Police allegedly used polygraphs to elicit false confessions.
After Chicago police repeatedly questioned Donny McGee about the murder of his elderly neighbor, a detective on the case asked him to "face the truth" and take a polygraph.
McGee was taken to the polygraph room but was never given the test.
Instead, polygraph examiner Robert Bartik later testified, McGee stood up as Bartik opened the door and began confessing — even before the examiner could say a word.
McGee denied he confessed. When the case went to trial, a jury found him not guilty in 90 minutes. DNA evidence would later exclude him.
At the heart of McGee's case and others is whether Chicago police used their polygraph unit as a tool to obtain false confessions. At least five defendants — four of whom were charged with murder — have been cleared since 2002. In a sixth case, a federal appeals court threw out a murder conviction, leading to the release last month of a Chicago mother prosecuted in the death of her 4-year-old son.
A Tribune investigation found that Chicago police have long ignored voluntary standards for conducting polygraph exams, even as those methods and the examiners themselves have factored into cases costing the city millions of dollars in damages.
Court records, department documents and interviews show that Chicago police polygraph examiners have not followed key standards as published by national industry groups when administering the exams, which have long been controversial. The Chicago examiners' results don't have to be reviewed by a second examiner or supervisor. The unit has no continuing education requirements in place. And it records only a fraction of its polygraphs.
For decades, the department did not use numerical scoring for the tests, even though such scoring is strongly recommended by major industry groups. Police said in 2012 that they had recently moved to numerical scoring.
Also, one of the unit's three examiners said in a sworn deposition that he has not always taken notes in interviews before the tests, though state law requires it.
Mark Handler, the American Association of Police Polygraphists' research and information chairman, has not studied Chicago's polygraph unit but expressed concern that any department would disregard standards.
"By not following the standards, you place yourself at risk for errors, which can lead to an increased risk for a false confession," he said. "It's a very precipitous slope and a dangerous game to play because the ultimate harm is convicting an innocent person of a crime they didn't commit."
Chicago police officials said they follow state law and use validated techniques for doing polygraphs, though they would not say what techniques they use.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-met-polygraph-confessions-20130310,0,281872.story