Truth can’t be reached through polygraph testing

Ilearned not to trust lie detector tests while writing a college paper on my IBM Selectric III typewriter. Yes, it was a long time ago. My topic was the famous case of a magazine claiming a college football game between Georgia and Alabama was fixed.

Before the game, an insurance agent was inadvertently patched into a telephone call between Alabama’s head coach, Bear Bryant, and Georgia athletic director Wally Butts. The insurance man said Butts supplied precise details about Georgia’s strategy to Bryant.

Then Alabama won the game, 35-0. One whisper led to another, and the old Saturday Evening Post published a wild, thinly reported story that claimed Butts and Bryant had rigged the game.

Butts sued the magazine for libel, and a jury awarded him more than $3 million. Bryant received an out-of-court settlement. He later wrote in his autobiography that the accusation of a fix had taken 10 years off his life.

The oddest part of this strange story had to do with the polygraph as a finder of truth.

Both Bryant and the insurance agent who accused him of being party to a crooked game underwent a lie detector test. Each man passed.

It’s obvious that both Bryant and his accuser could not have told the truth. Still, the polygraph examiners stood by the accuracy of their machine and their methods.

As the years rolled by, I covered cases in which police officers said various suspects had passed polygraph tests and been cleared of serious crimes, only to be prosecuted later when investigations turned up hard evidence.

And, in 1991, representatives of law professor Anita Hill announced she had passed a lie detector test to bolster her claim that Judge Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her years earlier.

Thomas was seeking confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court with slender credentials. He had been a judge on the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia for only 16 months when President George H.W. Bush nominated him to succeed legendary Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Thomas, who is black, faced the white men of the Senate Judiciary Committee in his confirmation hearing and called proceedings laced with sexual harassment allegations “a high-tech lynching.”

The full Senate eventually confirmed Thomas on a 52-48 vote. Eleven Democrats and 41 of 43 Republicans voted him onto the Supreme Court, where he remains to this day.

Did Thomas sexually harass Hill? Perhaps only the two of them know for sure.

My renewed interest in polygraph tests occurred because I’ve been peppered for a week with messages and calls from supporters of state Rep. Carl Trujillo, D-Santa Fe.

A former lobbyist, Laura Bonar, recently accused Trujillo of propositioning her and inappropriately touching her four years ago. Trujillo says he is innocent.

Bonar’s allegations came with Trujillo in the midst of a primary election challenge. In response, Trujillo commissioned a polygraph examiner to test the veracity of his story. Trujillo, according to the examiner, is telling the truth.

That might be the case. But the polygraph results are worthless except for the public relations value they bring to Trujillo’s re-election campaign.

A better process is underway. A subcommittee of the state House of Representatives is investigating Bonar’s allegations. Polygraphs have no place in the subcommittee’s work because they are unworthy of our collective trust.

I wrote last week that Trujillo should be presumed innocent. Proof, not mere allegations, must be the standard we live by.

I feel the same way about Trujillo’s polygraph test. It is pseudoscience that proves nothing.

Trujillo deserves a fair, thorough investigation from the subcommittee. That leaves the polygraph out. The device wasn’t trustworthy enough to substantiate Hill’s allegations all those years ago. And it’s not reliable enough to establish Trujillo’s innocence, no matter how many of his supporters say a lie detector test is definitive.