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Supreme Court: Lie detector tests too faulty to influence criminal sentencing [1]
['John Hult', 'More From Author', '- July']
Date: 2023-07
A Sioux Falls judge was right to bar the use of polygraph test results in a sentencing for a 2020 robbery and shooting death.
That was the conclusion of the South Dakota Supreme Court this week in the case of Raymond Banks. The 22-year-old is serving a 60-year prison sentence for manslaughter in the death of 30-year-old Casey Bonhorst. Banks has claimed his co-defendant was the culpable perpetrator.
Banks argued that the lack of his “lie detector” test results unfairly influenced his sentence. The court disagreed in a 5-0 decision penned by Justice Patricia Devaney.
Banks, the court ruled, had not offered any proof that his test results were reliable enough to become part of the record in his case.
“Given this Court’s clearly expressed concerns regarding the reliability of polygraph evidence, Banks has failed to show how the circuit court’s ruling would be ‘clearly against reason and evidence,’” Devaney wrote.
Banks and his co-defendant, Jahennessy Bryant, saw Bonhorst’s vehicle parked outside a Sioux Falls duplex on Feb. 26, 2020. One of the men suggested a robbery, with each later claiming it was the other’s idea.
Banks said Bryant pulled a gun and fired when Bonhorst threw change at Bryant. Banks claims he merely acted as a lookout.
Bryant claimed that Banks instigated the robbery, pulled the gun and fired. He only tried to hold Bonhorst by the arms, he said.
Bryant struck a plea deal that capped his prison time at 25 years. On the day Banks pleaded guilty, prosecutors read a factual basis statement based on Bryant’s version of events.
Before his sentencing, Banks asked Judge Robin Houwman to allow testimony from a polygraph examiner who’d purportedly concluded that Banks had the accurate story.
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Houwman rejected the request. The judge sided with prosecutors, who said polygraph results have no place in sentencing, in part because of their spotty reliability.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case in March. Banks’ attorneys argued that while polygraph results aren’t admissible at trial under the rules of evidence, they ought to be admissible at a sentencing hearing.
Hearsay evidence, which is testimony from a person without first-hand knowledge of the facts, is sometimes permissible in a sentence hearing. Also fair game are mentions of a defendant’s criminal history often barred from trials to avoid letting past misbehavior taint jurors’ view of a current criminal allegation.
The Supreme Court concluded, as it had in a previous case, that a lack of evidentiary rules at sentencing doesn’t create a “free-for-all” that forces the consideration of any shred of potentially meaningful information. Devaney mentioned that there are restrictions on hearsay evidence, for example.
“This rule requiring a base level of reliability before hearsay evidence can be considered at sentencing is generally applicable to other types of evidence as well,” she wrote.
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[1] Url:
https://southdakotasearchlight.com/briefs/supreme-court-lie-detector-tests-too-faulty-to-influence-criminal-sentencing/
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