ABSTRACT

By the 1980s many United States criminal courts had become quite used to dealing with polygraph evidence. The polygraph provides an excellent example of how ontological claims must be understood as situated within practices and with regard to specific norms and politics. The court opinion is a specific form of producing ontological statements about socio-technical relations. This chapter examines how ambiguities about the role of polygraph operators and uncertainties in the polygraph machine's operations were managed in Massachusetts over a thirty-year period. The story of the polygraph's status in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts began, a few months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The chapter explores how Polygraph uncertainties and the examiner's critical role in the exam are negotiated in the use of the polygraph in police interviews. Regular use of the polygraph in corporate America and police investigations led to a growing number of criminal cases in which lies detection evidence was submitted for consideration.