Mumbai: The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it.
Now, well before any consensus on the technology’s readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to disclose signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.
Illustration: Jayachandran/Mint
For years, scientists have peered into the brain and sought to identify deception. They have shot infrared beams through liars’ heads, placed them in giant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines and used scanners to track their eyeballs. Since the 11 September attacks, the US has ploughed money into brain-based lie detection in the hope of producing more fruitful counterterrorism investigations.
The technologies, generally regarded as promising, but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence—except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.
Psychologists and neuroscientists in the US, which has been at the forefront of brain-based lie detection, variously called India’s application of the technology to legal cases “fascinating”, “ridiculous”, “chilling” and “unconscionable”. (While attempts have been made in the US to introduce findings of similar tests into court cases, these have been generally by defence lawyers trying to show the mental impairment of the accused, not by prosecutors trying to convict.)
“I find this both interesting and disturbing,” Henry T. Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford Law School, said of the Indian verdict. “We keep looking for a magic, technological solution to lie detection. Maybe we’ll have it someday, but we need to demand the highest standards of proof before we ruin people’s lives based on its application.”
Whatever American scientists think, law enforcement officials from several countries, including Israel and Singapore, have shown interest in the brain-scanning technology and have visited government labs that use it in interrogations, Indian officials said.
Methods of eliciting truth have long proved problematic. Truth drugs tend to make suspects babble as much falsehood as truth. Polygraph tests measure anxiety more than deception, and good liars may not feel anxious. In 1998, the US Supreme Court said there was “simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable”.