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1 THE COURT: Mr. Daniels?
2 MR. DANIELS: For the purpose of the record,
3 Your Honor, we'll call Dr. Honts briefly.
4 CHARLES HONTS
5 The witness herein, having been sworn to
6 testify the truth, testified as follows:
7 DIRECT EXAMINATION
8 BY MR. DANIELS:
9 Q Please state your name and address.
10 A Yes, Charles Robert Honts, Honts.
I live
11 at 2263 Spring Brook Court, Grand Forks, North Dakota.
12 Q Let me show you a copy or maybe I can just
13 ask opposing counsel.
14 MR. DANIELS: May we now offer Dr. Honts'
15 vitae, Exhibit U?
16 MS. HIGGINS: No objection.
17 MR. DANIELS: We would offer with no
18 objection Exhibit U, Your Honor.
19 (WHEREUPON, Defendant's Exhibit U
20 offered into evidence.)
21 THE COURT: It shall be admitted.
22 (WHEREUPON, Defendant's Exhibit U
23 admitted into evidence.)
24 BY MR. DANIELS:
25 Q Does your vitae substantially set forth your
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1 professional qualifications and work history and
2 background?
3 A Yes, it does.
4 MR. DANIELS: Your Honor, unless there is an
5 objection to the qualifications of Dr. Honts, I would
6 just rely on the resume for the qualifications.
7 MS. HIGGINS: There is no objection, Your
8 Honor.
9 THE COURT: All right.
10 BY MR. DANIELS:
11 Q Dr. Honts, would it be fair to say that you
12 have been involved in polygraph research and
13 administration over the years?
14 A Yes.
15 Q Could you give us very briefly please a
16 summary of your history in that regard?
17 A Yes, I went to a polygraph school in 1976,
18 the Backster School of Lie Detection in San Diego,
19 California. And I practiced as a polygraph examiner in
20 private practice for several different employers between
21 1976 and 1980. I did mostly criminal forensic work
22 during that period of time and quite a large number of
23 tests.
24 In 1980 I decided that I would like to
25 further my education and was accepted into the graduate
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1 program at Virginia Tech. I received a master's degree
2 there, master of science in experimental psychology in
3 1982. My research while I was at Virginia Tech was all
4 on lie detection.
5 I went from Virginia Tech in 1982 to the
6 University of Utah where I received my Ph.D. degree in
7 1986. I stayed on at the University of Utah for about
8 two years in a research associate professor position
9 doing research on lie detection, funded research.
10 Q Specifically on the application of underlying
11 autonomic nervous system scientific principles to the
12 forensic polygraph lie detection technique?
13 A Yes, that's correct.
14 Q Okay.
15 A I left the University of Utah in 1988 and
16 went to the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute
17 where I was
18 Q Is that the same institute that Dr. Barland
19 is with?
20 A Yes, it is. I worked for Dr. Barland while I
21 was there as a research psychologist and I was a
22 research team leader. I was there a little over two
23 years and went into the University of North Dakota which
24 is where I still am. I'm now an associate professor.
25 Q So you started as assistant professor of
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1 psychology?
2 A Yes, that is correct.
3 Q When were you promoted to associate
4 professor?
5 A I was promoted let's see, in 1984, I
6 believe. I would need to refer to be sure.
7 MS. HIGGINS: Your Honor, excuse me. I may
8 have missed this has Mr. Daniels offered Dr. Honts as an
9 expert in any field yet?
10 THE COURT: No, I don't think he has.
11 MR. DANIELS: I'll be glad to offer him as an
12 expert in psychophysiology and in particular the use of
13 psychophysiological principles in the autonomic nervous
14 system to the forensic polygraph technique.
15 MS. HIGGINS: The Government has no objection
16 to him being an expert in the field of psychophysiology.
17 And if the latter part of that means administering and
18 scoring and working with polygraph exams, we have no
19 objection to that either.
20 MR. DANIELS: It is not only administering
21 and scoring, it's doing the scientific research and
22 performing scientific opinions. He is a scientist and a
23 polygrapher.
24 MS. HIGGINS: We have no objection to him
25 being admitted an as expert in the field of
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1 psychophysiology and as an expert in polygraph
2 administration.
3 MR. DANIELS: All right. That's all I'll be
4 asking about here.
5 BY MR. DANIELS:
6 Q You were promoted to associate professor?
7 A In 1993.
8 Q I know you have been waiting a couple of
9 days, but I am going to make this short. Let me just
10 run over the Daubert factors in summary and get to some
11 specific issues that have been raised in the testimony
12 here today. Are you familiar with these factors?
13 A Yes, I am.
14 Q You have actually written on the issue of
15 Daubert factors
16 A Yes, I have.
17 Q in connection with the polygraph? Can you
18 tell us whether the scientific hypothesis underlying the
19 administration of forensic polygraph can be and whether
20 it has been tested?
21 A Yes, it can be tested and they have been
22 tested many times.
23 Q And has the theory or technique been
24 subjected to peer review and publication?
25 A Many, many times.
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1 Q What is the known or potential rate of error?
2 A That's a very difficult question to answer
3 specifically. If we're concerned with the kind of test
4 that is run here, based upon the high quality laboratory
5 studies and the high quality field studies that are
6 available, my estimates would be very close to what Dr.
7 Raskin gave yesterday. I think within some small margin
8 of error that the test is 90 percent accurate with
9 innocent subjects and 95 percent or so accurate with
10 guilty subjects.
11 Q And that ranges within 5 percent of Dr.
12 Barland's estimates?
13 A Yes, it does.
14 Q Are there standards that exist to control the
15 technique?
16 A Yes, there are.
17 Q And does it have what is the degree, if
18 any, of the acceptance of the technique within the
19 relevant community?
20 A I think the acceptance in the relevant
21 community is quite high. I think it is shown both in
22 the Gallup study about ten years ago and from the study
23 that Susan Amato did under my supervision that any time
24 60 percent or so of professional scientific
25 organizations endorses that a technique is useful, I
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1 think is very impressive.
2 Q That is the survey that's reported on Exhibit
3 L that has been introduced in evidence?
4 A Yes, it is.
5 Q There has been some testimony about the
6 concept of countermeasures. Could you briefly explain
7 to us what research you're aware of or have conducted on
8 the subject and whether countermeasures are effective in
9 defeating the polygraph test?
10 A Yes, that is a very large question. I have
11 done a number of studies personally addressing the
12 effects of countermeasures. Our primary interests there
13 was in the national security setting because the great
14 concern in the national security setting is that a
15 person who is hiding their involvement with a foreign
16 government is going to penetrate the national security
17 systems and cause our government damage. And so the
18 cost of a false negative outcome is extremely high.
19 And the model that we took in undertaking
20 this research is that those people, hostile intelligence
21 officers, have access to all the information that is
22 available about how polygraph tests work and how
23 physiological responses might be reduced. And we try to
24 model that in the laboratory and give people the
25 advantage of that training.
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1 And if I can be brief, I will summarize that.
2 If people have high quality training and are given full
3 information, our studies and the studies vary but if you
4 average across them somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the
5 people we train can beat the test. The research also
6 indicates that simply reading about it, going in and
7 finding the information that is available in libraries,
8 there are a couple of sort of underground publications
9 about beating the polygraph, giving people that kind of
10 information is not sufficient. They need the specific
11 handson training that we have done to model what
goes
12 on at the spot.
13 The other thing that we have found is that
14 when people take polygraph tests, they frequently try to
15 beat the test. And this has been referred to as naive
16 countermeasures. They are fairly frequent. In the one
17 study that we published it was about 60 percent. The
18 interesting thing we found and even though in some cases
19 they used the vary countermeasures that we found
20 effective in other research when people attempt this
21 spontaneously without our training, they are just simply
22 ineffective.
23 Not a single one of the spontaneous
24 countermeasures was able to defeat the probable lie
25 control question test. There is additional data on
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1 that. In Steve Horowitz' dissertation which was done at
2 the University of Utah during that period of time I was
3 there as a research associate professor, I worked very
4 closely with Dr. Horowitz on that project.
5 And one of the questions we had was is the
6 directed lie more susceptible to countermeasures than
7 the probable lie because it is in some ways perhaps more
8 transparent. And so we tested that in Dr. Horowitz'
9 dissertation and what we found was that there was no
10 difference in the rate of spontaneous countermeasure
11 attempts in probable lie controls and directed lie
12 controls both of which he had in his study and again
13 that replicated our earlier work that the
14 countermeasures were not effective against either
15 technique. So none of those people were able to beat
16 the test.
17 Q Let me move from countermeasures to directed
18 lies since we've just talked about something that tied
19 the two of them together. Do you consider the directed
20 lie to be a valid control question technique that is
21 supported by the scientific data?
22 A Yes, I do.
23 Q Have there been studies on its efficacy?
24 A Yes, there have.
25 Q There was one other matter that has come up.
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1 Are you aware of the studies on the impact on juries on
2 the use of polygraphs in court?
3 A Yes, I am.
4 Q Could you briefly describe the research on
5 that and what the results show?
6 A Well, there have been several ways that
7 people have approached that problem, and I have been
8 involved in some of that research myself and personally
9 conducted some of those studies. One approach is to set
10 up mock juries in sort of a laboratory kind of setting
11 and then present them with evidence.
12 Sometimes that is done in the form of
13 actually having a mock court. In other cases people
14 will read transcripts or watch videotapes. The results
15 are quite consistent and from those studies that people
16 are not overwhelmed by polygraph evidence. That is the
17 percentage of verdicts moves about five percent. And so
18 people are quite capable of rendering guilty verdicts,
19 for example, when a polygraph has been offered that
20 shows that the defendant was telling the truth and vice
21 versa.
22 Q Is there anything that indicates that they
23 don't use it as one piece of evidence among with the
24 other pieces of evidence?
25 A No, absolutely that is exactly what the
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1 literature indicates. The other part is just to
2 interview jurors when that has been allowed by the Court
3 after they have
4 Q In actual trials?
5 A Actual trials. And that is also consistent
6 and they are quite capable of ignoring the evidence that
7 is offered and using it as a piece rather than a some
8 sort of overwhelming thing that they can't ignore.
9 Q As you can tell I'm rushing you. Let me just
10 ask one final question to avoid my maybe asking a lot of
11 questions that need to be asked. Is there anything else
12 from what you have heard in the last day and a half that
13 you feel a burning desire to correct or to inform the
14 Court about or have we covered it?
15 A One omission that did occur to me as we have
16 talked about the literature on the directed lie, the one
17 peer reviewed published study that has been mentioned is
18 the Honts and Raskin field study. The Horowitz study
19 has also been subjected to peer review in that it was
20 submitted to the Society for Psychophysiological
21 Research for their program.
22 They have an annual meeting and things are
23 presented and those are also peer reviewed in that they
24 are sent out to other scientists and they do reject
25 papers. Not every paper that is submitted to
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1 Psychophysiology is accepted. I have had papers
2 rejected. And that abstract is published in the journal
3 so a 250 word summary that has been subjected to peer
4 review and has been published so there are actually two
5 peer reviewed publications if you want to include that
6 published abstract.
7 Q On the countermeasures have you found that
8 you can look at a chart and determine whether or not
9 countermeasures have been used?
10 A No, you cannot.
11 Q What have you found to be the best way of
12 scoring a chart even given the possibility that
13 countermeasures in the abstract can be used by highly
14 trained individuals in particular cases?
15 A Let me put in a couple of elements there.
16 Our research in countermeasures has indicated that when
17 you just look at the charts and expert polygraph
18 examiners just look at the charts and they are forced to
19 make decisions about countermeasure use, they are no
20 better than chance. And the distressing part of that is
21 that they falsely accuse a lot of innocent people. And
22 the research indicates that an awful lot of that is
23 based upon misinterpretation of respiration and
24 breathing recordings. We often find that breathing
25 recordings are quite erratic. Deep breaths are not
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1 unusual with innocent subjects.
2 What we found in terms of scoring the charts
3 is to go ahead and apply the standard numerical scores
4 or to use the computer analysis and score the charts and
5 essentially do not evaluate the possibility of
6 countermeasures. The other thing that we have found and
7 this is a very wellestablished finding now across
all
8 of the studies that I have conducted except the first
9 one where we didn't have a computer when the first one
10 was conducted is that the computer analysis is much more
11 robust.
12 That is it is not as affected by
13 countermeasures. And the computer algorithms that come
14 with the system that Dr. Raskin used cut the
15 effectiveness of countermeasures about in half. So the
16 use of the computer analysis is a very good protection
17 against the bad effects of countermeasures.
18 MR. DANIELS: That's all I have, Your Honor.
19 CROSSEXAMINATION
20 BY MS. HIGGINS:
21 Q Dr. Honts, just for the purpose of
22 clarifying, I believe you talked about the Amato survey?
23 A Yes.
24 Q And you said that when 60 percent of the
25 membership responds in this fashion that you think that
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1 is highly significant?
2 A Yes.
3 Q Isn't it true that, in fact, it was 60
4 percent not of the whole society but 60 percent of the
5 136 people or so people who did respond?
6 A Yes, that's correct.
7 MS. HIGGINS: Your Honor, I have no other
8 questions. Oh, excuse me, I do.
9 BY MS. HIGGINS:
10 Q You talked about the Horowitz study. That is
11 the other study you say has been published or at least
12 something about what Horowitz has done has been
13 published having to do with the directed lie?
14 A Yes.
15 Q That is not an exhibit in this hearing, is
16 it?
17 A The original dissertation is not. The study
18 is discussed in several things that are exhibits. It's
19 discussed in some detail in the Current Directions in
20 Psychological Science paper that I authored. And it is
21 also discussed in some of Dr. Raskin's review work.
22 Q How old is that study? Was that before or
23 after your study on the directed lie?
24 A It was after.
25 MS. HIGGINS: All right. Thank you.
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1 MR. DANIELS: No redirect, Your Honor.
2 THE COURT: You may step down. Thank you for
3 your testimony.
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