MANHATTAN (CN) — After a critical hearing in New York, a spotlight is taking shape on the utility of “therapeutic polygraphs,” a treatment the U.S. probation system has used for decades on sex offenders.
The challenge erupted from a call by Assistant U.S. Attorney Drew Rolle for the court to make sex offender Richard Llanga Moran take a polygraph as a condition of his supervised release.
After serving an 18-month sentence for possessing more than 6,000 photographs and videos of child pornography, Llanga Moran had faced regular therapy sessions as a condition of his five-year term of supervised release.
The therapist he meets with regularly has found Llanga Moran “forthcoming and engaged in sessions,” but prosecutors want a so-called lie-detector test to determine whether Llanga Moran has accepted responsibility for his crime.
Llanga Moran drew the government’s skepticism with his insistence that there is an innocent explanation for the start to his habit. He said he had been trying to download Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” on a file-sharing service, when he stumbled upon the pornography that he found “morbidly intriguing” rather than sexually arousing.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Drew Rolle wants a court-ordered polygraph, but U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto appeared reluctant to grant such relief on June 13 after putting a psychiatrist, a probation officer and several attorneys in the hot seat at a three-hour hearing.
“One Piece of the Clinical Puzzle”
Taking the stand first was psychiatrist Naftali Garcia Berrill, the executive director of the New York Center for Neuropsychology and Forensic Behavioral Science. Operating under the trade name New York Forensic, the firm has contracted for 22 years with the federal probation department.
Berrill estimated that he receives about half of its patients from the government, and that he recommends polygraph testing “almost 100 percent” of the time for convicted sex offenders referred as patients.
“If it’s not a sexual compulsion, we’re not talking polygraph at all,” Berrill said, clarifying that he does not use test for drug addicts or compulsive robbers.
Without a polygraph, Berrill said: “The therapists think, ‘Everything’s fine,’ when maybe that’s not the case.”
Calling the technology “one piece of the clinical puzzle,” Berrill burnished the treatment’s credentials through a treatment manual published by ATSA, short for the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers.
Berrill himself boasts impressive credentials, with 30 years of practice under his belt, a doctorate from Vanderbilt University, a professorship at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, and several stints as an expert witness.