AntiPolygraph.org News

CBS News 4 of Miami reports that according to a filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecuting Guillermo Zarabozo for murder in the “Joe Cool” case, polygrapher Tom Mote, a former Metro-Dade detective and member of the Florida Polygraph Association, attempted to conceal unfavorable polygraph results. Zarabozo’s attorneys are seeking to have the results of polygraph examinations that Zarabozo passed with Mote admitted into evidence:

New Developments In “Joe Cool” Murder Case

MIAMI (CBS News) - There are new developments in the high profile case of a murder at sea. CBS4 has learned that one of the suspects in the “Joe Cool” murder case took several polygraph tests but there were conflicting results.

Guillermo Zarabozo, one of two men accused of hijacking a boat and killing the four crew members, reportedly passed two lie detector tests but failed two others. Federal prosecutors claim the defense and the polygraph examiner tried to conceal the questionable test results.

In Federal court on Tuesday, Zarabozo’s attorneys argued that their client passed two lie detector tests and they filed a motion asking for permission to admit those polygraphs results as evidence at his trial.

However, federal prosecutors claim the defense has been less than truthful and failed to reveal that Zarabozo also failed two other lie detector tests.

In recently filed papers, prosecutors say in one polygraph exam, “Deception noted… (when asked) whether he shot any of the crew members of the Joe Cool.”

The government also suggests the polygraph examiner, Tom Mote, tried to conceal the questionable test results. They quote Mote as saying to Zarabozo in a videotaped session, “If the FBI were doing this test, it’s bad news. As far as this test is concerned, it never happened. I wasn’t here.”

CBS4’s Gary Nelson reached polygraph examiner Tom Mote on the phone Thursday. He declined to comment for this story.

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In February 2007, AntiPolygraph.org News cited a Des Moines Register article about a defamation lawsuit filed by former Iowa Polygraph Association (IPA) president James E. Reistroffer against three members of the Association’s ethics committee: Mike McDermott, Dennis Wilbur, and Jan Caylor Martins. The matter is now settled, with Reistroffer having withdrawn his lawsuit, and each of the three respondents having signed a letter of apology to Reistroffer.

According to Mr. Reistroffer, the original ethics complaint against him arose when, as president of the IPA, he “made an inquiry about the methods of performing examinations on sex offenders” in the state of Iowa. Reistroffer felt that another polygraph examiner “was in error by performing examinations against the standards and practices of the Iowa Polygraph Association and the American Polygraph Association.”

As a consequence of his inquiry, Mr. Reistroffer was removed as president of the IPA and given an oral reprimand. He has since resigned as a member of the IPA and is now the president of a new polygraph organization, the Iowa Polygraph Society.

The respondents’ letter of apology (245 kb PDF), dated 6 June 2008, is addressed to Ms. Judy Scharff of the Iowa Polygraph Association and Mr. Reistroffer and reads as follows:

Dear Ms. Scharff and Mr. Reistroffer:

We, Mike McDermott, Dennis Wilbur and Jan Caylor Martins, as members of the 2006 Iowa Polygraph Association Grievance Committee, take this means to advise you of the following:

1. James E. Reistroffer has brought a defamation action against us in the Iowa District Court for Scott County arising out of our investigation of a complaint concerning him in his capacity as president of the Iowa Polygraph Association in 2006. During the course of that investigation, we made findings adverse to James E. Reistroffer that questioned his ethics, and we recommended to the Iowa Polygraph Association that he be removed as president and that our report be forwarded to the APA Ethics Committee Chair, Donald Weinstein. Based on our recommendation, the association removed James E. Reistroffer from the office of president and precluded him from a board position for a period of three years. He was given an oral reprimand pursuant to our recommendation, and our findings were sent to Donald Weinstein, the chairman of the American Polygraph Association Ethics Committee.

2. We apologize to James E. Reistroffer because our committee had no authority under the by-laws of the Iowa Polygraph Association to make the findings and recommendations set out in our report to the association on April 17, 2006. Information we obtained during our investigation was disseminated beyond our committee and the Iowa Polygraph Association board of directors. It was disclosed to Donald Weinstein, who was not a member of the Iowa Polygraph Association Committee or its board of directors. The findings of our investigation are considered privileged and should not have been released outside of the committee or the board of directors.

3. We do not object to allowing James E. Reistroffer to be restored to full membership without any conditions imposed on his right to hold any office. We similarly have no objection to allowing Anthony Reistroffer to be restored to Iowa Polygraph Association membership.

4. James E. Reistroffer was, in fact, the co-chair of the Grievance Committee of the American Polygraph Association at all times relevant to the inquiry by our committee in 2006.

5. A copy of this statement will be sent to Donald Weinstein, the chairman of the American Polygraph Association Ethics Committee.

6. We apologize for the harm and expense our actions have caused James E. Reistroffer, his family, and the Iowa Polygraph Association.

7. James E. Reistroffer has dismissed his defamation action against us and his claims against us have been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. At this time we wish to move on in a positive direction to benefit all parties involved.

On Wednesday, 18 June 2008, both Larry Sinclair, the Minnesota man who claims that in 1999 he performed oral sex on, and used cocaine with, then Illinois legislator Barack Obama and Dan Parisi’s WhiteHouse.com, which arranged for a polygraph examination of Mr. Sinclair, will be holding press conferences at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The polygraph was conducted on Friday, 22 February 2008 by Edward I. Gelb of Los Angeles and reviewed by Gordon H. Barland of Salt Lake City. The following is a video commentary regarding that polygraph examination:

For discussion and links to relevant documentation, see Larry Sinclair and the Polygraph on the AntiPolygraph.org message board. For AntiPolygraph.org’s earlier video commentary, which was recorded before the results of Mr. Sinclair’s polygraph examination were made public, see Why Larry Sinclair’s Polygraph Examination Will Be Evidence of Nothing.

In the 5 June 2008 issue (10 mb PDF) of the Fort Jackson Leader, Mike Glasch reports on current research at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment:

DACA researchers developing high-tech ways to detect deception

Mike A. Glasch
Leader Staff

Tubes strapped across the chest, sensors clipped to the fingertips and an inflated blood pressure cuff attached to the upper arm; all the while needles scratch on a roll of paper as an examiner grills his or her subject with a series of questions.

The needles and paper of the polygraph have been replaced by computer monitors, and soon the polygraph itself may be replaced.

Researchers at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment at Fort Jackson are studying new devices to replace the polygraph in a variety of situations — Soldiers in Baghdad investigating an IED explosion, Homeland Security officials screening potential terrorists at airports or FBI agents searching for a kidnap victim.

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On 3 June 2008, Tom Fudge of San Diego, California radio station KPBS hosted a discussion of fMRI-based lie detection. Guests included No Lie MRI founder and CEO Joel Huizenga, San Diego attorney Chuck Sevilla, and University of San Diego professor of philosophy and ethicist Larry Hinman. The program may be downloaded as a 16 mb MP3 file.

Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that law enforcement officers in the state can be compelled to submit to lie detector “testing” in the course of internal investigations. John R. Ellement reports for the Boston Globe:

BOSTON — Saying public confidence in law enforcement must be protected, the state’s high court today ruled that police officers can be forced to take lie detector tests when subjected to internal department investigations.

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled against Plymouth Police Officer Kevin J. Furtado, who was accused in 1999 of sexually abusing two minor children, an allegation the mother of the children publicly declared to be unfounded, according to the SJC.

Moreover, Plymouth County prosecutors decided against bringing criminal charges. Furtado then became the target of an internal police investigation, but refused to take a lie detector test, citing state law that bans employers from pressuring workers to undergo testing.

The law, however, allows lie detector tests to be conducted by law enforcement doing criminal investigations. Furtado argued there was no criminal case because prosecutors had chosen not to file charges against him.

But the SJC today said that exception must also apply to police officers and the leaders of the state’s police departments, even when no criminal case is immediately likely. In the ruling written by Justice Robert Cordy, the SJC drew on words from a 1984 ruling on the same general issue.

“We have little hesitation in concluding that, when the functions of a police department are disrupted by allegations of criminal conduct by police officers, the police department’s decision to subject officers reasonably suspected of criminal activities to lie detector tests furthers law enforcement objectives,’’ the court said.

Cordy also wrote, “the ‘criminal investigations’ exception applies where the conduct under investigation would constitute a crime even though criminal prosecution was not possible at the time of the administration of the lie detector test.’

For further reading, see the Massachusett’s Supreme Judicial Court’s slip opinion (PDF) in Kevin J. Furtado vs. Town of Plymouth et al.

In “Polygraphically Perverse,” former television show host Dick Cavett continues the story he began in his previous blog entry and explains how he stumped the polygraph operator that F. Lee Bailey brought on his show.

Some two weeks after MSNBC investigative reporter Bill Dedman broke the story of the Department of Defense’s new hand-held lie detector, formally dubbed the “Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System” (PCASS), Mike A. Glasch who writes for the weekly Reader, the official newspaper of Fort Jackson, South Carolina, picked up on the story in the 24 April 2008 issue (12.3 mb PDF). Ft. Jackson is home to the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the school that trains all federal polygraphers and which developed the new “Port-A-Poly” (as one contributor to the AntiPolygraph.org message board has dubbed it):

New credibility device fielded
Mike A. Glasch
Leader Staff

Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting a new tool to help them weed out potential terrorists — the Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System (PCASS), a hand-held device that works much like a polygraph.

James Waller, an instructor at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (DACA), left Sunday [20 April 2008] for Afghanistan to train troops on how to use it.

“Right now, our Soldiers are making life and death decisions: who to let or not let on base; who to release (or) who to keep, based on gut decisions,” Waller said. “This is just one tool to be used in the screening process.”

The idea of using junk science such as this polygraph-lite to make life and death decisions is an extremely foolish one. A “tool” that is known to be unreliable should not be relied on. Troops will be better off going with their gut and disregarding the flashings of the Traffic Light of Truth.

The subject has two wires connected to his fingertips or palm to measure changes in electrical conductivity of the skin. A third wire connected to a finger measures the subject’s intervals between heartbeats. Those wires are connected to a wrist cuff, which in turn is connected via USB to the PCASS.

The subject is asked a series of yes/no questions. The interviewer punches in the responses. PCASS then measures the subject’s physiological reactions and uses an algorithm - a computer program that makes the decisions - to determine if the subject is being truthful.

“The screen will display either red, green or yellow,” Waller explained. “Red means the subject was dishonest and lying to the security questions; green means they passed the test; yellow means the device did not get enough information to make a call so we need to rerun the test.”

So you re-run the PCASS when you get a yellow light. Kind of like shaking a Magic 8-Ball a second time when it says, “Try again later.”

Soldiers will use the devices when screening local nationals (it cannot be used on U.S. citizens) applying for jobs at bases in (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and (Operation Enduring Freedom), as well as when looking for suspected roadside bombers.

“Let’s say that we had an IED that was set off. A lot of times a patrol will cordon the area off, round up people from the area and question them,” Waller said. “Using the PCASS we can test them to see if they were involved in placing the bomb or actually detonating the bomb. It’s used for troops in the field to screen out the bad people from good people who are trying to do harm to U.S. forces or our coalition forces.”

The notion that this toy can be used “to screen out the bad people from the good people” is a dangerous delusion. Polygraph “testing,” of which the PCASS is a watered-down variant, has no scientific basis to begin with. Making matters worse, the “test” can be easily passed through the use of simple countermeasures that PCASS operators have no means of detecting. A federal polygraph examiner and past president of the American Polygraph Association has in all seriousness accused AntiPolygraph.org’s George Maschke of treason for publicly pointing out this fact.

According to Don Krapohl, special assistant to the director, DACA, three scientific studies were done on the device to determine its reliability. The Army conducted two of those studies; the third was contracted out to the Battelle Memorial Institute.

“Our accuracy rate, when you set the inconclusives aside, averaged 80 percent,” Krapohl said.

Both Krapohl and Waller agree that although PCASS is not 100 percent accurate, it is better than the current options available to Soldiers in the field.

There is no scientific ground for “setting inconclusives aside” for the purpose of determining the accuracy of a diagnostic test. DACA deliberately misled DoD about PCASS’s accuracy by leaving inconclusives out of the accuracy figures reported in a PowerPoint presentation (582 kb PDF). The studies were performed under highly unrealistic conditions that DACA knows will tend to make the procedure appear more accurate than it is in the real world. Paid volunteers pretended to commit a crime and were instructed to lie about it, and they would suffer no adverse consequences for failing to pass. Examinees were questioned in their native languages, rather than through an interpreter, as they will be in Afghanistan and Iraq. No testing of PCASS’s robustness against countermeasures was reported, nor was any test-retest reliability study conducted. Why not? Because Don Krapohl and others at DACA fear the results that realistic, unbiased testing would undoubtedly yield.

“It’s not a silver bullet,” Waller said. “It’s not perfect, but of all the technologies the National Academy of Sciences agrees that the polygraph and this type of technology is the most accurate. It’s better than what the troops do now, which is basically using gut intuition.”

Waller is misrepresenting the findings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, The Polygraph and Lie Detection. The report did not characterize polygraphy as “the most accurate” lie detection technology, as Mr. Waller misleadingly asserts. The report merely notes (at p. 173) that “[s]ome potential alternatives to the polygraph show promise, but none has yet been shown to outperform the polygraph.”

Nor does the NAS report support Waller’s claim that polygraph-type testing is better than using gut intuition, concluding instead (at p. 214) that “[t]here is essentially no evidence on the incremental validity of polygraph testing, that is, its ability to add predictive value to that which can be achieved by other methods.”

“Usually when we say it is less accurate than the polygraph[,] people pay attention to that and say, ‘Why are you using it if it’s less accurate?’” Krapohl said. “We like to point out that we don’t have enough polygraphers in the entire government to satisfy the requirements over in the theater.

“Gut instinct reliability is chance (50/50) or slightly better. That’s our benchmark. How do we improve about that and make this tool widely available? It (PCASS) gives us incremental validity over what we are doing right now.”

Don Krapohl is being less than honest. Once again, as the NAS report makes clear, there is no evidence that polygraph “testing” reliably provides incremental validity over that which can be achieved by other means, such as questioning a person, considering both their answers and demeanor, taking into account such relevant facts as are known, and reaching a considered judgment. The faulty studies conducted under the auspices of DACA provide no evidence that PCASS provides any incremental validity. Krapohl and DACA have willfully ignored the NAS report’s key conclusion that “[polygraph testing's] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies.”

For related reading on the PCASS, see Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System: U.S. Deploys Hand-Held Lie Detector.

Writing on his New York Times blog, former television show host Dick Cavett recounts the story of the time F. Lee Bailey appeared on his show to demonstrate how the polygraph works. Only it didn’t. Cavett tantalizingly reveals that a follow-up blog entry will be titled, “The Secret of How I Beat the Infernal Machine.”

Kat Richardson reports for The Dartmouth on Judge Jed S. Rakoff’s remarks at his recent William H. Timber ‘37 Lecture, which was co-sponsored by the Dartmouth Legal Studies faculty and the Dartmouth Lawyers Association. Excerpt:

Science and the law are “uncomfortable” but inevitable “bedfellows,” Jed Rakoff, a U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York, said in a lecture Wednesday in the Rockefeller Center. The talk addressed the long-term love-hate relationship between the two fields.

“The law is very messy, and it is attracted to science in search of certainty,” Rakoff said.

The hate part of the relationship becomes relevant when pseudoscience, or “junk science” as Rakoff termed it, interferes with the court system. Rakoff gave many examples of these “junk sciences,” including the use of polygraphs and fingerprinting. These procedures are often inconclusive, he said in justifying his “junk” label.

“[The use of a polygraph] is not remotely scientific and, when it creeps into the courtroom, can create great mischief,” he said.

Rakoff gave an example of a case in which an Egyptian immigrant living in a hotel across from the World Trade Center towers had been wrongfully accused of being involved in acts of terrorism based on his appearance and almost convicted because of polygraph results. Luckily, the man was exonerated in light of new evidence.

Rakoff warned that law and science are now yoked together in an unprecedented way because society believes that science and certainty are synonymous. Judges must work to determine whether the science is credible, replicable and generally accepted by experts in the field, he stressed. If so, then evidence pertaining to the field is admissible in a trial. Judges are the best suited to bear this responsibility, according to Rakoff.

Regarding the case of Abdallah Higazy, the Egyptian referred to in the article (who was an exchange student, not an immigrant), and from whom an FBI polygraph examiner coerced a false confession, see the discussion thread, FBI Polygrapher Michael Templeton Named in Lawsuit (Higazy v. Templeton) on the AntiPolygraph.org message board.