The Truth Machine (26 page)

The lie detector emerged amid mounting criticism of the brutalities of the third degree. Progressive police theorists such as August Vollmer, together with periodicals such as
The Nation
and
The New Republic,
led the strident campaign to oppose the practice, a campaign that reached a crescendo in the early 1930s.
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Emanuel Lavine's (1930)
The Third Degree: A Detailed and Appalling Expose of Police Brutality
was little more than a collection of sensational anecdotes. Published the year before the Wickersham Commission's
official investigation into police lawlessness,
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it nevertheless captured the public opposition to the practice. One author of the Report concluded that the regular and systematic use of violence to extract confessions was habitual in only the two largest cities of the United States. But if the third degree was defined as “threats, lies, display of weapons, exhausting grilling, and the like” then it was the exceptional American city where it was not practiced.
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The dramatic air of the lie detector test was increased by the presence of a mysterious looking “black box.” Eloise Keeler,
The Lie Detector Man: The Career and Cases of Leonarde Keeler
(Boston: Telshare Publishing, 1984). Reprinted by permission of Telshare Publishing Company.

Condemnations of police violence had been voiced from the earliest years of the century.
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“Decent public opinion stands firmly against such barbarism,” wrote Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, “and this opposition springs not only from sentimental horror and from aesthetic disgust: stronger, perhaps, than either of these is the instinctive conviction that the method is ineffective in bringing out the real truth.”
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Münsterberg's student William Moulton Marston later asserted that the use of deception testing exercised “a control over the criminal mind which no ‘third degree' [could] produce and which those who know criminal psychology fully understand.”
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“The process is operated with the utmost consideration for the individual,” remarked the
Review of Reviews
in 1932. “Third degree methods are discarded; the subject is given a cigar or cup of coffee if he desires.”
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The nation's progressive police were quick to recognize the value of Keeler's Polygraph, wrote
Scientific American.
“The need for such a device was acute. The old so-called ‘third degree' methods of obtaining the truth had been proved inefficient.”
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Saturday Evening Post
ridiculed the Chicago policeman who joked about having “‘a lie detector of my own about this long' … indicating the length of the blackjack.”
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“As a matter of fact,” the
Post
concluded, “the lie-detector examination is the opposite of the third degree.”
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The interest of the popular press in the “lie-detector” exploded from around 1930. The instrument was so famous by 1936 that
Popular Science Monthly
could describe “Two Simple Ways to Make a Lie Detector” to its readers.
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In some quarters, by the midthirties the instrument was synonymous with the “Keeler Polygraph.” Articles on the lie detector in the popular press invariably attributed inventor status to an individual or simply asserted that the instrument was an invention. But if the lie detector was to be depicted as an impressive scientific invention, then its validity had to be expressed in the most scientific manner possible: by deploying the power of numbers. Articles about the instrument's accuracy and reliability invariably included a figure expressing either the rate of confession or the rate of lie detection. Although few methodological or technological innovations were made to the test during
the 1930s, the accuracy figure gradually increased as the decade wore on. For a technology abounding in hubris, hyperbole was the norm.

In 1932 the
Review of Reviews
reported that confessions have been obtained in more than eighty-five percent of the cases on record.
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In experimental cases, claimed the
Scientific Monthly,
“there is an accuracy of approximately 85 per cent.” In numerous criminal cases however, “full confessions have been obtained in approximately 75 per cent of those in which the record indicated deception regarding the pertinent questions propounded of the suspect.”
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Living Age
ignored the distinction between experimental and criminal cases when it claimed the ingenious machine had registered accurate results in “75 to 86 per cent of cases submitted to it.”
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Forum and Century
claimed, “in seventy-five per cent of cases the subject, on viewing the unanswerable evidence he has given against himself, breaks down.”
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Reader's Digest
enthused that “75 out of every 100 individuals who give guilty reactions on the lie-detector make full confessions after they are shown the polygraph's remorseless record of their prevarications.”
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Newsweek
reported Keeler's belief “that on the average his machine is 85 per cent accurate in detecting lies to questions unimportant to the individual. Seventy-five per cent of all criminal cases found guilty by the apparatus have been substantiated by subsequent confessions.”
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After admitting some initial skepticism about the powers of the “Fordham psycho-galvanometer,” New Jersey Assistant Prosecutor Edward Juska claimed he was “now convinced that the detector is 98 per cent correct, as claimed.”
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It was no wonder the lie detector was considered to be a cost-effective addition to any police department. In Wichita, Kansas, the police apparently obtained approximately twenty confessions a month that would have not been secured without the use of the instrument. Statistics showed that approximately sixty percent of those caught lying by the polygraph confessed.
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O. W. Wilson, a graduate of Vollmer's “college cop” program, headed the Wichita department.
Scientific American
called Wichita “the proving ground for the Keeler Polygraph,” because apparently more people were tested there than anywhere else. Having tested more than thirteen hundred persons a year since 1936, the department had accumulated some four thousand recorded examinations by 1939—nearly half of which were the records of transients or vagrants, “picked up in the railroad yards or found loitering about the city streets.” The writer produced a statistic that would eventually achieve notoriety within the detection of detection discourse: “Otherwise stated, 99.9 percent of all persons examined were able to produce records upon which
a definite and immediate decision could be made.”
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In 1941,
Reader's Digest
claimed that the lie detector in regular use for six years in a large department store had “caught 90 per cent of the guilty, [and had] never convicted the innocent.” An official of a large detective agency said that while half of its cases could be solved by direct investigation, detectives ran up “against a stone wall” in the other half. “Here they have found the Polygraph 99 percent perfect.”
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Saturday Evening Post
concurred, maintaining that in only “1 per cent of the cases, the lie detector findings are proved to be wrong.”
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Accuracy statistics were also privileged in the scientific literature. In his 1917 paper on the “Systolic Blood Pressure Symptoms of Deception,” Marston claimed that measuring blood pressure constituted “a practically infallible test of the consciousness of an attitude of deception.”
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In one experimental study he concluded that he had correctly judged 94.2 percent of the curves he had examined.
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Harold Burtt reported that the systolic blood pressure method could correctly detect experimental crimes in “91 per cent of the cases as compared with 73 per cent” using the breathing method.
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Giving no experimental details, Keeler reported a response time-word association study that detected deception in sixty-two percent of cases. However, blood pressure and respiration techniques improved accuracy to ninety-three percent.
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Fred Inbau maintained that experimental cases were accurate “approximately eighty-five per cent” of the time, adding that in criminal cases, full confessions had been obtained in “approximately seventy-five per cent of those in which the record indicated deception.”
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In his history of lie detection, Paul Trovillo reported that the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory examined 2,171 subjects between 1935 and 1938. Of this number twelve mistakes in diagnosis had been verified, wrote Trovillo, who calculated that the errors were of the order of “five-hundredths of one per cent.” And even if the errors were ten times this number, “they would still be a relatively small proportion of the total.”
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Not everyone let the statistics go unexamined. In 1939 Walter Summers criticized Marston's work “because of its impressionistic character, so that the apparent statistical result is valueless as a critique of the accuracy of the procedure.” Having quoted accuracy claims by Larson and Keeler, Summers concluded that a procedure that started with an experimental validity of only eighty-five percent was “an extremely hazardous thing to employ in the investigation of the guilt or innocence of any person.” “Even the 75% efficiency obtained in the numerous criminal cases leaves a very great probability of error… . The 75% efficiency by no means tells us the entire story, for it fails to
relate the number of instances in which deception was actually practiced in a manner which eluded the examiner and the instrument.” Despite his forceful criticism, Summers did not dispense with the accuracy statistic altogether. The preliminary results obtained with his own psychogalvanometer—an instrument rejected by both Marston and Larson—had “showed an efficiency of better than 99%.”
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“Caution Keeler whenever you see him to cut out his talk about the infallibility,” Larson asked Vollmer in 1931, “because I know it is not infallible. Tell him to never have it used so that men are discharged because of the interpretation of the record, or legal action of any sort taken.”
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The status of invention and the power of numbers were not the only ways advocates of instrument gained legitimacy. Another one was the depiction of the machine as a “black box.” Expository articles often included a photograph of the enigmatic instrument, a depiction that explained yet mystified at the same time. Here was a gadget fabricated from reassuringly complex components, all of which were encased within a scientific-looking “black box.” By describing the instrument thus, however, the question what exactly it was fabricated from remained unanswered. The first explanation conveniently rendered the second superfluous: that the instrument looked “scientific” was a sufficient testimony of its credibility. What exactly was within the black box was rarely explained. It was useful to have the lie detector described as “mysterious,” or as the
Saturday Evening Post
put it, as a “curious engine.”
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Henry Pringle began his 1936
Reader's Digest
article “How ‘Good' is Any Lie?” with an account of the experience of submitting to a lie detector test: “We sat in a small room at the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory of Northwestern University in Chicago. On a table behind me rested a small, box-like machine. This was the Keeler Polygraph, popularly known as the ‘lie-detector,' and I was being subjected to an examination on my truthfulness. Professor Leonarde Keeler of the Northwestern University law school, was conducting the test.” Having praised the abilities of the intimidating “Keeler Polygraph,” Pringle wryly observed that the “vast majority of defendants … are entirely confident that they can outwit the little black box.”
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Keeler described his machine in the same manner. In 1948, he told Vollmer that a fellow operator had just completed his six-week polygraph course. “He is now carrying one of our black boxes to the Orient,” he wrote, “where he will be stationed for some time.”
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Reporting on a sensational “eleventh-hour” lie test that “sealed the doom” of a convicted murderer, the
Literary Digest
described how Keeler “put an odd
looking black boxlike machine, about two feet square, on the table” in the jail cell.
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In 1936, the
New York Times
described how a school principal wrecked his “experiment in psychology”—a homemade lie detector—that was attracting media attention.
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“The destruction of the black box equipped with dials and electric bulbs closed the incident.” In 1937,
Scientific American
pictured an instrument replete with dials, switches, a graphical recording device, and an assortment of tubes.
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The components looked scientific and complex, but the technical language obscured the fact that they were quite straightforward. Describing “Two Simple Ways To Make A Lie Detector,”
Popular Science Monthly
hit the nail squarely on the head when it told readers that “since the device is so simple, it is advisable to conceal it in a box so as to hide the mechanism and give it as mysterious and complicated an appearance as possible.” Although the homemade machine was little more than a toy, it nevertheless worked “on the same principle as the famous lie-detecting instruments used by criminologists in obtaining confessions of guilt from law violators.”
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