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LYING ON THE WITNESS STAND: PERJURY AND EXONERATION

After publishing some of our deception studies, I received one of the most interesting graduate school applications I’ve ever seen. The applicant, Denise Huddle, had run her own successful private investigation firm for the previous twenty-one years. She was ready to retire and felt she needed to go to graduate school to get the knowledge to build a foolproof lie-detection system based on language analysis. Everything in her application pointed to the fact that she was brilliantly smart and fiercely tenacious. We soon met and agreed that graduate school was not the way to go. Instead, I would work with her in developing a more real-world-tested language lie detector.

Denise’s idea was to find a real-world analog of the mock-crime study Matt Newman and I had conducted. Having spent thousands of hours in courthouses, Denise had watched hundreds of people testify in trials—many of whom were lying. Over several weeks, she and I hatched an imaginative study. We (meaning Denise) would track down the court transcripts of a large number of people who had been convicted of a major crime and who had clearly lied on the witness stand. In certain cases in the United States justice system, defendants who have been convicted of a major crime can also be subsequently convicted of perjury. The perjury conviction is usually the result of overwhelming evidence that the defendant lied on the stand. (Note to future criminals: If you are on trial for a crime you have committed and there is very strong evidence against you, do not lie. Just say, “I refuse to answer that question.” You’ll thank me for this advice.)

We also needed a separate group of people who clearly did not lie on the witness stand but who were found guilty anyway. Fortunately, Denise was able to track down eleven people who were convicted of a crime but were later exonerated because of DNA or other overwhelming evidence. This was an important comparison group because the exonerated sample was made up of people who were clearly poor truth-tellers.

This certainly sounded like a simple project from my perspective. Just get the public records, run them through the computer, and bam! Fame and glory was right around the bend. As often happens, it wasn’t as simple as I had imagined.

Denise spent almost a year tracking down the eleven exonerated cases as well as the thirty-five people convicted of felonies. To qualify for the study, people had to have testified on the witness stand and the full records had to be intact. Denise had a small trailer that she would drive to federal court archive facilities. Every day, she would use the court’s copy machines to make copies of the courtroom records—which were sometimes hundreds of pages in length. At night, she would return to her trailer and then scan the copies into her computer. She would usually spend two weeks at a time in the trailer before taking a few days off. On returning to her home, she spent additional time poring over the court transcripts, pulling out sections that were pivotal to the juries’ decisions and those sections that were uncontested.

Denise’s work eventually paid off. Although the number of cases was somewhat small, the effects were meaningful. Most striking were the differences in pronoun use. As with most of the other studies, the exonerated defendants used first-person singular pronouns at much higher rates than those found guilty of a felony and perjury. I-words (primarily just the single word I) signaled innocence. Interestingly, the truly guilty defendants used third-person pronouns at elevated rates. They were trying to shift the blame away from themselves onto others. Also, as with many of the earlier projects, the truth-tellers used bigger words, described events in greater detail, and evidenced more complex thinking.

The pattern and strength of the effects were remarkable. I was thrilled but Denise was disappointed. The computer correctly classified 76 percent of the