8-29-2011 Michigan:
Dr. Labeed Nouri is building a new life. But he still has some unfinished business from his old one.
Nouri, 40, served more than three years behind bars, convicted of sexually assaulting a young woman who worked in his medical office.
He got out of prison after prosecutors learned in April that the woman and her boyfriend lied repeatedly on the witness stand when they said she was a virgin, a central issue in the case.
Nouri, who maintains his innocence, is now reunited with his wife and four children. He's back practicing as an orthopedic surgeon.
And he's on a mission: Nouri is trying to get his accuser charged with perjury.
"She took three years from me," he said. "I can never get them back. My youngest daughter was a baby when I went away. I never saw her first step, heard her say her first word. It's my turn for justice."
The woman, through her attorney, declined an interview. The Free Press is not naming her because she has not been charged with a crime.
Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper, who dropped felony charges against Nouri and sought his release from prison when she learned of the perjury, said she is awaiting police reports before deciding whether to file any charges against the woman.
"We moved heaven and earth to get him out immediately when we learned of this," Cooper said.
Now free, doctor learns letter in sex assault case was forged
When Labeed Nouri was sentenced to prison in April 2010, the judge read a letter signed by his accuser's priest.
"A young girl has had her youth stolen," the letter read. "I have told her to forgive Labeed Nouri. She has forgiven him, but she needs closure on this terrible ordeal. ... It is time to grant her wish of getting her justice and put Labeed Nouri in jail where he deserves to be."
Oakland County Judge Mark Goldsmith did just that, sentencing Nouri to 10 to 20 years in prison for sexual assault convictions involving a woman who was 19 when she worked in his medical office in 2007. By then, Nouri already had spent 700 days in the Oakland County Jail awaiting trial and later trying to get his conviction overturned.
Free since April 2011, after prosecutors learned the woman had lied on the stand, Nouri said he only recently learned about another lie. The letter purported to be from the Rev. Zuhair Kejbou of St. Joseph Chaldean Catholic Church in Troy wasn't written by him.
"I have never written any letter," Kejbou told the Free Press. "Anybody can forge a signature."
Kejbou said he hasn't seen the woman, who is a member of his congregation, since he learned of the forged letter and has not questioned her or her family about it.
The woman, whom the Free Press is not naming because she has not been charged with a crime, declined an interview request through her attorney.
Nouri and his attorney Mark Kriger are calling for an investigation into the forged letter. They say that letter and others written on the accuser's behalf persuaded the judge to give Nouri a long prison sentence.
"It is a fraud and an obstruction of justice," Kriger said. "The judge relied on those letters to decide on my client's sentence, and he sentenced him to prison for 10 years. It's a travesty."
After-hours assault alleged
Nouri, a Chaldean who emigrated from Iraq in 2003, had a thriving medical practice in Hazel Park and Sterling Heights, often treating other Chaldeans in the tight-knit community. The married father was vice president of the church council at St. Toma Syriac Catholic Church in Farmington Hills.
In late May 2007, one of Nouri's Chaldean patients asked whether Nouri would hire his 19-year-old daughter, who was working at a video store. Nouri and his wife, Rouwaida Nouri, who managed his medical practice, agreed to hire her for two days a week to help with filing in their Hazel Park office.
On June 22, 2007, her sixth day of work, the woman alleged Nouri assaulted her in an exam room after hours, violating her with his fingers and touching her breasts and buttocks. The woman said the attack occurred between 7:15 and 7:23 p.m. -- saying she noticed the times on clocks in the office and in her car when she left. At 7:33 p.m., she called her boyfriend in a parking lot 2 miles from the office, telling him she had been assaulted.
Records eventually obtained by the defense show Nouri was in his office from 7:06 to 7:27 p.m., continuously dictating over the phone to a medical dictation firm.
The woman's parents took her to police and to a hospital. She refused to allow a rape exam, saying she was a virgin and such an exam would "un-virginize me," records show. A later external exam at a clinic run by Haven, a nonprofit that offers support to sexual assault victims, showed a tiny tear measuring less than half a centimeter.
Nouri was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct and two counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct for the alleged touching.
Virginity plays central role
From the beginning, defense attorneys contended the woman, who lived in Sterling Heights with her parents, fabricated the story because she had been sexually active and needed to explain why she was no longer a virgin.
Virginity is highly valued in the conservative Chaldean Catholic Church. During Nouri's trial, defense attorneys presented a gynecologist who said he was frequently asked by Chaldean families to examine daughters on the eve of their weddings to verify their virginity. Sometimes, weddings were called off if a woman was found to not be a virgin.
Nouri's accuser was asked on the witness stand about her virginity.
"In those reports at the hospital and to the police and at Haven, you went to great lengths, just as you have in this courtroom this morning, to tell everyone that on June 22, 2007, you were a virgin, is that correct?" defense attorney David Griem asked.
"Yes," she answered.
"You went out of your way to tell everyone that you were a virgin. What was your purpose for doing that?" Griem asked.
She responded, "That would be why, when I had the trauma down there -- it was due to what he did."
When asked why being a virgin was important to Chaldean women, she said, "If she is not a virgin, once she does get married, the community thinks of her as being promiscuous. They will not accept her into a man's family. They expect her to be pure."
Her boyfriend was called as a prosecution witness, and he also insisted they had never had sex.
The trial lasted five days. Nouri didn't take the stand in his own defense, and his attorneys later admitted they didn't fully explain he had the right to do so -- a point brought up in his post-conviction appeals.
Initially, the jury was hung, with jurors twice asking to review the accuser's testimony. On July 2, 2008, they found Nouri guilty.
"It was a shocking case, and a shocking conviction," said Deanna Kelley, one of his defense attorneys.
Kelley said she asked jurors after the verdict how they thought Nouri could have been dictating over the phone at the same time his accuser claimed he had been assaulting her. She said jurors told her that since they couldn't reconcile the time line, they chose to disregard it. "They said they then just decided to go by their gut," she said.
From the time the allegations were made, it would be three and a half years before Nouri and his attorneys learned the accuser and her boyfriend had lied repeatedly.
During that time, as his attorneys fought to overturn his conviction, Nouri remained incarcerated.
He was repeatedly assaulted by fellow prisoners -- his nose broken and his teeth cracked. He was hospitalized for three days and received stitches to his face, according to a federal lawsuit filed against Oakland County.
Oakland County corporation counsel Keith Lerminiaux acknowledged that Nouri had been assaulted in the jail but said he had lied about the circumstances and was the aggressor in one of the attacks. He said jail personnel obtained necessary medical treatment.
"It is our position that the county is not responsible for the assaults and therefore is not liable for them," Lerminiaux said in a written statement. He also said Nouri has not cooperated with the county in answering questions and is now seeking to dismiss the lawsuit.
Admission of lies caught on tape
In late 2010, Kriger -- Nouri's appellate attorney -- was filing motions to get the conviction overturned. One day, he heard a shocking rumor.
The accuser's boyfriend had spotted Nouri's wife and four children in the community and was suddenly overcome with guilt for lying about his sexual history with the woman.
When Kriger contacted the man, he learned he and the accuser had been sexually active for months leading up to the allegation and had since broken up. Kriger asked the man to secretly record conversations with the woman. The man met with her in March, and while recording their conversation, he told her he was worried private investigators were looking into the perjury.
The accuser, according to Kriger and prosecutors who have heard the recording, admits she lied on the stand but instructs the man to keep denying it if he's questioned.
She tells him that if authorities discover credit card receipts showing she was at local motels, she will say she lent the card to a friend. She also discusses feigning a mental breakdown so she would be hospitalized, a tactic she says she hopes would discourage a continued investigation.
Kriger took the recording to prosecutors in April. Prosecutors, noting Nouri had been convicted, offered a deal: If he pleaded no contest to a low-level misdemeanor assault -- with no probation-reporting requirements and no restrictions on obtaining his medical license -- he could be free within hours and get it expunged after five years.
It took Nouri, who was sitting in a prison cell at the Kinross Correctional Facility in the Upper Peninsula, two days to agree.
"I'm thinking, 'No, I didn't do anything,' " he recalled in a recent interview, as his wife wiped away tears. "But then I think, 'I take this and I can see my kids in a day or two.' I hadn't seen them in three years. I took it."
Meanwhile, his accuser has become a licensed practical nurse.
Her attorney, Edward Bajoka, declined to discuss the accusations of perjury and said he was unaware of the forged letter. He said his client insists she was attacked by Nouri.
"She does maintain that she was sexually assaulted," he said. ..Source.. by L.L. BRASIER
August 29, 2011
Doctor jailed 3 years wants perjury charges for sex-assault accuser
December 5, 2009
When you don't know what's the truth and what's the lie
12-5-2009 National:
Question: My 5-year-old daughter has told us something for 4 1/2 months and now just went back on her word after telling lots of people and police officers about a serious issue. Could she have been holding a lie that long? Is it possible? What do we do? We are freaking out. From: 211, Salem, OR
Hi 211,
This is a tough question for a few reasons, especially the age of your child and the unknown nature of the offense, but the police involvement obviously hints at something serious. For all those reasons, I checked in with three experts on this, David Finkelhor, from the University of New Hampshire, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center there; Mark Everson, child development specialist and director of the Program on Childhood Trauma and Maltreatment at the University of North Carolina; and a child psychiatrist.
Here's the consensus I gained: The simplest answer is, yes, it is possible for children to maintain something that is false, and also possible for them to retract something that is true.
It is possible, for instance, that a child this age might tell a lie in the heat of the moment for any number of reasons, most likely because he's fearful of punishment. When he sees all the attention it gets him, he might decide, "Hey, all this attention is fun," and embellish, or he could embellish the lie simply because he feels stuck with what he already said and fears even more punishment. Later, including months later, he could get tired of the attention and change his story, or he could change the story because his guilt catches up with him.
Another possibility, Everson says, is that he recants the truth because "the 'cost' of the disclosure is too high in terms of stress on the child, family disruption,
etc. On the other hand, one occasionally sees cases in which what began as
a little lie, often to escape being in trouble or disappointing a parent,
grows into a serious matter which the child may subsequently attempt to
correct."
Everson goes on to say: "The best advice, not knowing more about the case, sounds trite: the child should be evaluated professionally to explore which explanation is most likely true. Does the child have a history of creating false narratives? Is there corroborative evidence to support either of the child's accounts of what happened? The child's recantation should undergo careful
scrutiny, as hopefully the child's original disclosure did."
Everson agrees that that might not be a very satisfactory answer to you at the moment, so let me add a few thoughts, based, again, on the consensus of these experts:
1. The more a child is asked about what is/isn't the truth, the more confused he is likely to get. Especially as time passes, the truth and the lie are likely to blend together so that he doesn't know which is which. The more pressure he feels from adults, the more frantic and frustrated he will feel with himself.
2. Right now for you as parents, presumably the most important reason to know the truth is for your child's safety and, possibly even for the safety of other children. (Again, we don't have many facts here.) But consider that it's also for your child's future well-being. The truth of what happened is more likely to be psychologically damaging to him at different developmental stages in the future if the truth is not uncovered now. So the best reason to give him for trying to tell the truth is this:
"We will love you either way, no matter what is true, but you will feel better if you can tell us what you think is the truth. If you don't want to tell us, it's OK to tell some other adult you trust."
3. Get your child professional help from someone who has experience dealing with these kinds of issues and also experience working with children this age. A clinician is best able to determine fact from fiction because he or she will know the appropriate knowledge for a child of a given age vis a vis a particular issue. Children can't make up what is beyond their base of experience. ..Source.. Barbara F. Meltz
October 4, 2009
CA- Ex-prosecutor admits he lied about Polanski case
10-4-2009 California:
A retired prosecutor whose comments in a 2008 HBO documentary threatened to derail a 31-year-old sex case against film director Roman Polanski now says he lied.
David Wells told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Thursday that he "buttered up" his role in the Polanski case for the documentary crew. He said he lied about trying to goad a judge to sentence Polanski to prison in 1978 for having sex with a 13-year-old girl.
Wells' comments in "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" raised questions of judicial misconduct and spawned Polanski's most recent effort to get the case dismissed. But the legal challenge stalled when Polanski refused to return to the United States, where he faced certain arrest.
"I made these imprudent comments, just to liven it up a little," Wells said. "In retrospect, it was a bad thing to do, and I never knew this thing was going to be shown in the United States."
Wells now says he never spoke with the judge about the Polanski case, as he had claimed in the documentary. "I never discussed this case with [the judge] at any time," Wells told Blitzer.
Asked why he should be believed now, Wells said, "I'm destroying my character in public and everybody in the world knows about it. ... I don't like admitting this."
He agreed to take a polygraph test to set the record straight.
Polanski was arrested last weekend in Switzerland on a 1978 fugitive warrant and will fight extradition, his lawyers said. They had no immediate comment on Wells' recantation.
"I am astonished that he has now changed his story," Marina Zenovich, the documentary's director, said in an e-mailed statement. "It is a sad day for documentary filmmakers when something like this happens."
She said Wells signed a release form, never raised any doubts or concerns, and vouched for the documentary when he spoke to The New York Times in July 2008.
Wells also acknowledged that he lied to The New York Times. "I figured Polanski never was going to come back," he said. "I didn't want to put myself out as a liar."
Polanski's arrest in Switzerland made Wells' public exposure inevitable, he said. "I'm going to tell it the way it is and if I take a beating over it, I deserve it," he said.
Blitzer challenged Wells to a polygraph test, and he agreed to take one if his former employers at the Los Angeles County, California, District Attorney's office allow it. "I'm not going to do anything more to hamper the District Attorney's case," he said.
District Attorney's spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said the office had no position on the polygraph challenge. "Mr. Wells is retired," she said. "We have no control over him."
Wells was a bit player in a high profile case that has haunted the courts of Los Angeles for three decades. He was a calendar prosecutor, handling routine matters in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Laurence Rittenband, who oversaw the Polanski case.
Rittenband, who died in 1993, had a fascination with celebrity cases, and was so publicity conscious that he directed his courtroom staff to keep a scrapbook of news clippings, according to court records.
Polanski was charged with six felonies, including sodomy and rape, but pleaded guilty to a single count of having unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor under a plea bargain. The director, his lawyer and the prosecutor handling the case believed they'd reached a deal that would spare the young victim a public trial and Polanski jail time, according to court records.
Polanski fled the United States before sentencing. He was spooked when Rittenband indicated he would not honor the deal and instead intended to send the famed director to prison. Video Watch how the plea bargain went south »
The charges stemmed from Polanski's March 1977 encounter with the 13-year-old girl during a photo shoot at actor Jack Nicholson's house on Mulholland Drive. Polanski told the girl's mother he was on assignment for French Vogue, according to court records.
Wells said he was critical about the manner in which the case was handled. He believed Polanski should go to prison. He told the documentary makers that he suggested to Rittenband that Polanski be sent for 90 days of "diagnostic testing" at a state prison facility in Chino, California, to determine whether he was a sex offender.
He admitted to CNN that he was lying about suggesting the 90-day evaluation, adding that Rittenband routinely sent defendants for evaluation.The evaluation was completed in 42 days, and Polanski was freed early after it determined he was not a sex offender. Video Watch CNN's Jeff Toobin call it a sideshow »
Polanski was given permission to travel to Europe to complete a film before he was formally sentenced. It was understood by everyone that Polanski would receive credit for time served and probation, according to filings in his legal challenge.
While Polanski was in Europe, Wells said in the documentary, a photograph appeared of the director smoking a cigar, sipping a beer and accompanied by two young women.
A script from the documentary in the court file lays out what Wells said happened next:
"And so I took the picture into Judge Rittenband. I said, 'Judge,' I said, 'look here, he's flipping you off,' " he said. "I took it to Rittenband because I figured it was something he ought to see. And what I told him was, I said, 'You know, judge, you've made so many mistakes, I think, in this case. Look. He's giving you the finger. He's flipping you off. And here's the way he's doing it.' And I said, 'Haven't you had enough of this?' And then, of course, he exploded and what happened, happened."
Wells now says he lied about that, too. He said a newspaper reporter handed him the photo, which he passed on to the judge's court staff.
"I could call it building a bigger story, putting my part in the case bigger than it actually was," he said. "But when you peel away all the feathers, it's just a lie. I shouldn't have done it. I wish I didn't." ..Source.. by Ann O'Neill, CNN
August 16, 2009
Spotting Lies: Listen, Don't Look
8-16-2009 National:
Forget what you've learned from years of watching cop shows on television. Liars do not have trouble making eye contact. The guilty don't fidget. Culprits don't sweat more. As a matter of fact, research indicates that innocent people tend to be more nervous when they are being questioned because they are very intent on proving that they didn't do it. Liars come in with a script in their heads.
"A lot of different signs of anxiety are mistaken for signs of deception," says Kevin Colwell, a forensic scientist at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. He says research shows that even for the innocent, the whole tenor of an encounter with police can make it harder to remember things accurately. "In interrogation the whole goal is to convince somebody or trick them or coerce them whatever it takes to get them to confess to the crime."
Colwell is on the forefront of a movement to change that mindset and convince law enforcement and other interrogators that encounters with suspects are opportunities to get information, not just a moment to elicit a confession. The concern is that if an interviewer is already convinced that someone committed the crime they are investigating, interviewers stop searching for other answers. And that can lead to mistakes.
Seek Information, Not a Confession
This approach, of seeking information rather than a confession, is already well entrenched in Britain. Back in the mid-1980s, after a raft of cases involving false confessions, British courts ruled that officers were no longer allowed to use aggressive techniques — such as lying about evidence — to goad suspects. Interrogations in Britain also have to be taped. This has changed the way UK officers interview a suspect. They chat them up, and start by asking questions to which they already know the answers. The police in Britain say this shift in strategy hasn't reduced the number of confessions.
Colwell and a forensic psychologist at National University in La Jolla, Calif., named Cheryl Hiscock-Anisman have been doing this kind of interrogation research for years. As a general matter, they have found that people who are making up a story prepare an airtight, simple script that is easy to remember. People telling the truth have no script because, basically, they lived the story. So they tend to recall unrelated details and often make mistakes.
Colwell and Hiscock-Anisman have been working on a system that draws that contrast more vividly. And they've been taking their theories out into the field.
They are training police officers across the country to look for verbal patterns instead of fidgets. Just weeks ago they sat down with a group at the San Diego Police Department.
Sergeant Romeo De Los Reyes sat in on the session and, initially, was a little skeptical. "We've always learned that communication is 60- to 90-percent non-verbal," he said. "So this was a different approach to dealing with deception."
Now he sees this approach as another tool for his interview toolbox.
Ask a Simple Question
Basically the system asks an interviewer to pay attention to words and verbal cues rather than focusing on non-verbal communication. Hiscock-Anisman suggests interviewers begin with a non-threatening question. "For example, when I was living in Texas and I was running inmates for one of my studies we asked, 'what was the first day like for you in prison?'" she said. She chose that question for two reasons: it was a vivid memory, and it was very likely to get a truthful answer.
"There's no need to lie about your first day in prison, even if you're an inmate," she said.
The first question is designed to give interviewers a baseline of sorts. It gives them an idea of how much detail someone provides when they are telling a story truthfully. Next, interviewers are supposed to ask the person to tell them about the event under investigation. Then they compare the two stories. Does the suspect use the same number of descriptive phrases? Is there the same kind of recall? All these things are very important when trying to turn a gut instinct about whether someone is lying, into something more rooted in specific patterns.
Then comes the harder question, which Hiscock-Anisman says often separates the liars from the truth-tellers. "I say, now what I want you to do is I want you to go back to that time and I want you to describe every single thing that happened but this time I want you to tell me what happened last and work all the way backwards," she said. She laughs. "A liar is going to have a hell of a time, right?"
Try this the next time your teenager comes home late.
The point is, the research indicates that a person who is being honest tends to provide tons of little facts, anecdotal details that you only get from living a situation. In fact, Hiscock-Anisman says she's found that truth-tellers tend to add about 30 percent more detail than people who are lying.
But there are still practical questions on how law enforcement might use this approach. San Diego's De Los Reyes says the system might work with someone who has to decided to talk, but what about someone who is refusing to cooperate? That's unclear. Even so, the San Diego Police Department has asked Colwell and Hiscock-Aninson to come back, to do more training. ..Source.. by Dina Temple-Raston, NPR Radio
July 16, 2008
Catching Liars With Technology
7-16-2008 National:
It's the truth: It may be getting tougher to lie in court.
A wide range of tests designed to catch liars are starting to gain some respect in court, including the much abused polygraph, voice-stress analyzers and a newer test that tries to tell if someone is faking an illness or injury.
In recent years, courts have expanded the use of polygraphs in particular, allowing lie detector results to be admitted as evidence, and subjecting more individuals to mandatory testing, including parolees, sex offenders and police officers.
Many lawyers cite technological advancements and increased use of lie detectors in general as reasons for their growing acceptance. As the tests get more reliable, and more people use them, they say, more judges are willing to consider them as evidence.
"Nobody could spell polygraph five years ago. But as the technology gets better and better, judges are feeling more comfortable with at least eyeballing the results, " said Susan Moss of New York's matrimonial firm Chemtob Moss Forman & Talbert.
Moss also noted that family law attorneys are getting "more wiggle room" to submit polygraph results in motions for judicial review.
But lawyers aren't just asking judges to eyeball lie detector results. They're pushing to get the evidence submitted at trial -- and some of them are succeeding.
In Ohio, a law student accused of rape was acquitted last summer after a judge allowed his polygraph results to be admitted as evidence, over the objections of the prosecutor. The judge acquitted the defendant, in part, because of the polygraph results. Ohio v. Sharma, No. CR 06-09-3248 (Summit Co., Ohio, Ct. C.P.).
In New Jersey, an appeals panel last June upheld the burglary conviction of a man who failed a voice stress analysis -- another type of lie detector that measures stress in a person's voice. The defendant claimed the voice-stress exam was deceptive and coerced him into making a confession, but the court disagreed. New Jersey v. Torres, No. A-3350-0574 (N.J. App. Div.).
In Florida, a motion is currently pending before a federal court to allow jurors to hear that a suspect in the murders of four people at sea passed a lie detector test. Prosecutors are fighting to keep the evidence out. U.S. v. Archer, No. 07-20839-CR (S.D. Fla.).
THE 'FAKE BAD SCALE'
On the civil litigation front, a new test known as the Fake Bad Scale is increasingly being used by defendants in personal injury cases who claim that plaintiffs are lying or exaggerating about injuries. The Fake Bad Scale is a true-or-false test that attempts to identify those faking pain, psychological symptoms or other injuries alleged in personal injury claims. In the last year, the Fake Bad Scale has been upheld by one administrative law judge, but rejected by two courts in Florida.
Currently, New Mexico is the only state that allows polygraph results to be admitted without stipulation by both the defense and prosecution. About a dozen states allow polygraph results to be admitted if both parties agree to it. Most states, however, ban the practice altogether.
In the federal courts, judges have discretion over polygraph admissibility. The U.S. Supreme Court gave them that discretion in 1998, when it held that "the scientific community remains extremely polarized about the reliability of polygraph techniques," and thus left it up to individual jurisdictions to decide such matters. U.S. v. Scheffer, 523 U.S. 303 (1998).
"I think there is a slow trend building that is overcoming the courts' reluctance to admit polygraph results. I think that they are being used more, and I think that their reliability is increasing," said criminal trial attorney William Matthewman, of Boca Raton, Fla.-based Seiden, Alder, Matthewman & Bloch.
Matthewman is pursuing the motion to have polygraph results admitted in a Florida murder trial involving four crew members of the Joe Cool fishing boat who were killed at sea. A defendant passed a lie detector test, and Matthewman is trying to get that before a jury. He is relying on a 1989 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, which allows for the admission of polygraph results in federal trials, provided that certain requirements are met. U.S. v. Piccinona, 885 F.2d 1529 (11th Cir. 1989).
Matthewman, who has successfully used polygraph results in prior cases, argued that if jurors can hear DNA evidence, ballistic evidence and hair evidence, "there's no reason to exclude polygraph evidence."
Kirk Migdal, the Ohio defense attorney who successfully had lie detector results admitted in a sexual battery case over prosecutors' objections, agreed.
"[The polygraph] is either good science or it's not. I think it's good science," said Migdal, a solo criminal defense lawyer in Akron, Ohio. "You shouldn't require stipulation. They don't for fingerprinting, DNA, blood splatters. ... The jurors can weigh it just as if it were any other piece of scientific evidence."
But jurors might give too much weight to lie detector results, countered Robin Sax, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who believes its safer to omit polygraph results during trial.
"It's better to keep it out than risk a prejudice it has to a jury," Sax said. "It's good enough as an investigative tool, but I wouldn't want a case to rest on the reliability of the polygraph."
Sax said that prepolygraph interviews, where investigators interview suspects just before they are about to take the polygraph, are especially helpful. That's when suspects tend to admit to certain things, she said, adding those statements are admissible in court.
"In that interview we get a lot of admissions because all of a sudden, the suspect is sitting there thinking, 'What is this test going to say?' They can make preadmissible statements, and those can be helpful in determining guilt," Sax said.
Sax noted that, in recent years, she's seen an uptick in the use of voice-stress analyzers in child sex abuse cases, adding that one jurisdiction in particular "uses them in practically every child sex assault case to determine whether they can get any admissible statements."
Sax, however, said the validity of tests like the voice-stress analyzer and polygraphs remains to be seen, adding that the polygraph in particular remains highly controversial.
"The problem isn't the courts. The scientific community doesn't find it reliable," Sax said.
Neither does Joshua Marquis, district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., who rarely, if ever, drops criminal charges because a defendant passed a lie detector test prior to trial.
"The science behind them is not strong," Marquis said. "The absolute worst offenders -- people who are true sociopaths -- lying is a way of life for them, so they're going to probably pass them easily."
Marquis, does, however, see polygraphs as a useful tool in monitoring probationers, a growing practice that has been upheld by dozens of courts despite defense lawyers' claims that such tests violate the constitutional right against self-incrimination.
The 2nd Circuit in 2006 upheld the practice of using polygraph exams to monitor convicted sex offenders who have been released, holding that such testing "produces an incentive to tell the truth, and thereby advances the sentencing goals." U.S. v. Johnson, No. 04-4992.
Chicago criminal defense attorney Tamara N. Holder strongly disagrees, arguing that it's wrong to force a defendant to undergo testing when they've already served their sentence.
She also has reservations about the polygraph itself.
Currently, Holder, a solo, is challenging the results of a polygraph in a child abuse case, claiming that investigators coerced a 16-year-old into taking a polygraph, which she didn't pass, and then charged her with aggravated battery to a child. She recently filed a pretrial motion to make sure that any polygraph statements are excluded from trial. People v. Jordan, No. 07 CR 23415 (Cook Co., Ill. Cir. Ct.).
"The polygraph is the only thing that could possibly hurt her. She never admitted to anything in her statement," said Holder.
Holder added that she's seen a rise in the use of polygraphs by law enforcement. "Absolutely. I am seeing police officers unable to build a strong case against somebody and using the polygraph as a crutch to get charges, instead of doing a proper investigation."
Police officers, meanwhile, may find themselves sitting in the lie detector seat in Massachusetts.
Most recently, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in May ruled that police officers can be forced to take polygraphs in the course of an internal investigation. The case involved a police officer who was accused of child molestation, but refused to take a polygraph because he was never charged. Furtado v. Town of Plymouth, No. SJC-10049 (Mass.).
In Massachusetts, trial courts have discretion to admit polygraph evidence, which is admissible only after a party can show the polygraph examiner is reliable through producing proficiency-exam results.
Also in Massachusetts, polygraph results played a significant role in the high-profile case of Louis Greco, one of four men wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die in 1968 for a mob-related murder.
Last year, Greco's estate was awarded $28 million from the federal government over his wrongful conviction. Limone v. U.S., No. 02cv10890-NG (D. Mass.). Greco, who had passed several lie detector tests, died in prison in 1995 and was posthumously exonerated in 2004.
Two weeks ago, the commonwealth of Massachusetts also paid $500,000 to Greco's estate to settle another civil suit filed over the wrongful conviction. Warner v. Commonwealth of Mass., No. CV2007-02365 (Suffolk Co., Mass., Super. Ct.).
Among the claims was that prosecutors wrongfully ignored several polygraph results.
"They not only ignored it but argued against the test results. ... It was the whole case," said Boston attorney John Cavicchi, who for years fought for Greco's release and eventually filed civil suits over his conviction.
Cavicchi, a solo, is calling on courts to give polygraph results their due place in the courts. After all, he argues, the FBI uses them. The military uses them. And police departments all over the country use them.
"What is wrong with the courts?" Cavicchi said. "If the polygraph is so unreliable, then why are the taxpayers paying all this money for them?" ..News Source.. by Tresa Baldas, The National Law Journal
June 23, 2008
UK- Court quashes detention of girl, 14, whose lie split family
6-23-2008 United Kingdom:
A 14-year-old girl who was sentenced to 18 months detention for falsely accusing her brother and his friend of indecently assaulting her when she was nine has had her sentence quashed by the appeal court, which said it "should never have been passed".
The appeal court last week substituted an 18-month supervision order on the girl, whose allegations split her family and sent her brother into care.
Experts said the tragic consequences of her lie highlight the drawbacks of the low age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales - lower, at 10, than in other European countries. In many, such a case would not have come into the criminal justice system but would have been dealt with through child welfare procedures.
The girl, named only as O, was 11 when she made allegations in 2005 of indecent assault by her brother G and his friend J, which she said had happened two years before, when she was nine, G was 11 and his friend J was 12. G and J were prosecuted and convicted in April 2006. They were sentenced to supervision and made to sign the sex offenders register. G's mother felt she could no longer have him in the family home and he spent two years in care.
In 2007, O's mother discovered her daughter had lied about other things, and questioned her allegations against G and J. She admitted she had lied because she was "fed up" about G's behaviour at home.
The police were called, but O changed her story again. However, she later confessed to her aunt that she had lied because she wanted G to be "told off" and had been scared of getting into trouble if she retracted.
She was charged with perverting the course of public justice and pleaded guilty. G and J both made statements for the court case. G described his miserable time in care and the bullying he had experienced, and J said he had "suffered greatly as a result of his conviction and consequent stigma", the appeal court judges said.
The judge who sentenced O to 18 months detention had made condemnatory remarks about what she had done. The appeal court judges agreed that her actions were "quite dreadful", but said "the effects of her behaviour could not have been imagined or understood by a child of her age", only 11, when she made the allegation. The sentence of detention should never have been passed, they added. She and her family had required support, rather than punishment.
Dr Hamish Cameron, an experienced expert witness in child cases, said: "Early investigation by child protection professionals could have brought out the truth sooner. This welfare approach would have avoided the terrible effects on the three children's lives and on their families."
Alison Fiddy, of the Children's Legal Centre, said: "The low age of criminal responsibility has repeatedly been criticised in the international community." ..News Source.. by Clare Dyer, legal editor
June 12, 2008
MI- Rape charges dropped against immigrant teenagers
6-12-2008 Michigan:
KENTWOOD -- Saying there is not enough evidence to carry the case to trial, authorities have dropped rape charges against three teens who came to America from the former Yugoslavia.
The decision has left the young men's families ecstatic and their accuser's family angry and disappointed.
The last testimony in the case came in March, when a judge found there was enough evidence to send the first-degree sexual assault cases to Kent County Circuit Court.
During that probable-cause hearing, an 18-year-old former East Kentwood High School student testified she was sexually assaulted by now 18-year-old Imer Gashi and his friend, Armin Puskar, 18, last August in her home near 52nd Street and Eastern Avenue SE. She said she also was assaulted a second time by Puskar, Gashi and his brother, Nesret Gashi, 19.
She testified she watched pornographic movies with the young men but denied she consented to sex.
Over the next three months while their clients were free on bond, defense attorneys gathered evidence they say shows the accuser was telling various versions of the story to people who were willing to testify.
Defense attorneys also said they had records that showed the young woman attempted to contact her alleged attackers by phone and Internet, and had hung out with them at a football game and other events after the alleged attacks.
Grand Rapids attorney Kelly Lambert, who represented former Bosnian refugee Puskar, said the accuser's main concern was in maintaining a relationship with a boyfriend who dumped her after finding out she had been involved with the formerly accused.
Spring Lake attorneys Robert German and Kevin Megley, who represented former Kosovo refugees Imer and Nesret Gashi, said the woman's story was filled with contradictions that tipped the scale in their clients' favor.
"These guys were not let off on some legal technicality," Lambert said.
However, the young woman's father remains convinced his daughter was the victim of a brutal assault.
He denies his daughter made anything other than incidental contact with the men because they went to the same school and had friends in common. He said phone records showing her allegedly trying to contact the accused came from a third party using her phone.
"She doesn't understand why it's not moving forward," the father said, adding he is not angry with the prosecutor, but feels his daughter has not seen justice. "She's a very trusting person."
He said the defense attorneys have muddied the waters with issues meant to damage his daughter's credibility.
"I believe those guys are guilty," he said of the young men. "It's been pretty rough."
Prosecutors had offered Nesret Gashi a chance to plead guilty to attempted sexual assault -- a maximum five-year felony -- if he testified against the other two. He turned the deal down and, along with the others, faced up to life in prison if convicted.
The defense attorneys said Assistant Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker showed integrity in considering the evidence the defense presented and then dropping the charges.
Becker said there simply was not enough evidence to expect a jury to find the men guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
"If we get more evidence, we could prosecute," Becker said.
But finding more evidence could be difficult. The accuser waited three months to make a report to police, eliminating the possibility of physical evidence. There was no one else present when she claimed the attacks occurred, making it her word against the three accused, who claimed it was consentual.
Becker said the actions of the accuser after the alleged attacks would not be seen favorably by a jury.
The defense attorneys say the accusations have taken a toll on their clients, who have lost jobs and will carry the taint of the accusations with them.
But for now, their families are delighted.
In 1999, The Press ran a series of articles tracing the lives of the Gashi family as they made their way in West Michigan -- among 150 families who did so that year. German said his clients initially did not understand American law, which presumes innocence unless guilt is proven. ..News Source.. by Barton Deiters | The Grand Rapids Press
June 9, 2008
NY- Few real solutions for sex offenders
'False alarm' doesn't change society's ongoing conundrum
6-9-2008 New York:
Last week, a 9-year-old girl said she saved her 8-year-old sister from a possible abduction by kicking a man who had grabbed her in a parking lot on the west side of Binghamton in broad daylight.
The story wasn't true. The child later told police she had made it up -- although the level of detail about the appearance of the suspect and his vehicle suggests she might have had some help.
Before that confession, however, the community's initial reaction was a clear reflection of our times. The story rang true because we know there are predators among us and we've seen what terrible things they're capable of. Moreover, the community was already on alert due to reports of a man exposing himself to youngsters at Johnson City's North Side Park.
And beyond that, a lot of people in the community are convinced that Binghamton especially is home to more than its fair share of paroled sex offenders, although state officials insist that isn't so.
Ours isn't the only community struggling with the problem, however, and while it's a given that everyone involved in the effort to protect children from paroled sex offenders has good intentions, good results are what matter most -- and that's where opinions diverge.
It's easy to say we don't want any of them "here," and propose putting them "somewhere else." The problem with this approach is that every community wants to be rid of them and eventually you run out of "somewhere else."
It's easy to say all sex offenders should be locked away for life, or executed, but that would greatly complicate the prosecution of them and could in fact place victims in graver danger. The perpetrator might be less inclined to leave a potential witness.
The recidivism rate among pedophiles is very high, but not all sex offenders are pedophiles and there are some who benefit from treatment and pose no residual threat.
It's easy to demonize agencies which try to help paroled sex offenders, but without such assistance, what would the rate of recidivism be?
And while we focus so intently on paroled offenders, what are we doing to prevent new crimes?
Megan's Law is beneficial in that it alerts the community to the presence of registered sex offenders who previously went anonymous, but it doesn't offer much guidance about what to do with that information. Increased vigilance, surely -- and the police and parole officers pursue that assignment rigorously -- but not vigilantism.
The protection of children is a paramount concern, and the presence of sex offenders in any number in any community is always going to be troubling. Society is still trying to decide how best to deal with such criminals, including the possibility of confinement in mental hospitals once their criminal sentence is completed; and long-term use of monitoring devices to keep track of their movements.
Last week's incident further jangled community nerves, and some residents suggested harsh punishment for the child who concocted the story. That's a matter best left to her parents, but it would be appropriate to make sure she's familiar with the tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." ..News Source.. by PressConnects.com
June 4, 2008
FL- Man Sentenced To Prison After Girl's MySpace Page Lies About Age
6-4-2008 Florida:
ORANGE COUNTy, Fla. -- A 13-year-old girl's sexual shenanigans have put a second man behind bars. Morris Williams, 22, told the judge he thought the girl was 18-years-old, but he found out Tuesday that ignorance is not a defense.
Morris Williams' mother wailed as he went off to jail. The judge asked for media not to show 13-year-old Alisha Dean's face in court, but her pictures are all over her MySpace page and they portray a sexy, 19-year-old divorced woman.
"She told me she had just turned 18," Williams said.
Williams said Dean picked him up on the street and after a few conversations they had sex. When he heard she was not 18, he went to her father.
"He was like 'well, she's 13,'" Williams said of a conversation with Dean's father.
Williams said he never did it again, but Dean has done it before with 24-year-old Darwin Mills. Mills was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dean's father wanted Williams to join Mills there.
"One of the reasons for the law is the fact that minors have poor judgment," said Jerry Dean, the girl's father.
Williams' father believes the jail sentence sends the wrong message to Alisha.
"I guess we just sit back and count how many after this," Henry Smith asked after his step-son was sentenced to jail.
Dean's family admits Alisha still stays out late and has yet to delete her misleading MySpace page.
Williams will serve six years probation with the first year in jail. The other five years he will have to wear an ankle monitor. His attorney says he will come back to court to ask again for a shorter sentence. ..News Source.. by WFTV
June 1, 2008
How to know if someone's lying
Do polygraphs work? Not really, experts say. Use these tips instead.
6-1-2008 National:
On the cringe-inducing hit show "The Moment of Truth," guests are shamed into horribly embarrassing admissions on national TV after taking a so-called "lie-detector" test.
But, truth be told, the polygraph is a crude tool that the esteemed National Research Council says has "extremely serious limitations."
"Polygraph tests do not detect lies," says Frank Horvath, past president of the American Polygraph Association. "They detect physiological arousal to psychological stimuli." That means the devices register a lie when the interview subject is just plain nervous.
Researcher Paul Ekman, author of "Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage," contends that the best lie detectors are trained eyes and ears. He claims that when a person is telling a lie for the first time and it's a big one, he can detect the lie with near-perfect accuracy -- and so can you. The trick is to figure out the verbal and non-verbal cues that are masking concealed emotions.
One of the telltale signs: inconsistencies, such as when someone is telling you no and shaking his head yes, or saying he regrets something while using an unremorseful tone.
New English research found another way to spot holes in a story: Ask the suspected fibber to recite his story backward -- in reverse chronological order. You'll also discover contradictions in his behavior and speech. ..News Source.. by Reyhaneh Fathieh
May 9, 2008
I’m Not Lieing, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really
5-9-2008 Global:
Some tales are so tall that they trip over their own improbable feats, narrative cracks and melodrama. That one-on-one playground victory over Kobe Bryant back in the day; the 34 hours in labor without painkillers; the former girlfriend or boyfriend who spoke eight languages and was a secret agent besides.
Yes, uh-huh, really. Is it closing time yet?
Yet in milder doses, self-serving exaggeration can be nearly impossible to detect, experts say, and there are several explanations.
A series of recent studies, focusing on students who inflate their grade-point average, suggests that such exaggeration is very different psychologically from other forms of truth twisting. Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project. The findings imply that some kinds of deception are aimed more at the deceiver than at the audience, and they may help in distinguishing braggarts and posers from those who are expressing personal aspirations, however clumsily.
“It’s important to emphasize that the motives driving academic exaggeration seem to be personal and ‘intrapsychic’ rather than public or interpersonal,” said Richard H. Gramzow, a psychologist at the University of Southampton in England who has led much of the research. “Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to be realized.”
Psychologists have studied deception from all sides and have found that it usually puts a psychological or physical strain on the person doing the dissembling. People with guilty knowledge — of a detail from a crime scene, for example — tend to show signs of stress, as measured by heart and skin sensors, under pointed questioning.
Trying to hold onto an inflammatory secret is mentally exhausting, studies have found, and the act of suppressing the information can cause thoughts of it to flood the consciousness. When telling outright lies, people tend to look and sound tenser than usual.
“Specifically, people are especially more tense when lying, compared to telling the truth, when they are highly motivated to get away with their lies and when they are lying about a transgression,” said Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But a study published in February in the journal Emotion found that exactly the opposite was true for students who exaggerated their grades. The researchers had 62 Northeastern University students fill out a computerized form asking, among other things, for cumulative grade point average. The students were then interviewed while hooked up to an array of sensitive electrodes measuring nervous system activation. The scripted interview covered academic history, goals and grades.
The researchers then pulled the students’ records, with permission, and found that almost half had exaggerated their average by as much as six-tenths of a point. Yet the electrode readings showed that oddly enough, the exaggerators became significantly more relaxed while discussing their grades.
“It was a robust effect, the sort of readings you see when people are engaged in a positive social encounter, or when they’re meditating,” said Wendy Berry Mendes, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard and senior author of the study. Dr. Gramzow and Greg Willard, then at Northeastern and now at Harvard, were co-authors.
The researchers videotaped the interviews, and independent observers rated how students looked and behaved. “The ones who exaggerated the most appeared the most calm and confident” on the ratings, Dr. Mendes said.
The grade inflation was less an attempt to deceive, the authors concluded, than a reflection of healthy overconfidence and a statement of aspirations. “It’s basically an exercise in projecting the self toward one’s goals,” Dr. Gramzow said.
In earlier studies, Dr. Gramzow and Dr. Willard found that students who bumped up their averages in interviews subsequently improved their grades — often by the very amount they had exaggerated.
The findings provide another lens through which to view claims, from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s story of sniper fire in Bosnia to exaggerations of income, charitable contributions and SAT scores. As much as these are embroideries, they are also expressions of yearning, and for reachable goals.
In that sense, fibs can reflect something close to the opposite of the frustration, insecurity and secretiveness that often fuel big lies. That may be why they can come so easily, add up so fast and for some people — especially around closing time — become indistinguishable from the truth. ..more.. by BENEDICT CAREY
February 12, 2008
Learning to Lie
2-10-2008 National:
Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.
In the last few years, a handful of intrepid scholars have decided it’s time to try to understand why kids lie. For a study to assess the extent of teenage dissembling, Dr. Nancy Darling, then at Penn State University, recruited a special research team of a dozen undergraduate students, all under the age of 21. Using gift certificates for free CDs as bait, Darling’s Mod Squad persuaded high-school students to spend a few hours with them in the local pizzeria.
Each student was handed a deck of 36 cards, and each card in this deck listed a topic teens sometimes lie about to their parents. Over a slice and a Coke, the teen and two researchers worked through the deck, learning what things the kid was lying to his parents about, and why.
“They began the interviews saying that parents give you everything and yes, you should tell them everything,” Darling observes. By the end of the interview, the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of the family’s rules they had broken. Darling says 98 percent of the teens reported lying to their parents.
Out of the 36 topics, the average teen was lying to his parents about twelve of them. The teens lied about what they spent their allowances on, and whether they’d started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with. They lied about alcohol and drug use, and they lied about whether they were hanging out with friends their parents disapproved of. They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work. They lied about whether chaperones were in attendance at a party or whether they rode in cars driven by drunken teens.
Being an honors student didn’t change these numbers by much; nor did being an overscheduled kid. No kid, apparently, was too busy to break a few rules. And lest you wonder if these numbers apply only to teens in State College, Pennsylvania, the teens in Darling’s sample were compared to national averages on a bevy of statistics, from academics to extracurriculars. “We had a very normal, representative sample,” Darling says.
For two decades, parents have rated “honesty” as the trait they most wanted in their children. Other traits, such as confidence or good judgment, don’t even come close. On paper, the kids are getting this message. In surveys, 98 percent said that trust and honesty were essential in a personal relationship. Depending on their ages, 96 to 98 percent said lying is morally wrong.
So when do the 98 percent who think lying is wrong become the 98 percent who lie?
It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3. “Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.
Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.
This puts parents in the position of being either damned or blessed, depending on how they choose to look at it. If your 4-year-old is a good liar, it’s a strong sign she’s got brains. And it’s the smart, savvy kid who’s most at risk of becoming a habitual liar.
By their 4th birthday, almost all kids will start experimenting with lying in order to avoid punishment. Because of that, they lie indiscriminately—whenever punishment seems to be a possibility. A 3-year-old will say, “I didn’t hit my sister,” even if a parent witnessed the child’s hitting her sibling.
Most parents hear their child lie and assume he’s too young to understand what lies are or that lying’s wrong. They presume their child will stop when he gets older and learns those distinctions. Talwar has found the opposite to be true—kids who grasp early the nuances between lies and truth use this knowledge to their advantage, making them more prone to lie when given the chance.
Many parenting Websites and books advise parents to just let lies go—they’ll grow out of it. The truth, according to Talwar, is that kids grow into it. In studies where children are observed in their natural environment, a 4-year-old will lie once every two hours, while a 6-year-old will lie about once every hour and a half. Few kids are exceptions.
By the time a child reaches school age, the reasons for lying become more complex. Avoiding punishment is still a primary catalyst for lying, but lying also becomes a way to increase a child’s power and sense of control—by manipulating friends with teasing, by bragging to assert status, and by learning he can fool his parents.
Thrown into elementary school, many kids begin lying to their peers as a coping mechanism, as a way to vent frustration or get attention. Any sudden spate of lying, or dramatic increase in lying, is a danger sign: Something has changed in that child’s life, in a way that troubles him. “Lying is a symptom—often of a bigger problem behavior,” explains Talwar. “It’s a strategy to keep themselves afloat.”
In longitudinal studies, a majority of 6-year-olds who frequently lie have it socialized out of them by age 7. But if lying has become a successful strategy for handling difficult social situations, a child will stick with it. About half of all kids do—and if they’re still lying a lot at 7, then it seems likely to continue for the rest of childhood. They’re hooked.
"My son doesn’t lie,” insisted Steve, a slightly frazzled father in his mid-thirties, as he watched Nick, his eager 6-year-old, enthralled in a game of marbles with a student researcher in Talwar’s Montreal lab. Steve was quite proud of his son, describing him as easygoing and very social. He had Nick bark out an impressive series of addition problems the boy had memorized, as if that was somehow proof of Nick’s sincerity.
Steve then took his assertion down a notch. “Well, I’ve never heard him lie.” Perhaps that, too, was a little strong. “I’m sure he must lie some, but when I hear it, I’ll still be surprised.” He had brought his son to the lab after seeing an advertisement in a Montreal parenting magazine that asked, “Can Your Child Tell the Difference Between the Truth and a Lie?”
Steve was curious to find out if Nick would lie, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. The idea of his son’s being dishonest with him was profoundly troubling.
But I knew for a fact his son did lie. Nick cheated, then he lied, and then he lied again. He did so unhesitatingly, without a single glimmer of remorse.
Nick thought he’d spent the hour playing a series of games with a couple of nice women. He had won two prizes, a cool toy car and a bag of plastic dinosaurs, and everyone said he did very well. What the first-grader didn’t know was that those games were really a battery of psychological tests, and the women were Talwar’s trained researchers working toward doctorates in child psychology.
One of Talwar’s experiments, a variation on a classic experiment called the temptation-resistance paradigm, is known in the lab as “the Peeking Game.” Through a hidden camera, I’d watched Nick play it with another one of Talwar’s students, Cindy Arruda. She told Nick they were going to play a guessing game. Nick was to sit facing the wall and try to guess the identity of a toy Arruda brought out, based on the sound it made. If he was right three times, he’d win a prize.
The first two were easy: a police car and a crying baby doll. Nick bounced in his chair with excitement when he got the answers right. Then Arruda brought out a soft, stuffed soccer ball and placed it on top of a greeting card that played music. She cracked the card, triggering it to play a music-box jingle of Beethoven’s Für Elise. Nick, of course, was stumped.
Arruda suddenly said she had to leave the room for a bit, promising to be right back. She admonished Nick not to peek at the toy while she was gone. Nick struggled not to, but at thirteen seconds, he gave in and looked.
When Arruda returned, she could barely come through the door before Nick—facing the wall again—triumphantly announced, “A soccer ball!” Arruda told Nick to wait for her to get seated. Suddenly realizing he should sound unsure of his answer, he hesitantly asked, “A soccer ball?”
Arruda said Nick was right, and when he turned to face her, he acted very pleased. Arruda asked Nick if he had peeked. “No,” he said quickly. Then a big smile spread across his face.
Without challenging him, or even a note of suspicion in her voice, Arruda asked Nick how he’d figured out the sound came from a soccer ball.
Nick cupped his chin in his hands, then said, “The music had sounded like a ball.” Then: “The ball sounded black and white.” Nick added that the music sounded like the soccer balls he played with at school: They squeaked. And the music sounded like the squeak he heard when he kicked a ball. To emphasize this, his winning point, he brushed his hand against the side of the toy ball.
Next: How parents unwittingly teach kids to lie.
This experiment was not just a test to see if children cheat and lie under temptation. It was also designed to test a child’s ability to extend a lie, offering plausible explanations and avoiding what the scientists call “leakage”—inconsistencies that reveal the lie for what it is. Nick’s whiffs at covering up his lie would be scored later by coders who watched the videotape. So Arruda accepted without question the fact that soccer balls play Beethoven when they’re kicked and gave Nick his prize. He was thrilled.
Seventy-six percent of kids Nick’s age take the chance to peek during the game, and when asked if they peeked, 95 percent lie about it.
But sometimes the researcher will read the child a short storybook before she asks about the peeking. One story read aloud is The Boy Who Cried Wolf—the version in which both the boy and the sheep get eaten because of his repeated lies. Alternatively, they read George Washington and the Cherry Tree, in which young George confesses to his father that he chopped down the prized tree with his new hatchet. The story ends with his father’s reply: “George, I’m glad that you cut down the tree after all. Hearing you tell the truth instead of a lie is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees.”
Now, which story do you think reduced lying more? When we surveyed 1,300 people, 75 percent thought The Boy Who Cried Wolf would work better. However, this famous fable actually did not cut down lying at all in Talwar’s experiments. In fact, after hearing the story, kids lied even a little more than normal. Meanwhile, hearing George Washington and the Cherry Tree—even when Washington was replaced with a nondescript character, eliminating the potential that his iconic celebrity might influence older kids—reduced lying a sizable 43 percent in kids. Although most kids lied in the control situation, the majority hearing George Washington told the truth.
Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes a daily occurrence.
The shepherd boy ends up suffering the ultimate punishment, but the fact that lies get punished is not news to children. Increasing the threat of punishment for lying only makes children hyperaware of the potential personal cost. It distracts children from learning how their lies affect others. In studies, scholars find that kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars, at an earlier age—learning to get caught less often.
Ultimately, it’s not fairy tales that stop kids from lying—it’s the process of socialization. But the wisdom in The Cherry Tree applies: According to Talwar, parents need to teach kids the worth of honesty, just like George Washington’s father did, as much as they need to say that lying is wrong.
The most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to. According to Talwar, they learn it from us. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.”
Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We instruct him to swallow all his honest reactions and put on a polite smile. Talwar runs an experiment where children play games to win a present, but when they finally receive the present, it’s a lousy bar of soap. After giving the kids a moment to overcome the shock, a researcher asks them how they like it. About a quarter of preschoolers can lie that they like the gift—by elementary school, about half.
Telling this lie makes them extremely uncomfortable, especially when pressed to offer a few reasons why they like the bar of soap. Kids who shouted with glee when they won the Peeking Game suddenly mumble quietly and fidget.
Meanwhile, the child’s parent usually cheers when the child comes up with the white lie. “Often, the parents are proud that their kids are ‘polite’—they don’t see it as lying,” Talwar remarks. She’s regularly amazed at parents’ seeming inability to recognize that white lies are still lies.
When adults are asked to keep diaries of their own lies, they admit to about one lie per every five social interactions, which works out to one per day, on average. The vast majority of these lies are white lies, lies to protect yourself or others, like telling the guy at work who brought in his wife’s muffins that they taste great or saying, “Of course this is my natural hair color.”
Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict. And while they don’t confuse white-lie situations with lying to cover their misdeeds, they bring this emotional groundwork from one circumstance to the other. It becomes easier, psychologically, to lie to a parent. So if the parent says, “Where did you get these Pokémon cards?! I told you, you’re not allowed to waste your allowance on Pokémon cards!” this may feel to the child very much like a white-lie scenario—he can make his father feel better by telling him the cards were extras from a friend.
Next: The adolescent's need to withhold details
Now, compare this with the way children are taught not to tattle. What grown-ups really mean by “Don’t tell” is that we want children to learn to work it out with one another first. But tattling has received some scientific interest, and researchers have spent hours observing kids at play. They’ve learned that nine out of ten times, when a kid runs up to a parent to tell, that kid is being completely honest. And while it might seem to a parent that tattling is incessant, to a child that’s not the case—because for every time a child seeks a parent for help, there are fourteen instances when he was wronged but did not run to the parent for aid. So when the frustrated child finally comes to tell the parent the truth, he hears, in effect, “Stop bringing me your problems!”
By the middle years of elementary school, a tattler is about the worst thing a kid can be called on the playground. So a child considering reporting a problem to an adult not only faces peer condemnation as a traitor but also recalls the reprimand “Work it out on your own.” Each year, the problems they deal with grow exponentially. They watch other kids cut class, vandalize walls, and shoplift. To tattle is to act like a little kid. Keeping their mouth shut is easy; they’ve been encouraged to do so since they were little.
The era of holding back information from parents has begun.
By withholding details about their lives, adolescents carve out a social domain and identity that are theirs alone, independent from their parents or other adult authority figures. To seek out a parent for help is, from a teen’s perspective, a tacit admission that he’s not mature enough to handle it alone. Having to tell parents about it can be psychologically emasculating, whether the confession is forced out of him or he volunteers it on his own. It’s essential for some things to be “none of your business.”
The big surprise in the research is when this need for autonomy is strongest. It’s not mild at 12, moderate at 15, and most powerful at 18. Darling’s scholarship shows that the objection to parental authority peaks around ages 14 to 15. In fact, this resistance is slightly stronger at age 11 than at 18. In popular culture, we think of high school as the risk years, but the psychological forces driving deception surge earlier than that.
Many books advise parents to just let lies go—they’ll grow out of it. The truth is, kids grow into it.
In her study of teenage students, Darling also mailed survey questionnaires to the parents of the teenagers interviewed, and it was interesting how the two sets of data reflected on each other. First, she was struck by parents’ vivid fear of pushing their teens into outright hostile rebellion. “Many parents today believe the best way to get teens to disclose is to be more permissive and not set rules,” Darling says. Parents imagine a trade-off between being informed and being strict. Better to hear the truth and be able to help than be kept in the dark.
Darling found that permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their children’s lives. “Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t care—that their parent doesn’t really want this job of being the parent.”
Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth. “That actually doesn’t happen,” remarks Darling. She found that most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them. “It’s too much work,” says Darling. “It’s a lot harder to enforce three rules than to set twenty rules.”
A few parents managed to live up to the stereotype of the oppressive parent, with lots of psychological intrusion, but those teens weren’t rebelling. They were obedient. And depressed.
“Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids,” Darling observes. They’ve set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence, and they’ve explained why the rules are there. They expect the child to obey them. Over life’s other spheres, they supported the child’s autonomy, allowing them freedom to make their own decisions.
The kids of these parents lied the least. Rather than hiding twelve areas from their parents, they might be hiding as few as five.
In the thesaurus, the antonym of honesty is lying, and the opposite of arguing is agreeing. But in the minds of teenagers, that’s not how it works. Really, to an adolescent, arguing is the opposite of lying.
Next: Will how we deal with lies matter later in life?
When Nancy Darling’s researchers interviewed the teenagers from Pennsylvania, they also asked the teens when and why they told the truth to their parents about things they knew their parents disapproved of. Occasionally they told the truth because they knew a lie wouldn’t fly—they’d be caught. Sometimes they told the truth because they just felt obligated, saying, “They’re my parents, I’m supposed to tell them.” But one important motivation that emerged was that many teens told their parents the truth when they were planning on doing something that was against the rules—in hopes their parents might give in and say it was okay. Usually, this meant an argument ensued, but it was worth it if a parent might budge.
The average Pennsylvania teen was 244 percent more likely to lie than to protest a rule. In the families where there was less deception, however, there was a much higher ratio of arguing and complaining. The argument enabled the child to speak honestly. Certain types of fighting, despite the acrimony, were ultimately signs of respect—not of disrespect.
But most parents don’t make this distinction in how they perceive arguments with their children. Dr. Tabitha Holmes of SUNY–New Paltz conducted extensive interviews asking mothers and adolescents, separately, to describe their arguments and how they felt about them. And there was a big difference.
Forty-six percent of the mothers rated their arguments as being destructive to their relationships with their teens. Being challenged was stressful, chaotic, and (in their perception) disrespectful. The more frequently they fought, and the more intense the fights were, the more the mother rated the fighting as harmful. But only 23 percent of the adolescents felt that their arguments were destructive. Far more believed that fighting strengthened their relationship with their mothers. “Their perception of the fighting was really sophisticated, far more than we anticipated for teenagers,” notes Holmes. “They saw fighting as a way to see their parents in a new way, as a result of hearing their mother’s point of view be articulated.”
What most surprised Holmes was learning that for the teens, fighting often, or having big fights, did not cause them to rate the fighting as harmful and destructive. Statistically, it made no difference at all. Certainly, there is a point in families where there is too much conflict, Holmes notes. “But we didn’t have anybody in our study with an extreme amount of conflict.” Instead, the variable that seemed to really matter was how the arguments were resolved.
It will be many years before my own children become teenagers, but having lying on my radar screen has changed the way things work around the Bronson household. No matter how small, lies no longer go unnoticed. The moments slow down, and I have a better sense of how to handle them.
Just the other day, my 6-year-old son, Luke, came home from school having learned a new phrase and a new attitude—quipping “I don’t care” snidely, and shrugging his shoulders to everything. He repeated “I don’t care” so many times I finally got frustrated and demanded to know if someone at school had taught him this dismissive phrase.
He froze. And I could suddenly intuit the debate running through his head—should he lie to his dad, or rat out his friend? Recognizing the conflict, I told him that if he learned the phrase at school, he did not have to tell me who taught him the phrase. Telling me the truth was not going to get his friends in trouble.
“Okay,” he said, relieved. “I learned it at school.” Then he told me he did care, and he gave me a hug. I haven’t heard it again.
Does how we deal with a child’s lies really matter down the road in life? The irony of lying is that it’s both normal and abnormal behavior at the same time. It’s to be expected, and yet it can’t be disregarded.
Dr. Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has devoted much of her career to adult lying. In one study, she had both college students and community members enter a private room equipped with an audiotape recorder. Promising them complete confidentiality, DePaulo’s team instructed the subjects to recall the worst lie they ever told—with all the scintillating details.
“I was fully expecting serious lies,” DePaulo remarks. “Stories of affairs kept from spouses, stories of squandering money, or being a salesperson and screwing money out of car buyers.” And she did hear those kinds of whoppers, including theft and even one murder. But to her surprise, a lot of the stories told were about when the subject was a mere child—and they were not, at first glance, lies of any great consequence. “One told of eating the icing off a cake, then telling her parents the cake came that way. Another told of stealing some coins from a sibling.” As these stories first started trickling in, DePaulo scoffed, thinking, “C’mon, that’s the worst lie you’ve ever told?” But the stories of childhood kept coming, and DePaulo had to create a category in her analysis just for them. “I had to reframe my understanding to consider what it must have been like as a child to have told this lie,” she recalls. “For young kids, their lie challenged their self-concept that they were a good child, and that they did the right thing.”
Many subjects commented on how that momentous lie early in life established a pattern that affected them thereafter. “We had some who said, ‘I told this lie, I got caught, and I felt so badly, I vowed to never do it again.’ Others said, ‘Wow, I never realized I’d be so good at deceiving my father, I can do this all the time.’ The lies they tell early on are meaningful. The way parents react can really affect lying.”
Talwar says parents often entrap their kids, putting them in positions to lie and testing their honesty unnecessarily. Last week, I put my 3½-year-old daughter in that exact situation. I noticed she had scribbled on the dining table with a washable marker. Disapprovingly, I asked, “Did you draw on the table, Thia?” In the past, she would have just answered honestly, but my tone gave away that she’d done something wrong. Immediately, I wished I could retract the question. I should have just reminded her not to write on the table, slipped newspaper under her coloring book, and washed the ink away. Instead, I had done just as Talwar had warned against.
“No, I didn’t,” my daughter said, lying to me for the first time.
For that stain, I had only myself to blame. ..more.. by Po Bronson, NY Times Magazine
Why Do Kids Lie?
2-11-2008 National:
We seem to be in an ongoing analysis of why people lie… First, clients to therapists. And now we bring you a well-written, in-depth article in yesterday’s New York Magazine about why kids lie. The findings from one of the studies are not surprising to any parent:
Out of the 36 topics, the average teen was lying to his parents about twelve of them. The teens lied about what they spent their allowances on, and whether they’d started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with. They lied about alcohol and drug use, and they lied about whether they were hanging out with friends their parents disapproved of. They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work. They lied about whether chaperones were in attendance at a party or whether they rode in cars driven by drunken teens.
Of course they do. These are the topics that are difficult or embarrassing to talk about. They are the topics that result in a kid feeling like they are disappointing their parents, or result in serious punishments. We’ve all done it — it’s an inevitable part of the process of growing up. And your children will do it too.
So how does it start and do kids just grow out of it?
It starts as early as 2 or 3 — the more intelligent the child, the earlier (and better!) the liar. They do it to avoid taking responsibility for something and to avoid punishment.
Many parenting Websites and books advise parents to just let lies go—they’ll grow out of it. The truth, according to Talwar, is that kids grow into it. In studies where children are observed in their natural environment, a 4-year-old will lie once every two hours, while a 6-year-old will lie about once every hour and a half. Few kids are exceptions.
[…]
In longitudinal studies, a majority of 6-year-olds who frequently lie have it socialized out of them by age 7. But if lying has become a successful strategy for handling difficult social situations, a child will stick with it. About half of all kids do—and if they’re still lying a lot at 7, then it seems likely to continue for the rest of childhood. They’re hooked.
So who’s to blame? Well the parents of course!!
Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We instruct him to swallow all his honest reactions and put on a polite smile. Talwar runs an experiment where children play games to win a present, but when they finally receive the present, it’s a lousy bar of soap. After giving the kids a moment to overcome the shock, a researcher asks them how they like it. About a quarter of preschoolers can lie that they like the gift—by elementary school, about half. Telling this lie makes them extremely uncomfortable, especially when pressed to offer a few reasons why they like the bar of soap. Kids who shouted with glee when they won the Peeking Game suddenly mumble quietly and fidget.
The truth is, kids learn by modeling and learning from the behavior they see in their environment. That’s why school doesn’t just teach facts and dates and math and grammar, it teaches how to socially interact with others in an appropriate manner.
So it should be no surprise, really, that our children pick up not only our best traits — our honesty, sincerity, ethics and morals — but also some of our worse ones too.
Think you can avoid teaching your children this lesson? You can’t.
On average, adults lie in about 1 in 5 social interactions. Unless you’re prepared to become hyperaware and hypersensitive to your environment and interactions with others, it’s just a normal, everyday occurrence we all take for granted. There’s no getting around it.
The article doesn’t really have any suggestions on how to reduce the number of lies your child tells, or how to keep them from telling any in the first place. The key is to understand that it’s not your child’s fault he or she lies — it makes complete sense in some situations to do so.
What you can do is reinforce and reward the truth when you see your kid debating whether to tell a lie or not, and to try and curb your own lying, especially that done in front of your child. Talking to your child about the difference between social lies (”little white lies”) used to help smooth over our relationships with others, versus lies that matter may also be helpful, but only as the child is older and can understand the differentiation.
And if your child rarely lies, be thankful. He or she is in a class virtually unto themselves. ..more.. by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
