When the now notorious British nanny Louise Woodward was accused of shaking a baby to death in Newton, Massachusetts, she not only told the jury she was innocent; she turned to the polygraph to ‘prove’ it.
In the late 1990s, eight-month-old Matthew Eappen died from injuries – including a fractured skull and internal bleeding – that seemed to indicate shaken baby syndrome.
Woodward, then just 18 and Eappen’s au pair, was accused of murder. She subsequently passed the polygraph test, in which she insisted that she had not hurt the baby. However an expert witness in the case, social psychologist Leonard Saxe, a professor at Brandeis University, testified that the results were unreliable. While he could not – and still cannot – say what happened to Eappen (Woodward was later found guilty), Saxe knew one thing for certain: the polygraph test was not an indicator of the truth.
The lie detector test, as it is commonly known, is
