Polygraph Trainer Convicted for Teaching People to Beat Faulty Test

An Indiana man was sentenced to eight months in jail for training people to beat polygraph tests.  Chad Dixon pled guilty to charges of wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding.  What the charge stemmed from was his coaching federal job applicants and criminals on how to beat “lie detector” tests.

“Lie detector” tests, polygraphs, don’t detect lies. They detect physical manifestations of people who are nervous, uncomfortable, and the theory goes, more likely lying.  Dixon trained them on:

Controlled breathing, muscle tensing, tongue biting and mental arithmetic can all be applied to skew the results of lie detector tests, instructors in lie detector countermeasures claim.

According to The Register UK.  

Federal District Judge Liam O’Grady said: "There’s nothing unlawful about maybe 95 per cent of the business he [Dixon] conducted” but found criminal fault in his willingness to assist would-be applicants and others to lie to federal agencies, the Washington Post reported.

Prosecutors said after his sentencing that his customers included unsuitable applicants for federal law enforcement jobs and convicted sex offenders who were required to take polygraph tests as part of court-ordered probation or parole.

While that may be true, and it is unscrupulous to train people to lie to get a job and lie to police about breaking parole, what really happened here is that Dixon taught people to beat a rough and imprecise test.  As the Register correctly points out, polygraphs don’t even work.  They don’t detect lying.  They detect being uncomfortable.  They aren’t used in Europe. They aren’t admissible in court, because they don’t work.  There are too many false positives – people the test says are lying, but are really just nervous. 

This isn’t a Wizzinator, which gives someone fake urine to pass a urine test for drugs – which is accurate. 

What this is really about is that the federal agency didn’t want to do its homework on applicants and the parole board didn’t want to accurately check parolees behavior.  It is easier to hook someone up to a machine and see if the machine says you’re lying.  That a court requires an inaccurate test – THAT IS NOT ADMISSIBLE IN COURT IN A TRIAL – as part of a parole hearing, didn’t get aired here, apparently.  That a federal agency would require a test that is so inaccurate it can’t be used in court as a final barrier to employment, is just flat wrong.