainment.

In Colombia and most parts of the developing world, lie detectors are unregulated.

“For us it’s as common a procedure as a medical exam _ if you fail, you don’t get hired,” said Nelson Tovar, president of the oil drilling firm Mettco S.A., whose multinational clients are a frequent target for rebel saboteurs and kidnappers.

The U.S. government prohibits exports of polygraph instruments to China, Venezuela and other countries where it fears they may be abused to extract confessions from political opponents. But U.S. agents train Colombian security forces to use polygraphs for counterintelligence work as part of Plan Colombia, a $5 billion anti-narcotic and counterinsurgency aid package.

The U.S. government’s prohibition on polygraph exports is really quite stupid. The polygraph is early 20th century technology. Any industrialized country can make polygraph instruments. China (where the pseudoscience of polygraphy has regrettably become popular in recent years) doesn’t need U.S.-built polygraphs. They make their own, and offer them for export without restriction.

As a result, Colombia now outpaces other security-obsessed nations such as Ukraine, Russia, Egypt, Israel and South Africa in purchases of polygraph instruments.

“Colombia has the potential in the next few years to become our biggest foreign market,” said Yazmin Bronkema, international sales director for Lafayette Instrument Company, an Indiana-based firm that claims to be the world’s leading manufacturer of polygraphs.

Caracol now hopes to haul elected leaders before the cameras, to try to clear their names and extract themselves from a scandal that has been gripping Colombia. More than a dozen lawmakers face up to 12 years in jail for allegedly colluding with illegal right-wing paramilitary groups.

“The reason the show has caught on,” Palacio said, “is because we are fed up with lies.”

Unfortunately, the lie detector — itself based on lies — is no solution to dishonesty in society. Because polygraph “testing” is inherently biased against the truthful and yet easily passed by liars using simple countermeasures, it is bound to make matters worse, not better.

On Wednesday, 1 August 20027, the Dallas Morning News reported that DNA evidence has connected Gerald Edmond Pabst to a rape and murder regarding which he passed a polygraph “test” (emphasis added):

The Dallas County district attorney’s office announced today it charged a 55-year-old Ohio man in connection with a 21-year-old murder.

The district attorney’s office says DNA connects Gerald Edmond Pabst to the 1986 murder of Galua Crosby in Garland. Mr. Pabst was arrested at a bar in Geneva, Ohio. He had previously passed a polygraph regarding his involvement.

Ms. Crosby was bound, sexually assaulted and shot three times in the head at her Garland home. Another man, Clay Reed Chabot sentenced to life in prison for the crime in 1986.

Mr. Pabst testified at Mr. Chabot’s trial. Mr. Pabst testified that he had no agreement with prosecutors but his murder charge was dismissed a week later.

Mr. Pabst plead guilty to misdemeanor theft for items taken from Ms. Crosby’s home and was given a 30-day sentenced. He was given credit for time already served.

Mr. Pabst is now in custody at the Dallas County Jail.

In a follow-up report dated 2 August 2007, the Morning News indicates that Pabst in fact passed the polygraph twice (emphasis added):

The Dallas County district attorney’s office is looking into whether a man was unfairly convicted in the 1986 rape and murder of a Garland woman after a recent DNA test connected another man to the crime.

Gerald Pabst was arrested on a capital murder charge Tuesday, two decades after he testified that Clay Chabot attacked Galua Crosby. Mr. Chabot was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

“We want to make sure we’ve got the right characters in jail,” Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said Wednesday. “This is not to say Mr. Chabot did not participate in this crime.”

But the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization that seeks to exonerate wrongly convicted people through DNA evidence, says Mr. Chabot is innocent and was convicted based on lies that Mr. Pabst told a jury.

“The entire case the jury heard 21 years ago rested on Gerald Pabst’s story,” said Nina Morrison, an attorney with the Innocence Project, which is representing Mr. Chabot. “Clay has always maintained he had nothing to do with the crime.”

Mr. Watkins said Mr. Chabot, 48, could get a new trial. DNA does not link him to the crime.

Ms. Morrison said that the Innocence Project has been talking with the district attorney’s office and that she hopes Mr. Watkins will decide to join them in asking state District Judge Lana Myers to set aside Mr. Chabot’s conviction and ask for a new trial.

Mike Ware, who oversees the district attorney’s new conviction integrity unit, said the office is not ready to make a decision.

Mr. Pabst, now 55, was a suspect in the death of Ms. Crosby, 28, shortly after her slaying, Mr. Watkins said. He was charged with murder but never tried, even though he had a pawn ticket for Ms. Crosby’s stolen radio and her husband’s pocketknife.

Mr. Pabst, who lived in Terrell at the time, testified that he was at the home on the night of the slaying only because Mr. Chabot forced him to go with him to collect a drug debt.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor theft charge for taking items from Ms. Crosby’s home and was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

During the investigation, Mr. Pabst passed two polygraph tests, the results indicating that he didn’t take part in the slaying. At Mr. Chabot’s trial, Mr. Pabst testified that he was in another room when Mr. Chabot raped and killed Ms. Crosby.

The state argued that Mr. Chabot was angry about the poor quality of $450 worth of methamphetamine he had bought from Doug Graham, Ms. Crosby’s husband, five days before her death, according to the Innocence Project.

Mr. Graham, who could not be reached for comment, testified at the trial that he had offered to buy back the drugs but that Mr. Chabot refused, according to the Innocence Project.

Mr. Chabot testified at his trial that he wasn’t angry enough to kill Ms. Crosby.

The gun used in the crime did belong to Mr. Chabot, but Mr. Watkins said Mr. Chabot had lent it to Mr. Pabst, who returned it after the slaying.

Former state District Judge Janice Warder was the original prosecutor in the case. She could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Watkins said prosecutors are looking into possible wrongdoing by the district attorney’s office.

Ms. Morrison said that at previous court hearings in the 1990s another attorney for Mr. Chabot looked into whether prosecutors made a deal with Mr. Pabst for his testimony even though he told the jury they had not. Ms. Morrison said that nothing came of those hearings but that she believes the district attorney’s office is looking into the issue again.

Mr. Pabst declined to be interviewed at the Dallas County Jail, where he is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail.

The district attorney’s office said DNA linked Mr. Pabst to the crime in June.

Mr. Pabst pleaded guilty to two DWI charges and resisting arrest in the 1980s. No criminal record was found for him in Ohio, where he lived immediately before his arrest.

Mr. Pabst was arrested at a bar near Geneva, Ohio, which is not far from Cleveland, said George Espinoza, an investigator at the district attorney’s office.

Mr. Watkins said Mr. Pabst’s arrest shows that DNA can help solve old cases and free those who are wrongly convicted. Dallas County has recorded 13 DNA exonerations since 2001, the most of any U.S. county.

“This is just another example of what DNA can do for this county,” Mr. Watkins said.

The district attorney’s office has not been able to find Ms. Crosby’s family.

“I don’t think they’re around anymore,” Mr. Watkins said. “We’re just doing justice for her.”CASE UPDATE

What happened: The Dallas County district attorney’s office has announced it will investigate whether prosecutors believe Clay Chabot was unfairly convicted of raping and killing a Garland woman in 1986.

What’s next: The Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal group, plans to ask a judge to vacate Mr. Chabot’s conviction based on new DNA evidence. The district attorney’s office could oppose this or join the group in its request. If the conviction is vacated, the district attorney’s office must decide whether to try Mr. Chabot again. If the conviction stands, Mr. Chabot will serve out his sentence.

The example of Gerald Pabst underscores the folly of relying upon polygraph chart readings to “clear” suspects. Polygraph “testing” has no scientific basis and is easily fooled through the use of simple countermeasures that polygraphers have no demonstrated ability to detect.

The Associated Press reports that Rhode Island Governor Donald L. Carcieri has vetoed a bill that would have required polygraph “testing” of fishing tournament participants in the state:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Governor Carcieri vetoes a bill that would force participants in fishing tournaments to take a polygraph test.

Carcieri says the government shouldn’t be involved in managing fishing tournaments, which are popular sporting events in Rhode Island. The bill would force fishermen to take a polygraph either during the tournament or soon after it ended. It would apply to all tournaments which charge participants a fee.

…

Actually, it appears that the Associated Press got this story wrong. The bill, H 6419 Substitute A, would not have required the organizers of fishing tournaments to polygraph participants, but rather would have regulated the use of polygraph “testing” when organizers choose to employ this pseudoscientific procedure. The bill would have required, among other things, that “[i]f a fishing tournament uses polygraph tests…[t]he use of polygraph tests shall be conducted in the state of Rhode Island at a time and place that all participants can reasonably make at the time of the tournament or within several hours after the end of the tournament.”

Update: The Providence Journal gets the story right in “Polygraph tests, prizes not state’s business” (6 June 2007):

Fishing tournaments sometimes go to great lengths to distinguish between a “fish tale” and a true big fish.

In some cases, state Rep. Jon D. Brien claims, those measures are so drastic that they may mean the true winner of a tournament doesn’t get the prize.

Brien, D-Woonsocket, sponsored a bill to place restrictions on tournaments’ use of polygraph tests. The bill would have required that ads for a tournament explain the rules clearly and that the rules “not make it unreasonably difficult” for the person who catches a prize-winning fish to claim that prize.

Brien’s bill was passed by the House on June 14 and the Senate on June 21. Governor Carcieri vetoed it yesterday along with 35 other bills, many on weightier topics such as mandatory minimum sentences for drug charges, and domestic-partner benefits for state employees.

In his veto message, Carcieri called Brien’s bill “a classic case of overregulation.”

“I am concerned that this legislation will have a chilling effect on tournaments offered to Rhode Islanders,” the governor wrote. “If persons are not satisfied with the management of a private tournament, they are not required to participate. The state should not be in the business of micromanaging this type of sporting event.”

The bill would have required that if tournaments use polygraph tests, they conduct the test “according to accepted and customary polygraph standards and procedures,” that “polygraph experts” be “certified” and sign affidavits “to confirm that they will conduct an objective test and have not been asked to influence the outcome.”

The Youngstown Vindicator reports that the fate of Darryl Adams, a youth pastor accused of raping a minor, won’t be determined by the outcome of a polygraph “test,” after all:

Lie detector is out; jury trial is in for rape suspect
Wednesday, July 4, 2007

The Youngstown man failed to take the polygraph test and will face trial Dec. 3.

YOUNGSTOWN — The man once willing to let a lie detector test decide his fate in a rape case is proceeding to trial.

Darryl Adams, 44, of Glenwood Avenue, was in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court on Tuesday with his lawyer, Dennis DiMartino, for a pretrial. Natasha Frenchko, an assistant prosecutor, represented the state.

Judge James C. Evans noted in a judgment entry that Adams failed to take the polygraph test as had been arranged. The judge said the case will now be set for a jury trial. Court records show the trial was scheduled for Dec. 3.

Adams had been scheduled to take a polygraph test June 23 at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation in Richfield but left home in a rush and forgot to take his antidepressant medication, DiMartino said last month. The test did not go forward due to Adams’ anxiety.

Dawn Krueger, the assistant prosecutor who agreed in May that if Adams passed the test he would go free, said after the panic attack she doubted he would schedule another test.

Had Adams taken the test and failed, he had agreed to plead guilty to a single count of rape.

Adams is charged with three counts of rape. He is accused of raping a teen boy in his home between 2002 and 2004.

It is to be hoped that Ohio prosecutors will never again consent to having a pseudoscientific polygraphic trial-by-ordeal be substituted for the common law trial by a jury of one’s peers. For further reading on the harebrained scheme, see Result of Ohio Rape Case to Be Decided by Polygraph, More on Upcoming Trial-by-Polygraph in Ohio, and Polygraph in Ohio Rape Case Delayed.

On Monday, 2 July 2007, Westchester County, New York District Attorney Janet DiFiore released a Report on the Conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic (232 kb PDF). In 1989, Deskovic, then a highschool student, falsely confessed to the rape and murder of classmate Angela Correa following a (wrongly) failed polygraph examination. New York television station WABC’s Eyewitness News program summarizes the report in “Scathing Report into Man Wrongly Convicted”:

(New York – WABC, July 2, 2007) – He spent 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. Now there’s a blistering report about the improper conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic.

The Westchester DA, which originally handled the case, called its own investigation of the crime “a miscarriage of justice.”

Eyewitness News reporter Marcus Solis has more.

How could an innocent man spend half his life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit? Jeffrey Deskovic was 17 when he was convicted of killing Angela Correa, a classmate. Peekskill Police said Deskovic knew details about the investigation only the killer could know.

Today, a report found police developed tunnel vision, focusing soley on Deskovic and no other suspects; that investigators relied too heavily on a criminal profile provided by the NYPD and that detectives recorded only select interrogations, and not the eight-hour polygraph exam which ended with the teenager confessing to the crime.

The report claims Deskovic received shoddy defense from the Legal Aid Society. Prosecutors were faulted for presenting the case to the grand jury before getting DNA results that ruled Deskovic out.

At trial, prosecutors ignored the DNA evidence and offered alternate theories for the killing, and key pieces of evidence, including the victim’s clothes were lost.

Former DA Jeanine Pirro was criticized for not responding to Deskovic’s pleas to have the DNA retested. Her successor did just that. The result was a match and a confession from Steven Cunningham, the real killer.

For his part, Deskovic disagrees with the report’s conclusion that although mistakes were made, there was no bad faith involved.

The report states DNA should trump a confession. It didn’t in this case. The DA promises a similar case today would be handled differently.

A video report is available with the WABC on-line story. For discussion of the district attorney’s report, see Anatomy of a False Confession: Report on the Conviction of Jeffrey Deskovic on the AntiPolygraph.org message board.

The U.S. Government is soliciting bids for a project that, if implemented, could see travelers facing lie detector testing at airports, border crossings, and other high traffic venues. The project is sponsored by the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (DACA), which until recently was known as the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute (DoDPI). “Credibility assessment” is the U.S. Government’s latest buzzword for “lie detection” and supplants the now démodé “detection of deception.”

Although DACA nominally falls under the Department of Defense’s secretive Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), it is more than just a DoD agency in that it trains all federal polygraph operators, including those from non-DoD agencies such as the FBI and CIA. DACA also controls the federal research budget for lie detector testing (despite a history that includes burying unwelcome research results, such as those that suggested innocent blacks are more likely to fail the polygraph than innocent whites).

According to the amended solicitation, the scope of the project is:

To identify, implement, empirically evaluate, and validate optimal procedures for speedy accurate credibility assessment of humans passing through a security checkpoint in high volume environments (e.g., airports, border crossings, building entry). The effort shall specifically address physiological and behavioral assessment using instrumental and/or non-instrumental procedures applicable in multi-cultural environments with emphasis on the identification and reduction of factors affecting assessment accuracy and variability. It is anticipated that the scope of the project will be broad enough to justify a multi-disciplinary investigatory team and multi-site data collection.

What this would amount to is a program for mass lie detector testing of travelers. This is a truly bad idea. First, although the U.S. Government pretends that it already has a working lie detector (in the form of the polygraph), it is deceiving only itself. Al-Qaeda and other Islamic insurgents know full well that the lie detector is a sham. Moreover, even if a 90% accurate, countermeasure-proof lie detector were developed (something this project has virtually no prospect of achieving), it would be worthless for such a task as screening travelers for terrorists. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that as many as 1 in 100,000 travelers is a terrorist. With a 90% accurate lie detector test, for every 1 terrorist correctly flagged as deceptive, some 10,000 innocent travelers will wrongly be so flagged. One remains stuck with the hopeless task of finding the needle in the proverbial haystack.

This problem is similar to that associated with using the polygraph in an attempt to screen for spies. In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences completed a research review and concluded 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.” The federal government ignored that conclusion and has instead actually increased its reliance on employee polygraph screening. Now it would seem the U.S. Government wishes to subject the traveling public at large to such madness.

The open period for proposals has been extended until 2 P.M. EST on 10 July 2007. Scuttlebutt has it that Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, Massachusetts is favored to win the contract.

InsideBayArea.com reports on revelations that the CIA secretly conducted a polygraph experiment on (presumably unwitting) applicants for employment with the San Mateo, California Sheriff’s Office. Excerpt:

CIA’s ‘family jewels’ reveal misdeeds
San Mateo Sheriff helped agency develop lie-detectors,
FROM STAFF WRITER AND WIRE REPORTS
Inside Bay Area
Article Last Updated:06/27/2007 10:24:34 AM PDT

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency released hundreds of pages of internal reports Tuesday detailing assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro and the secret testing of mind- and behavior-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting U.S. citizens.

The documents also provided information on tapping journalists’ phones, spying on demonstrators who supported civil rights or opposed the Vietnam War, opening private mail between the United States and the Soviet Union or China, breaking into the homes of former CIA employees and administering lie-detector tests to State Department employees to test their loyalty.

Such polygraph tests were developed in part by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office in the early 1970s, according to documents obtained by the San Mateo County Times.

“At the CIA’s request, the Sheriff of San Mateo, California polygraphed certain applicants for employment in an experiment to test effectiveness of the polygraph,” wrote Associate Deputy Attorney General James A. Wilderotter after meeting with CIA Director William Colby and CIA general counsel John Warner in 1974.

The memo, a thumbnail sketch of the CIA misadventures detailed more fully in the recently released documents, led historians to expect that the just-declassified documents would provide further revelations regarding the CIA’s involvement with the county’s Sheriff’s Office. But a preliminary look at the just-declassified documentsrevealed no further information.

The Sheriff’s Office could neither confirm nor deny participation in the activities described in the memo by press time.

…

The “Family Jewels” report (24 mb PDF) is available in word-searchable format from George Washington University’s National Security Archive. The San Mateo polygraph project is described only briefly, at p. 236 of the report:

San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office

ORD conducted polygraph tests on all applicants. Polygraph security findings were compared with the Sheriff’s own security findings.

Charles Gulledge shares his DoD polygraph screening experience in the 22 June 2007 installment of James Randi’s weekly newsletter, Swift.

Attorney Kirk A. Migdal of Akron, Ohio, who last month convinced a judge to allow polygraph results into evidence over objection in the rape trial of New York law student Sahil Sharma, has evidently convinced Cleveland Scene writer Rebecca Meiser of Sharma’s innocence, based on nothing more than polygraph results:

Duke Comes to Akron
Is an overzealous prosecutor hunting an innocent man?
By Rebecca Meiser
Published: June 20, 2007

Kirk Migdal is used to clients insisting on their innocence. After 20 years of defending low-level bad guys, he fancies himself immune to their sob stories. It’s how he gets through the days.

“I can count on one hand the number of cases I’ve had where I really believe the guy’s been innocent,” he says.

But despite his best efforts, once in a while a case lodges in him like a kidney stone. “It’s easy to defend the guilty people,” Migdal says. “It’s the innocent ones that keep you up at night.”

Consider the sexual battery case against Sahil Sharma. Last summer, the then 25-year-old law student at New York’s Touro College traveled to Cuyahoga Falls for a cousin’s wedding. On the night before the nuptials, Sharma and his young relatives snuck out to a bar for reprieve. His cousin brought a friend, former Kent State student Michelle Sacia.

It was a muggy night, the kind that inspires consumption. At a bar at the Cuyahoga Falls Sheraton, Sharma and Sacia became acquainted, chatting about fashion and city life. But six drinks later, Sacia began to feel woozy. She’d asked earlier that day whether there’d be a place to rest before driving home. Sharma’s cousin said his room would be fine. Around 1 a.m., she asked whether she could lie down. She was let into a suite the cousin was sharing with Sharma.

Two hours later, Sharma opened his hotel room and found Sacia lying on his bed. She was not in the best shape. She had just vomited. He brought her a glass of water.

Afterward, the two continued their conversation. One thing led to another, Sharma claims, and soon their libidos took charge. They were drinking, he admits. “It probably wasn’t the most responsible thing to do.”

Then he fell asleep — only to awake the next morning to the sound of police pounding on his door. Sacia claimed she’d been raped.

Migdal wasn’t anxious to take Sharma’s case. Rape, by nature, is hard to defend. Most are he said/she said battles, soiled further by alcohol. But Sharma kept insisting on his innocence. So Migdal, unimpressed, did what he often does with clients: He took him to see Bill Evans, a polygraph examiner and lawyer.

Evans asked about specific facts. “Was Michelle awake while you were having sex?” “Did you insert your penis in Michelle’s vagina without her knowledge?” The American Polygraph Association asserts that asking questions based more on fact than opinion leads to a 90-percent accuracy rate. Sharma passed.

While the American Polygraph Association — an organization with a documented history of turning a blind eye to fraud by its members (see here and here) — may assert that polygraph “testing” has an accuracy rate on the order of 90%, such notions have been roundly rejected by the scientific community. Indeed, there is broad consensus amongst scientists that polygraphy has no scientific basis at all. Because polygraphy lacks both standardization and control (within the scientific meaning of the word), no meaningful accuracy rate is knowable. The only persons claiming 90th percentile accuracy rates for polygraphic lie detection are those with vested interests in promoting this pseudoscience.

Migdal, now convinced of his client’s story, went to the Summit County prosecutor, hoping to get the charges dropped. But he wasn’t approaching a receptive foe.

Sherri Bevan Walsh has spent much of her career prosecuting sexual assault cases and is known as a women’s rights darling in Summit County, where she’s gotten life sentences for three men who’d sexually abused young children. But some believe her success has bred zealotry.

A year and a half ago, recently recovered DNA evidence cleared inmate Clarence Elkins of raping his niece in 1998. Even Attorney General Jim Petro, a man loath to act on behalf of any convict, believed Elkins’ innocence was irrefutable and wrote a letter to Walsh demanding his release. But Walsh held her ground, claiming that DNA tests weren’t conclusive.

The Plain Dealer called her lack of action “unconscionable.” Defense attorney Jana DeLoach claimed that she and other prosecutors were “more interested in protecting their conviction than protecting the public.”

Only after pressure mounted did Walsh consent to Elkins’ release.

Is Clevelend Scene writer Rebecca Meiser suggesting that polygraph “evidence” should be accorded a probative value similar to that of DNA evidence? While lawyer Migdal claims to be persuaded by polygraph results, a prosecutor would be remiss to allow such unreliable evidence to guide her decisions.

Walsh refused to drop the charges. But Assistant Prosecutor Connie Lewandowski agreed to discuss allowing the polygraph test into evidence. (In Ohio, polygraphs can only be admitted if both sides concede.) Yet there were conditions: The prosecutor wanted to use her own examiner and her own questions.

A few days before Sharma was supposed to fly out for the test, he got a call. The prosecutor had changed her mind. The examiner wanted Sacia also to take the test. And due to the trauma of rape, the tests were considered “unreliable” for victims, says Chief Assistant Prosecutor Brad Gessner. The talks were off.

Polygraph results are unreliable for victims and suspects alike. Polygraph procedure is inherently biased against the truthful: perversely, the more honestly and fully one answers the so-called “control” questions (answers to which are secretly assumed to be less than honest), the more likely one is to wrongly fail. On the other hand, deceptive persons may pass the polygraph using simple countermeasures that polygraphers have no demonstrated ability to detect.

Migdal feared he was now playing witness to a “Duke case in Akron,” referring to the botched prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team. So he had his client take the polygraph anyway, using the prosecutor’s questions and examiner.

Then he contacted Dr. Louis Rovner, considered among the nation’s foremost polygraph experts, and had him conduct a test as well. Sharma passed both times.

The odds of three experts all screwing up is “about one in a thousand,” says Donald Krapohl, president of the American Polygraph Association.

Donald Krapohl is dead wrong. He is inappropriately applying a simple statistical method to what is, in essence, an unscientific, unstandardized procedure. His simplistic assumption is that given a 90% accuracy rate (again, a rate unsupported by the scientific evidence), the chance of an error on any single “test” is 10%, on any two tests one tenth of that (1%), and on any three tests, one tenth of that (0.1%). Such a conclusion with regard to polygraph outcomes is unsupported by any peer-reviewed research. In fact, there are no peer-reviewed studies on polygraph test-retest reliability.

To Migdal, the evidence was undeniable. But when presented with the results, Walsh again refused to admit them in court. “We never agreed for a polygraph to be a determinant in the case,” Gessner says.

That’s when Judge Judith Hunter took control. In late May, she ruled the tests admissible. “All three polygraphists used the most advanced computerized polygraph machines,” she wrote. “All three individuals independently found that Mr. Sharma was not being deceitful during the examination.”

Judge Hunter was duped to the extent that she believes using “the most advanced computerized polygraph machines” means that polygraph results are reliable. As with astrology, computerization cannot make up for the underlying procedure’s lack of scientific underpinnings. Judge Hunter’s 15-page order may be downloaded here (252 kb PDF).

Migdal was vindicated. Prosecutors were appalled. “Judge Hunter disregarded Ohio law,” Gessner says. His office is appealing the decision.

Meanwhile, Sharma’s trial is set for August. If he loses, he will never be able to practice law, so he tries not to think about such things. “In law school, we were taught that justice prevails,” he says.

But as Walsh learned in the Elkins case, justice in Ohio is far from perfect.

Indeed, to the extent that justice in Ohio is influenced by the results of pseudoscientific polygraph results, it is far from perfect.