Polygraph Failures Continue To Mount

It seems incredible that some law enforcement agencies as well and the U.S. government continue to rely on the polygraph as a truth verification tool in spite of the very high profile and notable failures of the device.  This is especially true in light of the recently published report by the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS conducted a study of the polygraph which was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense Polygraph Institute and their affiliates were manipulated to indicate a high accuracy rate.  In fact, the NAS recommended that the DOE discontinue conducting polygraphs, as they are prone to very high error rates.  The NAS report stated that “Issues of conflict of interest reflect a serious structural problem with polygraph research.” Some of the very notable failures of the polygraph are:

1. The Green River Killer, Gary Leon Ridgeway, pled guilty to murdering 48 women in the Seattle area over a twenty-year period. Ridgeway was given a polygraph following the murder of his fourth victim and passed the polygraph exam.  He was then dropped as a suspect and went on to kill another 44 women.  He is listed as the most prolific killer in U.S. history.  If the polygraph had been accurate, his reign of terror would have ended after his fourth victim. The failure of the polygraph to detect Ridgeway cost 44 women their lives.

2. The ‘Angel of Death’, Charles Cullen, as described in recent articles, working as a nurse, murdered as many as 40 people over a ten year period by giving them lethal injections. After his first victim died, he was considered a suspect and asked to take a polygraph test. He passed the polygraph test and went on to kill at least another 39 people. The failure of the polygraph cost 39 people their lives.

3. Aldrich Ames, while working in a very sensitive position at the CIA, became a traitor and over a long period of time, sold information as well as the names of the operatives working in the Soviet Union to the KGB.  Aldrich Ames was able to continue his treachery because he was easily able to pass his periodic polygraph examinations.  He said “There is no trick to (passing the polygraph) it, just smile and make the examiner think you liked them.” Eleven CIA operatives identified by Ames were executed by the KGB and untold harm done to our national security due to the failure of the polygraph and the CIA’s dependence on it.

4. While working as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, confessed Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes passed polygraph exams over her sixteen-year career. After she was caught, she admitted that she had given very damaging information to Cuban Intelligence. According to her plea agreement, she agreed to divulge the details of the information and the FBI decided to give her a polygraph to validate her information, a move that former FBI Supervisory Agent Dr. Drew Richardson called “Unbelievably stupid.”

5. In May, 1978, police arrested four Chicago-area men on charges of murdering a suburban man and his fiancée.  All of the suspects said that they were innocent, but no real doubt existed about their guilt: After all, three of them had failed a polygraph exam.

Eventually, a jury convicted the Ford Heights Four, as the public came to call them, for these brutal slayings, and two defendants received death sentences. But in 1996, DNA evidence exonerated all four. All four had spent eighteen years behind bars, two of them on death row, because of the failure of the polygraph.

6. In 2002, an Ohio court officially cleared Jimmy Williams after he spent 10 years in prison for the rape of a ten-year old girl. Because the defense attorney had stipulated to allowing the results of the polygraph tests to be admitted into court, the jury had heard that he failed the polygraph and convicted him. The now 22-year-old accuser admitted that the rape never happened.

7. In 2004, detectives suspected Kevin Fox of the molestation and murder of his four-year-old daughter. Fox agreed to take a polygraph exam, which he was told he failed. He was then interrogated and as a result, he confessed. Fox spent eight months in prison on a capital murder charge before DNA evidence cleared him.

8. CIS Analyst, Larry Wu-tai Chin also regularly passed polygraph examinations before he was arrested for being a spy for China.

9. Many of the Iraqis that gave pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction were given polygraphs to validate their information. Most all passed and the information was accepted as valid. It was later learned this information was not accurate.

10. The Washington Times reported an individual in Iraq that was involved in the weapons program was shown two pictures. In one, officials cut his image out of a photo of workers at a weapons factory. He agreed that the cutout image was of him. They showed him the full photo, with his image restored.  This time, he denied that he was in the photo. When given a polygraph concerning that issue, the polygraph did not catch him in this blatant lie.

11. The Washington Post reported that one week before Saddam Hussein’s sons were killed in a shot out, an individual came to military intelligence and told them that he knew where the sons were hiding. He was given a polygraph test concerning the information. He failed the polygraph and was sent on his way. One week later, the owner of the house that the first individual had identified came and said that the sons were hiding in his house. Special Operations personnel took the house down and killed Hussein’s three sons that had been hiding in the house some time.

12. Failed Polygraph sends innocent man to prison for 15 years...Read PDF here

Besides the polygraph being responsible for allowing severe damage to be done to our national security by it’s failure to identify spies, the Innocence Project has documented literally hundreds of cases where individuals failed polygraph tests and then spent many years in prison before being exonerated.  Some of these individuals spent most of their lives in prison for crimes they did not commit.  Some of these individuals did not make it off death row.

As previously stated, in light of these dramatic failures by the polygraph, it seems inconceivable that our intelligence agencies and some law enforcement agencies still rely on what has been documented and declared by the U.S. Supreme Court (U.S. v  Scheffer) as a very flawed instrument. And, due to the influence welded by the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute, much of which is behind-the-scenes, most of these agencies are not allowed to acquire the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer^® (CVSA^® ), even though almost the entire U.S. law enforcement community has already made the switch and have validated it as the “Gold Standard” for truth verification. In fact, there are now more law enforcement agencies utilizing the CVSA^® than the old polygraph.