Some Avoidable Lie-Detector Mistakes

tributable to the incompetency of the examiner conducting the test. In many instances, however, they are properly chargeable to a prevailing practice whereby otherwise qualified examiners will accept for test purposes subjects who have been rendered unfit for any such testing because of the treatment they have encountered at the hands of police investigators before being presented for lie-detector tests. No one in his right mind would expect a medical technician to conduct a satisfactory metabolism test on a patient who had just emerged from a fist fight or who had been chased up a flight of stairs or who had been verbally abused and threatened while on his way to the examination room. Yet the thought apparently seldom occurs to some police investigators that a person may be rendered unfit for a lie-detector test by an extensive interrogation based upon frequent and constant accusations of guilt. In many of these instances, the lie-detector examiner is unable to make a diagnosis that he considers reliable; his report is indefinite or inconclusive, and so the press report reads too. In cases where the extensive interrogation is accompanied by actual physical abuse, the positive suggestions of guilt constituting part of the third degree procedure may produce test

Detector · Lie detection · Telecommunications · Computer Science · Deception detection and forensic psychology · Psychology · Social Psychology · Torture, Ethics, and Law