June 1st, 2010 by admin

The UK courts and law enforcement agencies have often looked to make polygraph (more commonly known as lie detector) evidence admissible in court, but current legislation prevents this. The Chairman of the British Polygraphic Association Bruce Burgess said: “The problem being that if you get a judge or jury accepting the evidence of the polygraph, it could be used as a guilty or innocent tool…and we could do away with the court. And we can’t do that; it wouldn’t be a justice system.”
The current system of justice that we have requires that a judge or jury make a decision about guilt or the innocence of a defendant based on the evidence that is presented to them. A polygraph test is not like evidence – such as recorded telephone conversations – that can be trusted to a degree by the judge and/or jury that are presented with this evidence. Polygraph tests can be fooled, which would mean some evidence was inaccurate and could mean the wrong verdict being reached.

• If you need help with wrongful dismissal please visit ContactLaw.co.uk

This is the crux of the issue. At the moment, despite what some experts would want us to believe, polygraph evidence is not completely reliable. As such, a conviction could not in principle be completely safe, as it has been shown that it is possible to beat a polygraph machine and lie convincingly.

However, this is not to say that polygraph testing does not have a place in the legal system. Often during a lawsuit a defendant will be asked to take a polygraph test as part of a psychological evaluation that the judge has ordered for pre-trial disclosure. However, a judge can’t order a polygraph test, as the defendant must voluntarily take these tests. Defendants will sometimes agree to this in order to give their case more weight and empirical evidence to prove their innocence.

The polygraph test will remain inadmissible as evidence in court while the system of trial by jury continues to be the basis of the UK’s legal system for apportioning guilt or innocence to a defendant. With the nemesis of miscarriages of justice tainting the use of polygraph tests, and the lack of universal evidence to support their accuracy and infallibility, it is unlikely that these machines will offer any evidence that would be considered in a court of law.