Current Events > Cops and prosecutors invented voice analysis that can tell if you're guilty*

(+) Yeah! (+)

Tracy Harpster, a deputy police chief from suburban Dayton, Ohio, was hunting for praise. He had a business to promote: a miracle method to determine when 911 callers are actually guilty of the crimes they are reporting. I know what a guilty father, mother or boyfriend sounds like, he once said.

Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers speech patterns their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as hi or please or somebody can reveal a murderer on the phone.

So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpsters claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldnt be used to lock people up.

Prosecutors know its junk science too. But that hasnt stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions.

In 2016, Missouri prosecutor Leah Askey wrote Harpster an effusive email, bluntly detailing how she skirted legal rules to exploit his methods against unwitting defendants.

Of course this line of research is not recognized as a science in our state, Askey wrote, explaining that she had sidestepped hearings that would have been required to assess the methods legitimacy. She said she disguised 911 call analysis in court by getting creative without calling it science.

I was confident that if a jury could hear this information and this research, she added, they would be as convinced as I was of the defendant's guilt.

What Askey didnt say in her endorsement was this: She had once tried using Harpsters methods against Russ Faria, a man wrongfully convicted of killing his wife. At trial, Askey played a recording of Farias frantic 911 call for the jury and put a dispatch supervisor on the stand to testify that it sounded staged. Lawyers objected but the judge let the testimony in. Faria was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

After he successfully appealed, Askey prosecuted him again and again called the supervisor to testify about all the reasons she thought Faria was guilty based on his word choice and demeanor during the 911 call. It was Harpsters analytical class, the supervisor said, that taught her to evaluate a call to see what the outcome would be.

This judge wouldnt allow her to continue and cut the testimony short. Faria was acquitted. Hed spent three and a half years in prison for a murder he didnt commit.

None of this bothered Harpster, who needed fresh kudos to repackage as marketing material and for a chapter in an upcoming book. We dont have to say it was overturned, he told Askey when soliciting the endorsement. Hook me up. Make it sing!

Junk science in the justice system is nothing new. But unvarnished correspondence about how prosecutors wield it is hard to come by. It can be next to impossible to see how law enforcement in league with paid, self-styled experts spreads new, often unproven methods. The system is at its most opaque when prosecutors know evidence is unfit for court but choose to game the rules, hoping judges and juries will believe it and vote to convict.

People like Faria, defense lawyers and sometimes even the judges are blindsided. I dont want what happened to me to happen to anyone else, Faria told me.

Askey, who now goes by Leah Chaney and is no longer a prosecutor, did not answer questions about the case other than to say she didnt know about Harpsters work until after Farias first trial. She has denied allegations of misconduct in other media interviews.

I first stumbled on 911 call analysis while reporting on a police department in northern Louisiana. At the time, it didnt sound plausible even as a one-off gambit, let alone something pervasive that law enforcement nationwide had embraced as legitimate.

I was wrong. People who call 911 dont know it, but detectives and prosecutors are listening in, ready to assign guilt based on the words they hear. For the past decade, Harpster has traveled the country quietly sowing his methods into the justice system case by case, city by city, charging up to $3,500 for his eight-hour class, which is typically paid for with tax dollars. Hundreds in law enforcement have bought into the obscure program and I had a rare opportunity to track, in real time, how the chief architect was selling it.

Our "justice" system is bought and paid for by those in the prison industrial complex. They want as many people in prison as possible, even if all the people are innocent.

The assholes exploiting junk science to falsely convict people should be criminally liable.

And also just to solve cases and get a good record for their career. Prosecutors want to convict people to benefit their career. Sometimes they legit do know the person is innocent and they still don't care. Its like a human sacrifice. They destroy a life, just to benefit themselves and to make the public happy that a case was closed

Would someone like Ben stein fool it? I've never heard any inflection/emotion in his voice

People with anxiety would always trigger a guilty response I'm sure. -_-

People with anxiety would always trigger a guilty response I'm sure. -_-

What if youre just nervous

Based on patterns he heard in the tapes, Harpster said he was able to identify certain indicators that correlated with guilt and others with innocence. For instance, Huh? in response to a dispatchers question is an indicator of guilt in Harpsters system. So is an isolated please. He identified 20 such indicators and then counted how often they appeared in his sample of guilty calls.
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A sheriffs sergeant in Colorado also read the FBI bulletin and, weeks later, asked Adams to analyze a 911 tape from a widow suspected of killing her husband. She and Harpster wrote a report of their findings.

The widow said the word blood, for example, and thats a guilty indicator. (Bleeding, however, is not.) She said somebody at different points, which shows a lack of commitment. Witnesses to a crime scene should be able to report their observations clearly, Harpster and Adams wrote. She was inappropriately polite because she said Im sorry and thank you. She interrupted herself, which wastes valuable time and may add confusion. She tried to divert attention by saying, God, who would do this?" Harpster and Adams commented: This is a curious and unexpected question .

Remember America has the highest prison population in the world.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/5/6/AAbvRMAAECdg.jpg

this is because we dont kill criminals to the extent other nations do

This is not true, unless you believe China has executed like 300,000 prisoners

Considering it's been proven a portion of people on death row are innocent, it's good when states ban the death penalty

Cops and prosecutors invented voice analysis that can put innocent people away

You can look at the list of crimes which carry the death penalty worldwide yourself, you may learn something in the process.

The "land of the free" looking for more ways to lock people up

I can look at numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_some_dependent_territories_and_subnational_areas_by_incarceration_rate

Which countries do you think would have more prisoners than us, if not for their executions?