Milwaukee Criminal Defense Law Blog

Polygraph tests, often called "lie-detector tests," are not admissible as evidence in the courts. This is because they have never been shown to produce reliable proof of whether the subject is lying.

Nevertheless, they continue to be popular as an employment screening tool and, sometimes, as a way to assess suspects and witnesses in criminal investigations. Many probation agents are also allowed to employ polygraphs to assess whether their clients are being truthful with them, though because they are not admissible in court a failed test cannot (alone) result in probation revocation. 

It would be immensely convenient if lie-detectors worked. They seem to promise a fair, objective way of determining whether someone is telling the truth. They were first developed by psychologists at the beginning of the 20th century, then refined by law enforcement and private businesses in the 1920s.

New York City is infamous for its "stop-and-frisk" policy, which allowed officers to perform a pat-down search on anyone they suspected of carrying a firearm. This resulted in tens of thousands of innocent people, the vast majority of whom were African-American or Latino, being stopped, frisked, and given an arrest record despite having done nothing wrong.

Luckily, New York law requires police to seal or destroy old arrest reports that resulted in no charges. But according to a new lawsuit, police and prosecutors still have access to those old records and are using them to justify arrests, more serious charges or longer sentences.

The Center for Court Innovation, a New York-based criminal justice reform agency, recently released a study on supposedly race-neutral risk assessment tools. These tools are widely used by courts to determine whether defendants should be granted bail or held in jail until trial.

The tools parse each defendant's demographics and criminal history, the seriousness of the current charge, and any past interactions with the justice system, such as arrests without charges. They then spit out a number corresponding to the theoretical risk that the defendant will commit another crime if released on bail.

The Montgomery County, Mississippi, prosecutor seems to have made it his career mission to convict Curtis Flowers for four 1986 murders in a small-town furniture store. Over the past two decades, he has tried Flowers for the murders six times.

For each trial, the prosecutor worked hard to remove any Black jurors, who might be more sympathetic to Flowers. Over the course of those six trials, there were only 43 potential jurors who were African-American. The prosecutor made sure only two actually served, even though the town where the murders occurred is 53% Black.