If it can be proven that she lied? Yes. Fact is, she passed the polygraph.
The problem is, the U.S. Supreme Court has had something to say about the validity of polygraphs in the past. As Law&Crime’s
Aaron Keller noted before
in a different context, so-called “lie detector test results are largely considered inadmissible in court because the tests are not reliable. People can cheat them and, sometimes, the tests pick up false readings.”
Keller pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court case,
U.S. v. Scheffer (1998):
[T]here is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable. To this day, the scientific community remains extremely polarized about the reliability of polygraph techniques.
National security lawyer Mark Zaid said that whether Ford passed or failed the test is irrelevant because it “signifies nothing.”
This Is the Most Meaningless Proof of Christine Ford’s Truthfulness Out There Right Now
Thomas Mauriello, a former senior polygraph examiner who worked at the Defense Department for 30 years, said in an interview Monday that polygraph tests merely detect when a subject is experiencing a physiological reaction — like perspiration or an increased heart rate — to one or more questions.
The tests don’t, he said, determine whether a person is lying or attempting to deceive. Instead, the results have to be interpreted by the person administering the test.
“The polygraph is not a lie detector,” said Mauriello, who now works as a part-time professor at the
University of Maryland’s criminology and
criminal justice department. “Let’s make that clear. There is no such thing as a lie detector. It’s simply an investigative tool that will record physiological reactions when you’re asked a question and give a response.”
He said if a person being tested doesn’t have a physical response to a question, that’s not necessarily a guarantee that he or she is being truthful or honest. Mauriello said there are even medications called beta blockers that a person can take to prohibit such bodily reactions.
Experts doubt claim of ‘truthful’ polygraph result from Kavanaugh accuser