When Lie Detectors Lie
“Did you ever do anything that was illegal?” This was not a question posed to me by a cleric in a confessional or even a police officer or a prosecutor. Instead, it was a polygraph examiner my lawyer had hired to help me refute wrongful charges that I had possessed cocaine intending to distribute it. (For more on this, see “My Visit to the Realm of the Accused.”) He was not looking to pry. To do a proper test, he had to establish a baseline of how I responded to questions that might make me anxious. Fortunately, I passed the examination, but I would have never taken it if I had known then what I know now about lie detectors and the intrusive nature of an examination.
In 2003, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released The Polygraph and Lie Detection, an exhaustive 373-page review of all credible studies on the validity of forensic lie detection. The report concluded that “[polygraph] practitioners have always claimed extremely high levels of accuracy, and these claims have rarely been reflected in empirical research.” Trying to make the best out of a bad situation, the polygraph industry picked the most favorable study in the book to proclaim that the NAS found examinations were truthful 89% of the time when properly conducted. Even that figure gives me pause. These tests are used in critical hiring and firing decisions, so being wrong more than 10% of the time seems bad. However, in 2018, a report titled “An update of the 2003 National Academy of Sciences report on polygraph testing” called out the industry cherry-picking and pointed to more recent research that showed polygraph accuracy could be as low as 65%. This stunning conclusion came with the caveat that no study had yet to adequately emulate the anxiety a test taker might feel when accused of a serious crime.
While the Supreme Court has ruled that polygraph results cannot be used as trial evidence, in Submerged, my book about a wrongful conviction, I show how lie detectors can have a consequential impact outside the courtroom and may still reverberate inside as well. When 16-year-old Rayna Rison first went missing in 1993, local law enforcement in the City of La Porte, Indiana, administered polygraphs with her current boyfriend and Jason Tibbs, who had a brief platonic relationship with her in middle school but remained close thereafter. Both teenagers failed the test when asked if they knew where Rayna was. Police did not think they killed her, but their supposed deception was a distraction that made the detectives believe she was a runaway.
A polygraph was also administered to Rayna’s brother-in-law, Ray McCarty. He had impregnated Rayna when she was thirteen, which made him the detectives’ prime suspect. The FBI conducted his polygraph, and the examiner concluded he, too, showed deception. His reaction was also suspicious when asked if the missing girl might be in specific areas. McCarty showed agitation when asked about a section on a map that included the pond where Rayna was found submerged a few weeks later. While the boys weren’t concerned too much about the false results of their tests, the 27-year-old brother-in-law broke down and sobbed when informed he failed.
Although a grand jury indicted McCarty for Rayna’s murder in 1998, charges were dropped a year later, and the Rison family fingered Jason as their favorite prime suspect. Brett Airy was the City of La Porte detective leading the investigation into Tibbs. The two had crossed paths when Jason faced an absurd charge about stealing barrels of nickel balls from the foundry where he had become a manager. After Airy questioned Jason without a lawyer, he asked him to take a Voice Stress Analysis (VSA) on the detective’s computer. Jason took it but failed. According to the NAS study, VSA results are even more problematic than polygraphs. The nickel charges were eventually dropped, no doubt an embarrassment for Airy, but he shared the results of the VSA with Jason’s employers who fired him.
In 2008, a convicted murderer, Rickey Hammons, came forward with a preposterous story about the Rison case a few days after an article appeared in the local newspaper reporting that convicts could get their sentences reduced if they helped with unsolved homicides. Back in 1993, he claimed, he was smoking dope in the loft of his family’s pole barn when his sister’s boyfriend, Eric Freeman, backed her car inside. He said Jason got out of the passenger seat and opened the trunk, where he could see Rayna’s dead body. Although Hammons concocted numerous outrageous lies during the investigation of the murder he committed, to my knowledge, Detective Brett Airy never asked him to take a polygraph about the pole barn story.
Freeman was a different matter. When the police questioned him after hearing Rickey’s pole barn story, he didn’t know what they were talking about. He didn’t remember ever opening the trunk of the Hammons car. But for some odd reason, his lawyer advised him to take a polygraph, which he failed. Five years later, after marital and financial setbacks, he agreed to sign an immunity agreement and let the detectives feed him details about the murder he knew nothing about. No doubt, failing the lie detector made him feel even more susceptible to the charge he had been Jason’s accomplice. Freeman’s testimony at Tibbs’s murder trial would be key to his conviction.