Make this page my home page   January 31, 2012 Print Comment RSS
Tim Dees Police Tech & Gear with Tim Dees  Will we ever have a
true lie detector?  And will any of them be admissible in court?
The quest for a method to detect deception has been ongoing for
several hundred years. Our tradition of oath-taking in court
prior to giving testimony comes from a medieval practice of
requiring witnesses to swear before God, placing their immortal
souls at risk if they were to lie. The notion was that no
earthly consequence of misconduct, even being drawn and
quartered (look at the closing scenes in Braveheart if you don’t
know what this is), could trump spending eternity in torment.
That method didn’t work any better then than it does now.  The
polygraph is still the gold standard for truth verification,
although there are as many people who condemn the polygraph as
are willing to rely on it. Computerized voice stress analysis
(CVSA) is popular in some circles, possibly because it’s neither
as expensive as a polygra