On Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:27:47 -0400,
wrote:


And detained him for some serious questioning.
And asked him to take a lie detector test. They did none of that yet
if this is just an honest guy, not out for something, why did he
lawyer up?

Wowsers! You really think they could just arrest someone and make them
take a lie detector test without so much as probable cause to believe
a crime was committed, or a warrant? I don't think Police have
casually used lie detectors for a long time. I'm not sure they even
can.

Right.

There is ZERO evidence that he broke any laws. He didn't even get
a speeding ticket for going 90 MPH.

BTW, lie detectors are (often?) crap. They talk about liars fooling
the examiner, but the problem they don't talk about is non-liars being
labeled as liars.

After my first year in college, at my summer job, I used to get groggy
at my desk during coffee breaks (I don't drink coffee). I was at the
doctor for something else and mentioned this and he sent me to some
big specialist in Chicago, who saw me for free as a courtesy to his
friend. The doctor, head of neurology at Univeristy of Illinois
Medical Center, gave me a sleeping EEG and said I didn't have
epilepsy and never did. (The GP had thought I did since I was 13)

I told them how I felt faint (and did faint once or twice) when I
stood up suddenly. They called a lab in the building to check that
out but they couldn't set up until Monday. My mother wanted to leave
the next day so we ended up going to the leading lie detector place in
Chicago. Only for the blood pressure part, but he asked me if I would
like the whole test (same price) and being an 18-year old boy, I was
curious. My mother told me later that before the test even started,
he came into the waiting room and told her, "Don't worry Mrs. MM2005,
we had a case like this last week and it was all in her mind."

When I got the report back it was full of omissions and factual
mistakes, that distorted everything I had said. Especially the parts
he paraphrased. He concluded I was making up my symptoms and I can
assure you I wasn't. In fact all I had was "orthostatic hypotension"
a drop in blood pressure when standing up, something more than a third
of people have, but mine was enough to make me pass out a few times,
and a few times since then, when I stretched my muscles, and now when
I cough a lot. But it's never come close to happening when I'm
driving.

This lie detector place in Chicago was even known the Acting Medical
Examiner of NYC when I talked to him, and the guy who "examined" me
was supposed to be one of their best (although maybe not since he was
the one they had come in on Saturday, but he was still good enough to
work there.) I think the guy wished he had a better education and a
better job and was pretending to himself to be a wise and knowledgable
doctor, instead of a polygraph examiner.

I left out some details, like what the omissions and mistakes were,
but this is a major reason that lie detector testimony is not
admissable in court.

I have no reason to lie about this. There were no consequences to me.
The specialist relayed the lie detector report with very little
comment, only to say that it said I was malingering, and my own GP may
have also been annoyed at me, especially since he was disproven about
the epilepsy (which I was glad of. He hadn't told me I had epilepsy.
If he had, I would have known he was wrong, because epileptic seizures
occur seemingly at random times, not when you stand up), but there
were no consequences to that either. I was away at school 9 months a
year and by the next year my parents had moved to another city, so I
never saw him again anyhow.