A SECOND ASSAULT
Faller, Nancy
A second assault The lie detector has long been opposed by civil libertarians and has received a sound debunking from Congressional committees. Lie detector findings are inadmissible as courtroom...
...Lie detector findings are inadmissible as courtroom evidence in some states and limited in most...
...The lie detector is an imperfect investigative tool at best, contributing little to solving crime...
...After being subjected to national publicity and local pressure, Sullivan has relaxed his standard...
...But when a woman is urged to take the test by a police officer or her own attorney, usually a deputy prosecutor, is she free to say no...
...If every woman knew she was going to be polygraphed," warns Althea Grant, director of Detroit's Rape Crisis Center, "she wouldn't go through with it...
...Whether or not the rapist is prosecuted may depend on whether or not she satisfies the doubts of a dubious device...
...The polygraph is the deterrent to follow-through...
...But police and prosecutors still rely heavily on the polygraph as an "investigative tool" in criminal procedures—most offensively, in cases of sexual assault, when the victim is likely to be the one strapped to a lie detector machine...
...Constrained by legal safeguards, officials supposedly use the lie detector only on those subjects who submit voluntarily...
...When the Detroit police finally yielded to public pressures and stopped funning polygraph tests on rape victims, Chief William L. Hart said the possibility of deterring "even one woman" from reporting a rape made him change his mind...
...Nancy Faller (Nancy Faller is a free-lance writer in Yakima, Washington...
...If law officers insist on using unreliable means of testing a woman's veracity, why not simply throw her in the river and see if she sinks...
...As he explained it, "I can't think of another crime where anyone can knowingly accuse someone falsely...
...Yakima County now tests fewer rape victims, but has not eliminated the practice...
...Raped women make up the only class of crime victims whose honesty is routinely tested...
...But the consequence of testing, selective or not, is probably to inhibit reporting of rape...
...They argue it measures only deceit or, more exactly, the "fear of detection ." But John E. Reid, the acknowledged pioneer in the field, appears less certain: In a book he wrote with Fred E. Inbau, he describes how to administer the " 'Guilt Complex' Test for the Overly Responsive Subject," stating that in some instances the examiner should report the results as inconclusive...
...The nature of the crime makes polygraph testing of the victim especially questionable...
...Jeff Sullivan, a prosecutor in Yakima County in Washington, used to require a lie detector test whenever a women reported a rape...
...Many professional polygraph examiners insist the lie detector does not record that kind of guilt...
...And the mere practice of strapping rape victims to a lie detector upholds an old attitude that needs to be dispelled—that women readily cry rape...
...The polygraph can register guilt, and women, who have been conditioned by society to believe that whatever happens to them sexually is their own fault, are apt to feel guilty...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
