Thank you for posting this. It reminded me to actually look into this. I heard about it AGES ago, in the mid-1990s and was intrigued, MaM2 re-ignited the interest, and you re-re-ignited my interest.
Your article has this juicy quote
Oh well if anyone is qualified to determine the merit of this technology, it would be world renown neurologist Ken Kratz.
And now the offer to Kratz makes more sense to me.
In MaM2 Zellner pretty explicitly stated the value of the test to her was more in Steven's willingness to take it.
I found an interesting article on Brain Fingerprinting. Here are bits I think are worth posting here. I have written summary at the end for the reasonable people,
look for the red text to find the summary. One should note the article I use is from 2005 and more research into brain-based deception detection methods has occurred. The article is very broad and pretty good though.
As for Brain Fingerprinting itself, it has its basis in what is known as the "P300" response. Essentially, after encountering a familiar/meaningful stimulus, your brain reacts approximately 300 milliseconds later. This phenomenon was discovered in the 1960s and has been studied extensively.
The way Brain Fingerprinting works is you are shown a word that maybe has something to do with a crime or maybe it doesn't and you have to answer yes or no. Familiar/meaningful ones result in that P300 response on an EEG. If you answer no and the p300 is present, that is indicative of a deceptive answer.
The bones of contention with Brain Fingerprinting itself is that the P300 response gets used as a lie detector, when what it truly tests is familiarity/meaningfulness and there are complications. Other than that, Lawrence Farwell (the guy who did the Steven Avery Brain Fingerprinting Test) uses a lot of "Florid advertising copy" when talking about his research and his product. Never forget that Brain Fingerprinting is, in fact, a product.
Source:
Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice
This article is sort of a meta-analysis of Brain Fingerprinting. It is a study of the research done on the field. It is, overall pretty critical of Brain Fingerprinting as a lie detector as Farwell does it. It goes into the history of trying to use the P300 response as a lie detector, the author of the article has a history of trying this himself. Here is an interesting quote
The author lists some limitations that can muddy the water of Brain Fingerprinting's usefulness, such as sobriety of the suspect and the fragility of memory. A guilty person may not have guilty memories. He also, much later, points out countermeasures CAN be taken to throw off the results. Another thing is that the brain could be paying attention to something else, if the suspect is presented with the word "necklace" and the suspect didn't notice a necklace, that could give off inaccurate results.
The author of my source says that his own research tended to accurately find guilty parties based off of P300 responses 80-95% of the time. Another group of researchers had a 90% detection rate. Yet another group found 27-47% detection rates. A study by a Japanese police department tested it and got 48% success. So depending on who does it,the specific methodology, and who it is tested on you can get pretty variable results.
That is kind of normal, I guess you could say. The problem is there was/is nothing all that standardized, there was/is no solidified gold standard method. With no gold standard, things will be all over the map; researchers are mostly not being taught how to do it in college and are working it out for themselves to some extent. Stuff like that happens in emerging fields of study.
Brain Fingerprinting was used in an Iowa court. The guy was already in prison and tried using BF to get out. His case ultimately made it to the Iowa Supreme court which granted him the right to a new trial. The SC determined there was plenty of reason to grant him a new trial without the BF, so they kinda just shrugged at it, choosing not to really say one way or another whether it is a useful tool. That is normal for courts, they hedge their bets and if they don't need to set precedent, they often avoid doing so.
From a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office titled “Federal Agency Views on the Potential Application of ‘Brain Fingerprinting’”
Source:
Investigative Techniques: Federal Agency Views on the Potential Application of 'Brain Fingerprinting'
Of course, in the context of the time period, "enhanced interrogation techniques" were widely used and accepted, so lack of interest may be as much "we already have a system we like" as much as it was "it isn't worth our time trying this."
From the meta-analysis :
All that said, there are other researchers working on similar techniques, here is an article doing more or less the same general thing as Brain Fingerprinting, and is more modern and done by less....excitable researchers.
You probably don't have much need to read this article, it's very dense with jargon and math.
It is mostly here to demonstrate this is still an active field of research and there are competitors to Farwell and Brain Fingerprinting; if Farwell is shaky ground to stand on, there are other, superior options.
These researchers manage to surpass a 95% confidence interval in their methods. 95% is the standard for psychology research. A confidence interval sort of tells you the odds your result is good. Even Farwell, with his weirdness sometimes doesn't do this well sometimes.
P300 amplitudes in the concealed information test are less affected by depth of processing than electrodermal responses
----- TL;DR/SUMMARY----
-At this point in time, I would describe it as "unproven but not wild nonsense." I'm not finding anything that explicitly determined this can't work, more that Lawrence Farwell (the creator and the guy who tested Steven) overstates the accuracy and reliability of his procedure as vigorously and as often as he can; he claims 100% success, the author of the study I cited said -Farwell's results are more like 87-90%, and he only tested pretty small numbers of people.
-Farwell is a weird dude, research-wise and there are people doing similar but higher quality research. Farwell may be the only one you can hire to do these tests on a person in prison?
-The author of my source repeatedly points out problems with how Farwell works, but gets results similar to Farwell. Farwell raises red flags but if other people are getting similar or even better results, so I don't know what to really think about that.
-This brain-fingerprinting thing is probably the shakiest thing Zellner has done, but then again, she would have known that going in and said she primarily wanted to see if Steven would even willingly go along with it.
-I see nothing precluding this from being/becoming useful in the future in at least some instances.
My primary source again:
Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice
I will post the latest filing from the State in this thread: Motion to Stay Appeal and Remand Jan 24/19
