To Veil or Not to Veil: Detecting Lies in The Courtroom. A Comment on Leach et al. (2016)

Abstract

For the past 40 years, lie detection has predominantly been studied in the context of police-suspect and investigative interviews. In their paper, Leach et al. (2016) examined whether niqabs or hijabs interfere with the trial judges’ ability to detect deception and concluded that veiling enhanced trial judges’ ability to make accurate veracity judgments. In this comment, we argue that the conclusions made by Leach et al. are based upon an inaccurate experimental court paradigm and suffer from methodological and analytical issues. It is our opinion that the applicability of their research findings to real-life court proceedings alongside potential changes to court practices and policies based on Leach et al. should be regarded as naïve and misinformed.

Key words:

• courtroom
• credibility assessment
• cross-examination
• deception detection
• lie detection
• niqab
• trial

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Hugues Delmas, Ian Fraser, Barry Morrison, Jim Stiff, and Éric Raymond for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.