Niqab-in-court study panned

Doubts raised on linking veil with honesty

A team of researchers schooled in deception has cast doubt on a landmark Canadian study that found the wearing of niqabs actually improves courtroom truth-telling.

A critique of the study published this week listed so many “limitations” that any move by the Canadian justice system to adopt its findings would be “naive and misinformed” and could cause “irremediable harm to the judicial system.”

“The benefits of paying less attention to witnesses’ and lawyers’ facial expressions are neither theoretical nor empirically grounded arguments,” read the critique, published in Psychiatry, Psychology and Law and written by Vincent Denault, a lawyer and co-director of the Montreal-based Centre for Studies in Nonverbal Communication Sciences.

Last year, a study out of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology directly challenged Canada’s Supreme Court ban on witnesses testifying while wearing a niqab.

The study, published in the journal of the American Psychological Association, had women don niqabs and tell lies while being questioned on camera.

Then, volunteers were asked to judge the women’s truthfulness as compared to liars who weren’t wearing veils.

The results were that the veiled women were less likely to get away with lying.

“People were focusing on what the women are saying, rather than what they look like,” lead researcher AmyMay Leach told the National Post in July.

The critique by Denault, which was co-written with deception psychologists in France and the U.K., says Leach’s study did not accurately replicate courtroom conditions.

For one thing, liars in the study were given only two minutes to craft false testimony, while under Canadian law a witness can practise their testimony for months.

The liars were asked “open-ended questions” rather than having to cope with the leading questions that would have been posed in a real cross-examination.

The women in Leach’s study were cast as impartial witnesses to a crime, when in reality most courtroom lying comes from either plaintiffs or defendants.

And the study only tested how a visible face affected truth-telling.

“The function of witnesses’ and lawyers’ facial expressions goes well beyond the issue of lie detection,” it read.

Denault expressed particular worry that Leach’s study could easily find its way into law.

“It only takes one lawyer” to use the research to set a legal precedent, noted the critique. Conceivably, Canada could then be in a scenario of legalizing veiled court testimony without the full ramifications being understood.

Denault’s paper obliquely criticized psychology scholars who make recommendations that “exceed their area of expertise,” and wrote that such actions may “be detrimental to justice itself.”

In an email to the National Post on Friday, Leach said her study was judged on an “unrealistic criterion” of replicating courtroom condition.

“It would be highly unlikely that a laboratory story could replicate every aspect of a trial,” she wrote.