The Truth Machine (33 page)

The will to truth, which is still going to tempt us to many a
hazardous enterprise; that celebrated veracity of which all
philosophers have hitherto spoken with reverence: what
questions this will to truth has already set before us! What
strange, wicked, questionable questions! It is already a long
story—yet does it not seem as if it has only just begun?

—Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)

“This is not my idea,” he said.

“Yes, Inspector Bryant told us that. But you're officially the San Francisco Police Department, and it doesn't believe our unit is to the public benefit.” She eyed him from beneath long black lashes, probably artificial.

Rick said, “A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly. As a benefit it's not our problem.”

“But as a hazard,” Rachael Rosen said, “then you come in.”

—Philip K. Dick (1968)

“C
HICAGO,
Tuesday, March 2.—Joseph Rappaport, murderer of Max Dent, a government informer, died in the electric chair early today after a struggle for a reprieve which had its climax when a lie detector was carried into the death cell and scientists, lawyers, jailers and witnesses stared at tiny needles tracing on a slowly moving paper ribbon what proved to be mute lines of doom.” Thus begins a 1937
New York Times
article, “Lie Detector Seals Doom of Murderer.”
¹
Having won a stay of execution once by order of the State Supreme Court and four times on the order of Governor Horner, Rappaport's hopes lay with the lie detector, a machine in which the Governor had declared himself to be a “great believer.” “Judge in the test,” enthused the
Times,
“was Professor Leonard Keeler of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory of Northwestern University, inventor of the detector, scientifically known as a polygraph.”

Keeler and his party had filed into the cell, according to
Newsweek,
interrupting a card game between the condemned man and his guards.
²
The criminologist “put an odd-looking black box-like machine, about two feet square, on the table” and then tightened a rubber tube around Rappaport's chest.
³
The suspect looked tense “as a rubber sack attached to quarter-inch rubber tubing filled with mercury was wrapped around his upper arm and inflated to midway between systolic and diastolic blood-pressures.” The interrogation began:

“Is your name Rappaport?”
“Yes.”
The stylus flowed evenly across the slow-moving ribbon.
“Did you kill Dent?”
“No.”
The pen dashed off an inch-high peak.
“Is your home in Cook County?”
“Yes.”
The needles graphed an even course.
“Do you know who shot Max Dent?”
“No.”
The needles quivered, flickering jagged lines on the tape—mute lines that sealed a murderer's fate.
⁴

“Rappaport went into the death chamber at 12.04,” the
Times
reported. “He was pronounced dead at 12.12.”
⁵

Three months later, on June 8th, 1937, the
Times
told the story of another troublesome case whose resolution rested with the lie detector. Around 5:30 p.m. the previous evening two boys, aged nine and twelve years old, had stepped into a taxi at Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street in New York.
⁶
Flashing a ten dollar bill, one of the boys had instructed the driver to take them to a G-Man movie on Broadway. The suspicious driver had instead called a nearby policeman over to his cab. Patrolman Patrick Casey took the boys to the East Fifty-first Street police station for further questioning. While two detectives looked on “with expressions of exaggerated grimness,” the patrolman rolled up the boy's sleeve, wrapped a towel around his arm and connected the towel with a string to an alarm clock on the windowsill. The detectives pretended to watch the clock intently, while Casey pointed his finger
at the suspect and asked him, “Where did you get that money?” The boys quickly confessed to having found the money at home. They were held at the station until their parents came for them. Both agreed “that their experience with the police had been more thrilling than any G-man movie.”
⁷

So we have two lie detector tests, one apparently legitimate, the other not. The Chicago test had been conducted on a convicted murderer, with the State Governor's blessing, by the great Professor Keeler, a man widely known as the inventor of the lie detector. The New York test had been little more than a crude police station joke, a shameful charade whose intention was to cajole two bewildered boys into admitting their guilt of petty theft.
⁸
In Chicago, justice was seen to be done, while in New York proper procedures were abandoned. The Chicago police used a real lie detector, but their New York counterparts rigged up a fake one.

The newspapers may have crowned Leonarde Keeler the inventor of the detector, but he always contended that “there is no such thing as a ‘lie-detector.'”
⁹
The polygraph, he maintained, simply recorded the body's physiological changes onto a chart, which the skilful examiner must then scrutinize in order to arrive at a “diagnosis” of guilt. Because a person undergoing a lie detector examination “responds almost continuously to his immediate environment, to other individuals, to sounds, odors, pain, and other stimuli factors,” Keeler argued, all attending circumstances must be devoid of “irrelevant factors” if correct procedures were to be followed.
¹⁰
Drawing an analogy with the medical examination, Keeler believed that the subject of a deception test must refrain from eating or drinking for several hours, rest quietly for fifteen or twenty minutes before the test, and be undisturbed during it: “examinations must be conducted in darkened rooms, or in quiet environs.”
¹¹
Thus, even according to Keeler's criteria, Rappaport's last minute death chamber lie test was deeply compromised by the attendance of a rowdy group of “scientists, lawyers, jailers and witnesses,” not to mention journalists: the apparently genuine Chicago test displayed some troubling and dubious features.

Certain aspects of the bogus New York test, however, conformed to orthodox polygraph practice. In his 1930 article, “A Method for Detecting Deception,” Keeler argued that suspects should be made wary of the machine and be reminded of the lie detector's capabilities with the following preamble: “This machine to which you are connected has been used for some years on criminal suspects, and so far has proved a very reliable means of detecting the innocence or guilt of a man, and I'm sure we will not fail in your case.” A single test of ten to fifteen minutes was usually sufficient to ascertain guilt,
Keeler suggested, but subsequent procedures could be introduced if necessary. A suspect could be shown the machine's polygraphic tracings, for example, and asked to account for his emotional stress. Or a second test could be arranged so that the subject would be forced to watch “the excursions of the fluctuating needle.” It was important to utilize a suspect's fear because “the tell-tale needles will only tend to magnify each excursion as he sees them recorded,” Keeler explained. By this point about seventy-five percent of the guilty suspects confessed. But if a confession was still elusive, “a night incommunicado” would doubtless assist. “The only ‘torture' involved in such a test,” Keeler clarified, “is self-induced through fear of being caught, and that fear exists whether the man is being cross examined in the usual way or on a blood-pressure apparatus.”
¹²

By enhancing the dramatic atmosphere surrounding their lie detector test, by drawing their suspects' attention to the machine, and in attempting to produce a confession, the police of the East Fifty-first Street station were following established testing methodology.
¹³
The two aspiring New York petty thieves might have been attached to nothing but a towel and an alarm clock, but they experienced many of the melodramatic features of an orthodox lie detector test. Although these two stories appear to be polar opposites, that opposition is quite unstable. The experiences of Joseph Rappaport and John McLaughlin delineate one of the lie detector's most pertinent polarities. The instrument symbolizes the enlightened business of crime detection. However, it is oftentimes little more than a source of the darkly comic. The delectable irony of lie detector discourse is that the legitimate and the illegitimate regularly intermingle: this modern science of truth depends on an old-fashioned art of deception.
¹⁴
This is a discourse in which scientists become celebrities, scientific instruments acquire magical agency, and standardized practices allow the nonviolent to become violent. It is a discourse that blurs distinctions between the eye and the ear, the scientific and the spectacular, the endogenous and the exogenous, and the normal and the pathological. The polygraph's power is its ability to maintain credibility while tolerating these essential tensions.

Criminology's first object of knowledge,
Homo criminalis,
was construed as a degenerate and pathological species, a reviled “other.” Although the belief that the criminal was a biologically flawed type of person was widely held, the theory was emphatically articulated, studied, and promoted by Cesare Lombroso. His notion of the born criminal dominated discussions about criminality from around 1875 until after the turn of the twentieth century.
The establishment of criminology as a discipline went hand-in-hand with the conceptualization of criminality as an essentially biological problem. The theory was the touchstone that all investigators had to acknowledge, even if only to criticize. Later depicted by Lombroso as having come to him fully formed, in a flash of insight, a wide range of nineteenth-century intellectual and practical projects, including statistics, psychiatry, prison reform, philanthropy, evolutionism, and degeneration theory had, in fact, made his work possible. Lombroso also mobilized classical mythology, history, literature, and the natural world, not to mention anecdote and folklore in support of his thesis. It was out of this effervescent ether that the solid and apparently steadfast figure of criminal man materialized. Criminal man, then, was the solution to criminology's first dilemma: crime would be confronted by invoking a eugenic mode of governance for the pathological body of the criminal.

Criminal anthropology had an eye for an arresting visual image and an ear for a compelling story. Yet behind the loquacious rhetoric lay an insecurity, a tension between the desire to govern and the desire for knowledge, and also between science and common sense. Criminology's charismatic bricolage was unstable, and criminal man's aetiology, prognosis, and even his existence were under perpetual threat. The dilemma between scientific expertise and charismatic authority—resolved by the mythopoetic figure of Lombroso— was one the lie detector would later inherit.

Criminal anthropologists were fascinated by the female body. In accordance with long-standing beliefs about gender differences, women were considered inherently secretive, deceptive, and duplicitous: they could not be trusted. They were believed to be essentially corporeal beings, enslaved by their bodies. An entrenched undercurrent of Western thought posited a binary opposition between the male rational mind at one pole and the female irrational body at the other. Like the primitive savage—also regarded as less evolved than the European male—women were thought to be insensitive to pain and generally less “sensible” than men, possessing ineffectual emotionalities.
¹⁵
Whereas women were thought to be in need of governance due to their disruptive biologies, men were thought to be sufficiently rational to be able to suppress their emotional and sexual drives. Criminal anthropology had first sought evidence for criminality in the visible: in tattoos or facial physiognomies or via the assessment of the shapes and sizes of anomalous skulls. But this evidence proved elusive. Having decided that the stigmata of crime might not be written exclusively on the surface of the criminal body, criminology had to look ever deeper inside it for those hypothesized “internal
lesions” of criminality. That women apparently exhibited no visible signs of criminality was, paradoxically, another reason why criminology came to regard them as perfect suspects. Criminal anthropology was obsessed with prostitutes; when it came to women, the discipline considered the distinction between the normal and the pathological a matter of quantity not quality. The prostitute's criminal trade depended on invisibility—hidden deeds, concealed emotions—and yet the nature of her business was relentlessly corporeal. As the epitome of femininity, the prostitute also embodied criminality: degenerate and duplicitous yet devoid of external stigmata.

Criminal anthropology postulated that because criminals were savages living in the midst of modern civilization, they were indifferent to the suffering of others, devoid of empathy, and were less sensitive to pain compared to the law abiding. Incapable of displaying normal emotions, the criminal's sentiments were vulgar, crude, and unrefined. Criminology, therefore, constructed emotion as either an absence, a deficiency of the criminal mind, or as a pathology, a deviation from the normal. Once the search for visible stigmata of criminality had floundered, an extensive range of physiological instruments was employed to measure the hidden world of pathological emotions. Invisibility, corporeality, femininity, emotionality: this was the discourse of female criminality, a discourse that overlapped with that of hysteria, the most widely-diagnosed female malady at the time. Emotion was the key because it was both concealed within the female body yet also denigrated as rationality's criminal “other.” The female body came to occupy a numinous position within criminological discourse via the prostitute's: “Find a solution to the enigma of women, and you will solve the puzzle of criminality!” By offering a solution to this puzzle, the laboratory study of the emotions inadvertently made possible the later development of the lie detector.