TREMORS IN THE BLOOD-Amit Katwala

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showman's touch. John Larson, Gus Volmer and Leonard Keeler hoped the lie Detector would make the justice system fairer, but the flawed device soon grew too powerful for them to control it. Poisoned their lives, turned fast friends into bitter enemies, and as it conquered America and the world, it transformed our relationship with the truth in ways that are still being felt as new forms of lie detection gained momentum

in the present day. Tremmer's in the Blood reveals the incredible truth behind the creation of the polygraph through gripping true crime cases featuring explosive gunfights, shocking twists, and high stakes courtroom drama. Touching on psychology, technology and the science of the truth. Tremor's in the Blood is a vibrant, atmospheric thriller and a warning from history beware what you believe.

The book that ever featuring this evening is Tremors in the Blood, Murder, Obsession, and the Birth of the lie Detector, with my special guest journalist and author Ammitt Katwawa. Welcome to the program and thank you very much for this interview.

psychology neuroscience. That's what I study at the university. And about four years ago now, I was watching Making a Murder of the true crime documentary on Netflix with Steveen Avery, and in the second season of Making a Murderer, in an attempt to clear his name, Stephen Avery does a test with a brain fingerprinting test, which is a kind of new form of lie detection test that uses brain Scandal says that you can use brainscans to tell whether

someone's lying. And with my science, how and I was kind of thinking, this doesn't make any sense to me, I don't I would initially quite skeptical of this test. So I ended up doing a lot of reporting into new forms of live detection, so things like AI brain scans, other new technologies and that people claimed him to detect lies.

But while I was doing that reporting, which ended up being an article for The Guardian and also being part of this book as well, I also found out about the crazy history of the polygraph and the men who created it. And actually what I found was that there were parallels between what happened one hundred years ago when the polygraph was invented, and what's happening today with these new forms of light detection? And I guess the purpose of the book as well as to entertain, and the

former is also to maybe strike a warning. Though we don't learn the lessons of the mistakes that were made with the polygraph, then we risk falling into the same chrap again with new forms of detection in the future.

miles south of San Francisco, where they lived. Take us to that incredible scene and what happens.

behind him speeds up. Whenever he slows down, the car behind him slows down, And just to start coming into the city, the car kind of gets really really close to them, and he tries to speed up to get away from it, but the car kind of keeps nudging placer and closer and closer, and eventually the car forces Henry to the side of the road just in the western area of San Francisco, and Henry kind of hits the curbs, the lights go out, and then the next thing he knows is a guy standing at the window

of the car pointing a gun at him, asking for money. Henry hands over three hundred dollars in cash, but then when the bandit asks for his wife's jewelry, Henry gets annoyed and he starts to reach for his gun, which he's got in the side pocket of his car, and then everything starts to happen very quickly. So what Henry says happened next is that as he's reaching for his gun to scare off the guy who's robbing him, the

band that pulls out his own gun and shoots. And then what Henry says happens is that his wife, Anna throws herself in the front of the bullet, takes the bullet, the guy runs off. Henry's left in the car. His wife's bleeding from a wound in her chest or a stomach, and you know, he's left not knowing what to do. So then he drives to the nearest hospital, which is just further up in nineteenth Avenue, and someone's estating in

the middle of the park. Rushes to hospital. They can't do anything for that hospital, soil they take her to another hospital. Henry follows in his car. By the time he arrives at the other hospital, the doctors tell her tell him that his wife has died, and you know, he is a straw. I think he collapses. You know, it's traumatic event for him. So this is the kind of central crime. At the first half of the.

the newest hospital is. So that's that's how it looks from this witnesses perspective, except that, and this is one of the first inconsistencies that been inter creaking to Henry's story that Henry describes the car differently to Gorfinkle. Right, So Henry says it's a particular type of car, and Golfre says it's a different type of car. And this might seem like a minor point, but obviously in those days the police lead on how solvers crime was looking for a red Dodge, but it wasn't a red Dodge.

It was a dark blue Hudson car. So that's one of the first insonsistencies Henry's story and then over the following weeks, Henry's story about what happened on the night in question actually begins to unravel.

So if you're walking around with one hundred dollar bill, then you very wealthy or there's something suspicious about it. So then what happens next is there's this kind of police hunt for these bandits. You know, Henry says there's kind of three men that were involved in this shooting because he saw them as the car was pulling up alongside him and forcing to the side of the road. He said he saw three men in this car. So

there's this kind of statewide hunt for these men. And eventually they find these two brothers called Arthur and Walter Casta, and Arthur and Walter Caasta are all characters, just absolute villains, I guess, is any way you can put it, you know, sort of violent, prone to making terrible decisions. Their father was actually a police officer. Princes their police officer, so if they'd been murdered, and then after that, this family sort of went off the rails a little bit, and

they're kind of in their twenties and thirties. Walter in particular is the I guess, loose cannon of the family. His kind of friends and family would say things like he makes bad decisions. His friends called him dizzy. He's like impulsed, he's like a child, he's prone to these violent outbursts. And then there's his younger brother, Arthur, who's kind of the more level headed of the two brothers. And they're actually like I think seven seven boys and

also huge family. So that they get picked up basically at a garage in the mission, having tried to pay a bill player pay for a repair bill with one hundred dollars bill and the garage. Enna thinks this is suspicious, so he calls the police, and the police know the Caster brother's very well because they've been in trouble with the police before, so they bring them into questioning and then they bring Henry Wilkins in to identify the brothers

in a police lineup. But Henry comes in and he says that he doesn't actually recognize either of the brothers as the men who robbed him and shot his wife. So the police let the to let the brothers go, that's the next step. And you know, Henry is still at this point kind of playing this innocent victim, this brief husband, this guy whose wife has been taken from him by this kind of random act of violence.

and more and more. Henry had been allegedly seeing other women. So there was a sense that things were bad in the marriage even before this happened, and that perhaps this patriots agree and husband that Henry was putting forward was a bit of a front.

I should say that. The other thing that the police did was they showed Henry the Caster brother's car and they said, you know, was this the car that you saw at the scene of the crime, And obviously he

said no, but because it wasn't. So what happened was that the Caster brothers had rented a car from this garage owner on the morning of Anna's death, and then they had returned it maybe an hour after she was shot, so you know that was and that car, the description of that car matched the car that the witness, Jacob gorfing Or, had seen speeding down nineteen seventy behind Henry's car. So you see how the police kind of pieces together.

So they have this witness who sees a car following Henry's car, and then they have the character by renting a car that matched the description of that car. That's how I happened. And this car that they found, which they're pretty sure was the car that was following Henry, there's no resemblance to the car that Henry said he saw, so clearly Henry is maybe not telling the full truth about what happened on that night.

he's considered the father of modern policing. He was one of the first people to bring in forensics. He was one of the first people to bring in radios and signaling system for police officers. He started using fingerprints and photo libraries and things like that to kind of catch criminals. The other thing he did was he started hiring university graduates,

college graduates as police officers. So up until nineteen twenties, most peace officers were kind of uneducated, quite British people, i suppose, and they used their fists and their clubs to get information out of suspects. And Farmer thought that this was a bit distasteful, and he thought that actually hiring college graduates would lead to a more humane form of policing. One more a better route towards justice. He started hiring all of these university graduates and then the

player was nicknamed the college cops. And one of Valmer's college coups was a guy called John Larson. And John Lson was older than some of the other college croups. He was already in late twenties. But he was different because he's the background in physiology. So he'd done a PhD in physiology and he wanted to become a criminologist.

He wanted to use physiology to help solve crimes, so he went to Berkeley to basically get some real well policing experience before he then used that accommodation of this physiology research to become a criminologist. And Larson was like a terrible cop. He was constantly bumbling, getting in fights with his colleagues, crashing cars, things like that. It was

a very good scientist. And in nineteen twenty two, so the year before Anna Wilkins was shot, Vroma read a research paper by a guy called William Moulton Marston who would go on to be the creator of Wonder Woman, but he's also well known for coming up with this essential insight. Right, So Marsden realized or discovered that when he measured people's blood pressure as they told false stories, that blood pressure would go up when they were lying. So this is the kind of essential insight that then

feeds into the polygraph machine. So Marston noticed that there was a link between blood pressure and people telling lies, essentially what he thought there was. So Roma reads this research them and he thinks, if only we could find a way to formalize that, to make that usable in piece investigations, to make it objective rather than subjective. So he calls John Larson into his office one day and he says, John, could you turn this into a machine that we can use to, you know, kind of measure

and while we're interrogating suspects. So, you know, John Marson goes away and he cobbles together a bunch of equipment from the lab at the University of Berkeley, like a blood pressure monitor, a sort of a scrolling piece of paper, and a pen that kind of scratches away lines depending on whether someone's blood pressure goes up and goes down. And you'll recognize what I'm describing as essentially a polygraph machine. A lie detector is not dissimilar to how it looks today.

So this is in nineteen twenty two, and then a few months later they get a chance to kind of try out this machine on a real case. There's a series of best women's dorm at the University of Berkeley, and Larson uses the lie detective machine. The cardio neuropsychograph is what he was calling it back then, which isn't a very catchy name, but he uses that to basically investigate this case of these stuffs at this dorm, and then beyond after that, it gets used in a number

of other kind of cases. That gets used in the murder trial O case, a guy called William high Tower who keeps murdering a priest, and it gets more and more popular over the following year. So by the time the Wilkins case comes around, the light of sector is sort of getting wider recognition in the press, and you know, is generally thought of in kind of positive terms. So those are the two kind of creators I guess of the detector. The other person who's important in the story

is a guy called Leonard Keeler. So Keiler was about sixteen at the time that last and wasn't menting the light detectors. He was a high school student, quite a sickly boy. He'd been off school for a while with various illnesses. And he was a family friend of August Formers. So Volmer was friendly with Charles Keeler, who was Lend Keiler's father. He knew that Keiller was sort of kicking his heels at home, so one day he said, oh, why don't you come into the police department and you know,

I'll show you show you around. So, you know, Keiler comes into the police department one day, just like the kids. You know, he's quite a you know, interesting guy. He's into like animals. He keeps rattlesnakes at home. He like does slighted hand magic and things like that. But anyway, at the moment Keiler sees Last and with the polygraph machine, he's like completely fascinated by this machine, and he becomes a Larsen's kind of protege. He comes as a system.

He helps Last and take the machine around California doing tests on people and things like that. So those are the three main characters. And you know, so this is in kind of the spring of nineteen twenty two. So behind the Wilkens case, rolls around a year later. These three characters have kind of honed the light detector and

they think they aren't to a good thing. It's been using a couple of moder cases and lots of like t thefts and things like that, and the Wilkins case is like another kind of big step for them.

you shoot your wife? And the test as it was designed, required you to wait a minute between each question to allow someone's body to react to the question, and then allow it to come back to a baseline for you

then ask the next question question. And the theory is that by comparing the responses to the control questions to the responses to the kind of target questions, you can determine whether someone's lying, because if they're lying, there'll be the theories that they're pulsed and the blood pressure will go up if they're herd. The truth, the theory is

that it won't. That's one of the one of the points I try and make in the book is that, you know, I don't think we can necessarily take that for granted, which which means the polygraph is slightly flawed. But yes, so John Larson kind of gets the very across the bay to San Francisco and he does the slight test on on Henry Wilkins. And you know, at this time, the Caster brothers sort of in the wind right.

They've been released and they've basically just disappeared from the city, and Henry is being seen with much more suspicion by the press and by the police. But actually he takes the liab De text to test and he passes the lad De tech to test. So according to this machine that's been invented. Henry is innocent, he had nothing to do with his wife's death, and he's just been sort of wrongly implicated. He is the victim of kind of random violence. And so again the police are kind of

forced to just let him go. So Henry is brought in to do the slide of text test, he passes the tex to test, and then he's let go. So then the police are kind of back to square one right there. Initial suspects, the Caster Brothers were released because Henry said he didn't recognize them, and then Henry was brought back in when they realized that actually he didn't know the Caster brothers. That's the other thing, that important

thing that had happened. So it had transpired in the intervening weeks that Henry had actually worked with water Casta and then was acquainted with the people that the police think shot his wife, which is again is like a real red flag. But they bring in then he passes the live detective test, so they let him go.

as kind of a showman. He's much more interested in using this machine to solve crimes, you know, chase down criminals, crack cases, do all these kind of dramatic, heroic things. And sometimes because Keuiler is not a scientist, he sort of discards the careful, cautious scientific method that Larson would prefer that he use. So this is the essential kind of difference between these two men. And in the years that follow, these two men have spectacular fallings out their

different attitudes to the polygraph machine. And actually John Larson really ends up hating Keiler by the end of the book. You know, he really really kind of despises him. He thinks that Keela has turned this machine that he invented the last and invented into sort of Frankenstein's monster, right, Keeler is largely responsible for the spread of the polygroch around the world, but Larson kind of never really forgives them for it.

So arthurcass This is like mid June twenty twenty three by this point, and Arthurcaster is kind of sitting in this jai jail cell at this point, and he hears a young kid, kind of like a teenager, I guess, being brought in and he talks to him briefly, and the kids says, you know, I'm being sent down for the Anna Wilkins murder and I didn't do it. I'm innocent.

I'm innocent, and Arthur is like, okay. And then what happens is that night they put this kid in the cell next to him, next to Arthur, and all night you can hear this kid moaning and crying and wailing. You know, I'm gonna they're going to hang me. You know, I'm innocent, I didn't do it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this goes on for a couple of nights and then eventually Arthur's conscience starts to weigh on him. You know, his mother comes in and his mother tells him, oh,

you know, you should do what's right. And so, you know, a couple of days later, Arthur confesses. He says, you know, we were involved in the shooting and it was Henry Wilkins that paid us to kill his wife. And this is kind of a bombed our moment in the whole case, and actually happened because the kid that they brought in to cry and whale and moan in the cell next to Arthur's cell was an actor. He was not actually

a real suspect at all. They brought him in with the beress purpose of kind of tricking Arthur into confessing, and it worked. And it also points the finger straight back at Henry Wilkins, which means two things. Really, It means that the police had released not only Walter and Archicasta, who ended up being implicated, but they'd also released tend Me on the basis of a test on the so

called light attective machine. And the reason that I kind of picked this case for this book about the history of the polygraph machine is that it was one of the first kind of high profile failures of this machine, the first of many.

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Just go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free. ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder again that ZipRecruiter dot com slash m r der. ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. Now, we talked about this, this dramatic failure, at least that John Larson felt it was a dramatic failure of this device that he had put his considerable part of his life into. But how did August Volmer react and how did Keeler respond? And what was the next chapter in the light Detector?

So that's one of the kind of main things that comes out during the kind of trial and the pre trial and as it transpires, and his sister came over from Germany a few months before Anna died and basically was been struck up an affair with Henry Wilkins essentially, so yeah, more and more kind of fingers seem to be pointing at Henry. But the first trial, it's kind of a hung jury, so that they didn't come to

an agreement in the first trial. And basically what happened is that the prosecution calls, you know, after Cast and water Caster, who then you obviously go out and say that they were paid by Henry to shoot Anna, but no one really believes them. The jury kind of think, okay, well, on the one hand, you've got this weaving husband who, yes, maybe was having an affair, but on the other hand,

you've got these two renowned crooks with long criminal records. Actually, what ends up happening is that they don't really believe anyone in the case, right, They don't believe either Henry or the Caster brothers, but so there's no kind of unanimous verdict, and actually it goes it goes to a retrail and the retail for the very similar pattern, you know, same kind of witnesses, same kind of attempts to malign the characters of various people, saying you know, that kind

of undan tactics used by the attorneys. At one point, the attorney's kind of almost come to blows, so the opposing attorneys are literally standing outside of the courthouse squaring up against each other, and they have to be separated by the police. But by the end of that second trial, Henry is found innocent, so actually no one goes to jail for this crime. Then the other thing we should

talk about, of course, is the shootout. So they managed to catch Arfter castera kind of relatively early on, but Walter Caster still kind of disappears. So after the Custom

brothers were initially released, they kind of flee north. So they get a car and they drive up up the west coast towards Eureka, through the kind of old gold mining country in the Redwoods, and eventually they pitch up, you know, somewhere somewhere on up there, and Arthur is brought back to San Francisco, but Walter is still kind

of on the lamb. But at some point Walter sneaks back to San Francisco and the police are watching him, and then they get a tip about where he is one day, so they send kind of three police officers down to go and get him when he's staying at his mother's house and they send three places officers to go and kind of arrest him and bring him back so that he can he can be tried in this

Henry Wilkins case. And essentially what happens is that as the police knock on the door and they enter, so Water's mother answers the door, the police barge in and then the shooting start. Water shoots one of the police officers in the head in just above the eye. He shoots another one in the chest, He shoots his girlfriend who he suspects of having led the police to him, and then he turns with the gun on himself. And there's space of about two minutes, there is massive bloodshed

at this house San Francisco. One of the police officers dies, the other one is okay. Eventually that has to have eye surgery, and then obviously Waters's girlfriend and Water both

both passed away as well. And for John Larson, this is like a really like project event because he's kind of thinking, Oh, if my machine had worked properly, this would never have happened, right, Or if the machine had not existed, maybe Henry would have been arrested, and you know, they wouldn't have had to track Water down in this way. So in his mind it's like the machine failed, and because the machine failed, all these people are now dead. So it's a really dramatic kind of tourn of events.

called James Arfonder Fryer. He was a First World War there twenty five year old who had been accused of murdering a prominent black doctor in Washington and Marston wanted to use this case as a kind of test case for getting a lie detection accepted in court, but the judge was not convinced. He basically said something like, when this technology is broadly accepted by experts in the field, then it will be sufficiently developed to be to be usable in the court of law. But it hasn't reached

that case yet. And this standard of qualification, which was known as the Fries standard, kind of became the fact a benchmark which new technologies have to reach in order to be usable in court. You know, whether that's fingerprinting, blood battery analysis, all these kind of new technologies that people want to use as evidence have to the standard where they're kind of broadly accepted by experts in the field.

And the polygraph didn't reach that standard. And actually the polygraph has never reached our standard, which is why it's not usable in court. Federal court in the US.

find Henry guilty to prove that he was guilty. So after Henry gets released, John Larson kind of befriends Henry Wilkins and he convinces him to take another lie detected test, which Henry passes again, and then he also convinces him to do a truth theorem, which again Henry kind of passes. It still shows up that he telling the truth. John Larson remains convinced that Henry's innocent, but with no evigenc he sort of has to let it go. But he

never really stops thinking about that case. But anyway, so yes, after the conclusion of the Henry Wilkins case, Larson becomes increasingly sort of reluctant to spread the polygraph any further until he's done the kind of scientific validation work. Leonard Keeler becomes more and more hard working in his efforts to sell it to market, to commercialize it, to spread it to the world. So twelve years later, This is nineteen thirty five now, so they have all relocated independently

to shut Chicago, so bombers in Chicago teaching courses. Out of college, Larson has been bouncing around various jobs. One of the problems with Johnlarson is he's incredibly stubborn and sort of very I guess belligerent and can't keep a job because he constantly gets in fights for the superiors over trivial matters. So, you know, by this point, it's nineteen thirty five, and then the Keiller's in Chicago's work.

He's working at a crime lab kind of doing all this cool stuff, like you know, ballistics and tracking down gangsters. It's the capone era, so Chicago is the kind of cap sort of crime in the US. The Keelers, they're sort of, you know, using his skills to kind of catch criminals. So yeah, in nineteen thirty five, and a guy called Max Dent has popped out to buy cigarettes in the West Side of Chicago. He's a Jewish, is a very Jewish area that they're kind of immigrants from

Eastern Europe, lives with his parents. He's popped out to buy cigarettes and he's walking back from the shop back to home when someone runs out of an alleyway and basically guns him down, and the suspect has kind of quickly identified as a guy called Joe Rappaport, And the theory is that basically Max Dent is a prolific police informant. He has been snitching on people all over Chicago, and he essentially like deals drugs and then like tells the police that he's sold so and so drugs, So they

then go and arrest that person. And the theory is that Joe Rappaport is one of the people who one of the few people who Max Dent has been formed on who's not already in prison, and therefore he's one of the few people with both the means and the motive to have shot him. So Rappaport is kind of quickly arrested and he becomes the sort of next kind of big This becomes the next big case that that I look at in the book because the light detect becomes entwined in this case.

with the perfect crime. And at this point it's kind of nineteen thirty six and Richard Lobe is at Juliet Penitentiary where John Larson is working as kind of the prison sort of psychiatrist, and the Larston comes out of his office one day and he finds Load completely naked, dripping wet, and carvered in blood. He's had his throat slashed basically, and Larson had to like stop up quite

close relationship with Lobbit in the previous months. And essentially what happens is that that Larson is told not to speak to the press about what's happened, that the kind of people that run the prison don't want this case getting out into the papers, but Larson refuses to adhits those rules. So this murder of Richard Lowbiiner the prisoner

ends up costing Larson his job and Jolia. It's an interesting kind of side story here that kind of ties Larsen into the political machinery at the time, which is kind of fascinating.

Chicago and led to it being needed in their appport case. Soically, there was a judge in Chicago called Henry Horner who was investigating police of corruption and there was a case of a woman who had died and the police regarding her house and one of her She ran a cafe called it, I think, the Singing Bird Cafe, and one of the kind of star attractions to the cafe was

this this yellow canary. He would sing and people loved it. Anyway, the police regarding this house and the canary disappeared, and there had been been a spate of kind of thefts from crime scenes and it was a very corrupt era in policing. So immediately Horner was like, Okay, well, I'm not going to stand for this. I'm going to get to the bottom of who was stolen this stolen this canary.

And they basically brought in Lenko and Filmer to do li de text tests on all the police officers involved, and they were able to get a confession from one of the officers that he had stolen the canary and then swapped out for another one essentially, and so the lightestext has successfully solved this case, and that stuck with Horner, and basically what happens is Horner Horner then goes on to become the governor of Illinois. Eventually to this judge

who is really close to Kila. He starts to have a really close friendentship with learn the China actually ends up administering Quila's wedding, ends up becoming the governor of Illinois. But by the time the Jai Rapp book pace is kind of going to the courts, one who is now the governor over Illinois and that ends up being important because or shooting Max Dent has been given the death penalty, that.

Illinois with please for clemency. She door stops them at the station she made plience to curse him, and you know, all this stuff when if he doesn't let her brother live, essentially, and what happens is that Joy Rapport's death sentence keeps getting commuted, so it keeps getting delayed, not commuted, so he keeps getting keeps getting delayed. And I think it

happens like three or four times. He's, you know, due to go to the electric chair, and something happens at the last minute, some legal route, and actually it gets pushed back, you know, it gets delayed for legal res since it gets delayed for Jewish holidays, and eventually Rose Wrapperport manages to convince Henry Horner to cancel the execution. It's so good if Joe Rapport can pass a lighter text test. And that's where then the Keeler comes in.

So Horner obviously knows Keiler and that's why he knows about the lighter texted test. So he calls killer up and he said, can you go and do the slider detective test on this death row in mate? And that's what kind of forms the kind of closing segment of the book. Is this really dramatic lighter text light detected to test in the prison on the guy who's due to be executed that night.

was appalled by when he found out that happened. So essentially, report fails the light tex test that's conducted by Keiler and is marched from the cell to the electric chair and is executed, and becomes the kind of first person to be executed as a result of failing a lighter text tests.

Quilla are all around town, and Keiler complains about you know, last and bad mouthing him and all this kind of stuff. And eventually, eventually what happens is that Volmer, both Wilma

and Keila cut tied with Larson. You know, Wolmer kind of decides that actually does not worth the Greek trying to continue to maintain a relationship with John Larson to John Wilson and sort of bitter and alone kind of cotecting newspaper clippings of Rider sector stories, you know, scanning the press for bad news stories about Keela that will reflect badly on Keila his former protgee. And yeah, their relationships sort of disintegrates, and then Keida has quite a

sad story as well. Tequila Quila's wife leaves. He kind of descends into alcoholism, who basically does nothing but drink. His business fail, he eats it set a business kind of saying like the text test that fails, and he dies really really young. Of essentially of liver disease because because of the amount of he's drinking.

the polygraph. So yeah, by the end of his life, John Larson was pretty despondent, and he kind of writes something like, you know, this machine that he thought would fix the criminal justice system, you know, be a force figure that actually ended up being a Frankenstein's monster. He regrets ever having vented it, and personally game to that as lemon.

reassess that perspective. I think in light of some of the issues around policing at the moment, this kind of very like I guess the technification of placing has maybe had some bad impacts that probably can be traced back to Boma. So I think his heart was in the right place. You know, he wanted to make placing more humane, but I think in bringing in in bringing in certain technologies that ended up not being good things to use.

He may be stowed the seed to some of the problems that we see today, the over miltarization of police and things like that.

they also perpetos kind of horrendous mischaracters of justice. And I guess the lesson from the two main cases that I faced on the Henry Wilkin's case and the GI rapport cases that these machines are not infallible. You know, it's my view that in the Henry Wilkins's case, the light tec to test got it wrong, right, it wrongly said Henry was innocent of cousan's killer's wife, and he was probably guilty. As a result of the test getting it wrong, several more people died. You didn't need to die.

And then the Gi Wrappport case. I think Joe Rappert probably was guilty. But the decision about whether to execute someone should never have been made by a flawed machine. And there's all sorts of research over many decades basically proving of the polygraph is not accurate. Estimates of his accuracy range from, you know, as high as ninety percent to as low as sixty five percent. Sixty five percent is really low. And the problem is that we're often

using these these technologies in in edge cases. You know, there's really difficult to determine things, and the stakes are so high that I don't think it's appropriate to be using these technologies to decide whether someone lives or dies, or whether someone's going to rest of their life in prison.

So you know, all these forms of the right detection are sort of slightly flawed in different ways, and that makes them problematic.

weight than it warrants. And actually, who knows if they hadn't done a lied to tad test on Gara Wageway, maybe they would have found more evidence or done more digging, or you know, been more suspicious for longer, and maybe they would have kept him in jail. And you don't know what that case sort of looked like if the polygrop test hadn't been used right, and how it would have progressed. So that's really problematic.

your brain waves. There's also fMRI based brain scanning, so you sit in an MRI scanner while you look at these questions and supposedly that compel if you're lying as well. And then more recently there's kind of AI powered line detection technology. So I went to do a test by a company called convers which looks at your people dilation as you answer a series of questions and determines that tries to use that to determine whether you're live or not.

Sort of theory is that if you are thinking harder than your peoples are more dilated, that that's true. The theory is that if you're lying and thinking harder, therefore your people's are more dilated, and that could be a way to catch liers. So yeah, there's a whole speed of technologies. Often the investment in the new li detection technologies sort of goes hand in hand with the political

climate of the time. So when governments are trying to look tough on security and crime and that, they'll fund things like reforms of fly detection. So there was a big spike in reforms of light detection after nine to eleven, for instance, And you know, so that's where we're at. And you know, these forms of bye detection are being adopted even though they're not one hundred percent accurate, and they have some of the same flaws as the polygraph.

And the biggest problem with the polygraph and is what research is called the fact that there's no Pinocchio's knows right. There's no telltale sign of lying. That's true for everyone all of the time. And without that, you know, these machines you can't you can't know if someone's pulse is going up because they're lying or because they're nervous about being wrong. With the acused of lying, you can never know. And that's the real problem with not only the polygraph,

but all these new forms of right detection technology. And I think that's the lesson that can be learned from the stories of Henry Wilkins, a report from Loss and August former len Keeler. You know, from one hundred years ago. That's the lesson that we should take through to today and into the future.