Truth Wanted

"The lie detector," said Mrs. Edna Hancock, "lied."

The veracity of lie detectors was headed for trial last week in a Brooklyn court. On the trial's outcome may hinge whether one Murray Goldman, accused of attempting to rape Mrs. Hancock, goes to prison for ten years.

Mrs. Hancock, a sailor's wife, worked as a nurse's assistant in the Brooklyn State Hospital. One day last July a fellow employe walked into her room in the hospital and discovered Goldman cowering in a corner. Mrs. Hancock, properly indignant, cried wolf, had Goldman arrested for breaking in and trying to rape her. She said she had never seen him before. Goldman retorted that she had indeed seen him before--seven times, and in bed. A jury believed Mrs. Hancock and convicted him.

The judge, Brooklyn's famed onetime criminal lawyer Samuel Leibowitz, was not quite convinced. When Goldman accurately described a mole on Mrs. Hancock's hip, Judge Leibowitz began to investigate, soon unearthed evidence that Goldman's story might be true. Thereupon the judge called in a psychologist and tested Goldman with a psychogalvanometer which, by recording electrical impulses in a man's skin, is supposed to show whether he answers questions truthfully. The lie detector gave Goldman 100% and Judge Leibowitz gave him his freedom.

Last week, however, the case started a new circle. Accompanied by her sailor husband, with whom she had been vacationing in their home town of Drury, Mo., Mrs. Hancock stormed into the Brooklyn district attorney's office and demanded a new trial. The district attorney, observing that lie-detector tests have no legal standing in New York, promptly promised her one.

Courts in general consider lie detectors too unreliable to admit their findings as conclusive evidence. Psychologists are equally skeptical of them. There are now some half-dozen such instruments, depending variously on measurements of blood pressure, breathing, heartbeats, etc., to detect emotional disturbances that are believed to be associated with lying. But, although some inventors claim better than 85% accuracy, proof of a lie detector's infallibility is obviously impossible to obtain. There is no way of guaranteeing that, in some cases, even the best instrument may not tell the wrong story.

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