The Lie Detectors (32 page)

Larson had failed to slay the monster he had created, or contain its destructive fury. "Beyond my expectation," he wrote shortly before his death, "thru uncontrollable factors, this scientific investigation became for practical purposes a Frankenstein’s monster, which I have spent over 40 years in combatting." There is no simple mechanism that can undo the process of creation, just as there is no route back to the prelapsarian innocence we enjoyed before the Fall. And Larson had no doubt as to who was responsible for his own fall from grace. It was Keeler, he said, who had "fostered a Frankenstein’s monster in the form of a psychological third degree." But what of Larson’s own responsibility?

Larson always considered his instrument benign because he judged his own motives to be pure: to end police corruption, diagnose the criminal mind—and who knows—perhaps even cure it. But the ambition for knowledge is never wholly pure, nor is its realization perfect, as Dr. Frankenstein learned. From the start Larson been entranced by the power of the machine. Why else had he invited young Margaret Taylor back to his lab, if not in the hope that the machine would make her more likely to comply with his desires? And why else had he paraded his discovery before the noir newspapers of San Francisco, if not to boast of having been the first to open a window on the soul? A creator always has unexamined motives, and perhaps for just that reason, something always goes awry with his creation. Indeed, it is these unacknowledged motives that give the creature its hideous strength, just as it is the creator’s disgust with those imperfections that launches the creature on its autonomous journey.

Once out of nature, every human creation takes on a life of its own, animated by the imagination of its audience—or, in certain cases, by its nightmares. The lie detector was an instrument designed to feed on the fears and desires of those hooked up to it, as well as the public who observed its operations from afar. So long as the people fear the lie detector—even if they suspect it is hokum—they will never succeed in killing it. There will always be a sequel.
Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Blood of Frankenstein, Revenge of Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein
….

This was the final indignity of Larson’s life: that his name, his honest labors, and his scientific aspirations would be forgotten, and only the monster would survive. The lie detector had become the hero of a life story that contained so much more: his fingerprint work, his modus operandi system, his collections of tattoos, his asylum reforms, and the thousands of patients he had comforted. It was the fate of Dr. Frankenstein, so often identified with his monster that readers habitually referred to the monster as Frankenstein. Larson feared that the monster would upstage him. And so it did.

Yet this oblivion is, in its own way, just. After all, if Larson had not invented the lie detector, someone else would have. Indeed, all the men formerly famous for having "invented" the lie detector have been forgotten, except one. Only William Moulton Marston, creator of the lie detector and of Wonder Woman, has endured: happy in his ménage à trois, ebullient in his showman’s patter, preaching his gospel of psychological uplift, and dedicated to the coming dominion of women. Marston embraced the lie detector for what it was: a figment of the popular imagination and an emblem of our dangerous suggestibility. He was proud of his creation, and never seemed to suffer for it.

"Nobody will ever believe you if you write a thing like that," I told myself…. So, for the sake of plausibility, I lied about her!

—DASHIELL HAMMETT, "LETTER TO THE EDITOR,"
BLACK MASK,
1924

OVER THE COURSE OF THE PAST EIGHTY YEARS, LIE DETEC-
tion has been perhaps the most investigated forensic technique. Hundreds of investigations of the polygraph have been conducted, only to be reviewed in review essays, studied in metastudies, and analyzed by committees of scientific analysts. Their conclusion? A review by the National Research Council in 1941, a meta-analysis by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in 1984, and a survey by the National Academy of Science in 2003 each concluded that the techniques of lie detection, as used in investigative work by polygraphers, do not pass scientific muster. Yet lie detection lives on.

The lie detector cannot be killed by science, because it is not born of science. Its habitat is not the laboratory or even the courtroom, but newsprint, film, television, and of course the pulps, comic books, and science fiction. To put it in the more sober language of economics: lie detection is demand-driven. For more than eighty years a polygraph of pulsing tubes and swelling diaphragms has supplied the requisite "science." Now, at long last, the era of the polygraph seems to be drawing to a close, not because the science has changed—that happened decades ago—but because the public has come to believe in a different kind of science. The results have been mixed. While corporate use of the lie detector has sharply declined, the courts are under pressure to allow polygraph evidence, even as many in the U.S. government are rushing to embrace new lie detector technology.

The one constant is the machinery’s role in political theater. For the past several decades nary a public scandal has gone by without its polygraph moment. In his testimony before the Warren Commission, Jack Ruby’s first request was to be tested on the lie detector. Watergate generated its own industry of affirmation: Chuck Colson took a polygraph test to prove his innocence, and passed; Jeb Magruder took one to confirm his accusation that John Mitchell had lied, and passed; even F. Lee Bailey took one just for representing someone, and passed. Apparently everybody was on the upand-up, until Senator Sam Ervin, chair of the congressional hearings, dismissed the technique as "twentieth-century witchcraft."

James Earl Ray took one. And O.J. Simpson went so far as to be hooked up to a polygraph machine, though he later denied in court that he had actually "sat" for the lie detector test or had called it off when it seemed to be going poorly, as was widely reported. Anita Hill took a test to avoid being accused of avoiding one; Clarence Thomas refused the test and disparaged its value. In the great fan dance of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Monica Lewinsky offered to take a lie test if the special prosecutor, Ken Starr, offered her immunity from perjury charges, then changed her mind. As for Paula Jones, whose public accusations got the show rolling, she later let herself be strapped into a machine on the nationally syndicated television show
The Lie Detector,
for the edification of the public.

When the public doubts your sincerity, there’s nothing like a private date with a friendly polygraph operator. The parents of the murdered pageant princess JonBenét Ramsey took a test that pronounced them innocent. Jeffrey Skilling of Enron arranged for an exonerating polygraph. Representative Gary Condit, rumored to have knowledge about the death of his intern Chandra Levy, refused to take the FBI’s polygraph until a national poll indicated that 83 percent of Americans thought he should take one; whereupon he took one privately and announced the results, as he presumably would not have done had he failed. Whereas a lie detector wielded by a prosecutor feeds on stress and pushes for confession, a lie detector in the friendly hands of a consulting polygrapher provides reassurance and exoneration.

In this context, the lie detector is not a hoax so much as a mirror of make-believe. Since the 1950s America’s sci-fi religion, Scientology, has used the E-Meter—a simple galvanometer—to gauge the spiritual health of initiates as they verify their ascent to "clear." In the 1960s Cleve Backster—Keeler’s disciple and the founder of the CIA’s polygraph program—hooked a lie detector to his household plants and discovered that they reacted dramatically when he threatened to burn their leaves or killed brine shrimp in a nearby tank; this was evidence, he said, of a "primary perception" that linked all living things. In the 1980s and 1990s, the
National Enquirer
relied on lie detector tests to confirm tales of alien abduction.

For the past half century the debate over the polygraph has gradually deviated from the pattern laid out by Keeler and Larson. Despite Larson’s prodding, the American Psychiatric Association went no farther in 1944 than "cautioning against advertising" the lie detector, lest the public think a mechanical device could replace the association’s brand of expensive excavation: "Whereas there is no conscience robot and no diagnosis robot." In 1958 Pope Pius XII praised modern psychology in general, but warned against methods that entered a person’s "interior domain" against that person’s will, among them lie detection. Then, during the 1960s, the Warren Supreme Court discovered a right to privacy in the interstices of the Bill of Rights, and some legal scholars suggested that the lie detector, even when "voluntarily" submitted to, violated citizens’ psychological integrity. The device, these civil libertarians reasoned, probed not by means of the ordinary senses but like an electronic listening device that pierced the walls of a person’s home. Hence, even when the subject agreed to a test, the operator might unexpectedly turn his attention to areas the subject had not agreed to discuss (as Keeler often did). This view, however, never found favor with the courts. Once the subject had given explicit assent to the exam, they ruled that anything the subject said could and would be used against him.

In the political arena, resistance to the lie detector fared somewhat better. In the late 1960s, the union representing government employees, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, pressured Congress into ending interrogations into sexual practices and private acts. The Civil Service Commission added restrictions on the instrument’s use in preemployment screening of nonsecurity government personnel. The AFL-CIO spoke out against lie detection in the workplace. Abuses of the instrument became a favorite object of congressional inquiry, with politicians damning the machine as an "invasion of the mind." And in the late 1960s, California, Oregon, Alaska, and Massachusetts restricted employers’ rights to polygraph workers at will. By the mid-1980s, twenty-two states had done so; all of them had high rates of unionization.

Yet the same period saw a tremendous expansion in the use of the lie detector. In 1959, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that private employers could require being tested on the polygraph as a condition of employment. That same year the FBI trained its first operators, and they were testing nearly eighty cases a month by the end of 1960. When a report by the Pentagon cast doubt on the scientific legitimacy of the polygraph in 1964, the report was immediately classified. In 1965 the American Bar Association unapologetically defended the technique as a "useful tool" of interrogation in cases where consent had been given. By the middle of the 1960s, some 1,000 operators were at work, a tenfold increase since the 1950s; and half of the nation’s police departments were making use of the technique, along with thirteen federal agencies, and some 40,000 businesses. Then the use of the machine increased tenfold again, from 200,000 Americans a year in the 1960s to 2 million by the 1980s. By then, one-fourth of all U.S. firms used the technique for preemployment screening or systematic checkups on honesty.

In those same decades the polygraph finally began to make modest inroads outside the United States, particularly among its close allies. Canada, West Germany, Japan, South Africa, and Israel have all adopted the machine for their military police and some criminal investigations. Most foreign courts still officially reject the technique, however, and the United States remains by far its largest per capita user. Despite the growing use of the technique across cultural and linguistic barriers, there has been little research published on its effectiveness in these circumstances. Since Keeler inaugurated his program with German POWs, American polygraphers have interrogated Korean and Vietnamese combatants, Chinese spies, and Arab terrorists. But almost all polygraph operators are still white Christian males, and there is scant evidence that the lie detector can minimize cross-cultural misreadings.

Occasionally, polygraph experts have urged their colleagues to set rigorous protocols for interrogation and establish licensed training schools. In fact, only cursory standards have been adopted, and the reason is simple enough. Keeler’s style of polygraphy works best when the examiners are not constrained by norms.

In the past half century, public debate over the government’s use of lie detection has generally pitted the executive against the legislative branch. The executive branch (often in Republican hands) has typically favored the instrument as a means of controlling the federal bureaucracy. The legislature has alternated between howling for more lie detection whenever the executive branch failed to protect national security, and howling for curbs when constituents complained.

Ironically, a push by the Reagan administration to expand the use of polygraphs in the 1980s finally led to federal restrictions. The administration wanted to end the disclosure of classified information, nominally in the interest of national security, but mostly to halt embarrassing revelations about the true cost of Reagan’s military buildup. The president complained that he was "up to his keister in leaks" and authorized polygraph exams of presumed leakers. But a study by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment concluded that lie detection was, at best, an uncertain science and unsuited for "dragnet" screening. Then, after his reelection, Reagan ordered random polygraph testing of all government employees with access to classified information, placing nearly 200,000 bureaucrats under the lie-detector regime. Secretary of State George Shultz interpreted this as an attack on the integrity of his department. When his private pleas failed to get the order rescinded, he publicly announced that he would sit for a test at the president’s request, but would resign "the minute…I am told that I’m not trusted." The president quickly modified the order to cover only those suspected of espionage. This snafu helped jar Congress into passing the Polygraph Protection Act of 1988, which forbade private businesses from requiring their employees to take polygraph exams under most circumstances. Under pressure from civil libertarians on both the left and the right, Reagan signed it. The law did preserve some notable exemptions. The polygraph could still be used in criminal investigations; when employers had grounds for suspecting a crime (as Keeler often pretended); and on federal, state, and local government employees, including police officers. Still, the law of 1988 led to a dramatic drop in use of the polygraph.

Businesses quickly made their peace with the ban. Whatever its former role as a deterrent, the polygraph had ceased to make sense in the new economy of the late twentieth century. Introduced early in the century to vet employees in the hierarchies of managerial capitalism, the polygraph was too crude a tool to enforce loyalty in the horizontal firms of the new service economy, where "knowledge workers" operate almost like subcontractors, with quasi-entrepreneurial roles inside the firm. The sort of loyalty that once came with lifetime employment is rarely expected or delivered.

Ironically, just as corporate America was giving up on the lie detector, the era of the Frye rule was ending, potentially opening criminal courts to the polygraph. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the judiciary’s ban and strictures against police coercion had simply given investigators more reason than ever to deploy the lie detector to extract pretrial confessions. Likewise, the famous
Miranda
ruling of 1966 simply inoculated the police against more intrusive regulation of their activities, much like the printed health warning on packages of cigarettes. All along, of course, polygraphers continued to press for the courts’ recognition as qualified experts. In the 1950s, Russell Chatham at Oak Ridge sponsored a survey, which found that twice as many polygraphers (75 percent) as psychologists (36 percent) believed reactions on the instrument were a sign of deception. In the 1980s and 1990s, proponents and opponents of lie detection conducted rival surveys, contending for the right to speak in the name of the "relevant" experts.

Meanwhile, the courts had come under pressure to define more clearly what counted as scientific evidence. In 1977 new federal rules of evidence declared that courts hear relevant scientific evidence whose probative value outweighed its potential to prejudice the outcome. Then in
Daubert v. Merrell
(1993), the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly replaced the Frye rule with a multipronged test. Henceforth, trial judges were to let jurors hear scientific evidence that had been (1) subjected to a program of scientific testing, (2) published in peer-reviewed journals, (3) assigned a known error rate, and (4) found acceptable by the relevant scientific community (the old Frye rule). Hailed at the time as a victory against "junk science," the
Daubert
decision led some polygraph operators to believe that their day in court was coming at last. After all, decades of rejection had spurred polygraph researchers to conduct laboratory and field studies, publish in peer-reviewed journals, and announce their low error rates. Some appellate courts agreed to let criminal courts consider polygraph evidence, which was, after all, already approved for parole cases, civil suits, and national security purposes.