Expert decries narcoanalysis in police interrogation

Bangalore, July 8 (UNI) Renowned forensic scientist Prof P Chandra Sekharan has said the Karnataka High Court direction to create more staff positions and infrastructure to carry out narcoanalysis tests will create an unhealthy trend in police investigation and institutionalise the unholy practice.

''Thanks to the direction of a division bench of the Karnataka High Court, the police in other states crave to have the facility for narcoanalysis in their home states and this will create an unhealthy trend in police investigation and institutionalise the unholy practice,'' he said yesterday.

He also stated that the issue will be brought to the notice of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Tracing the history of narcoanalysis, Dr Sekharan said ever since Dr Robert House, a Dallas-Texas obstetrician introduced the technique in 1922, narcoanalysis had been done in any hospital having an anaesthetist, but the interrogations was always carried out by the police when their subjects were in trance. This test had never been carried out in Forensic Science Laboratories.

After clinical and experimental studies concluded that there was no such magic brew as the popular notion of truth serum, the police in advanced countries realised that drugs were no more the answer to interrogation and almost all the nations abandoned it as a psychological third degree method, he added.

''It is unfortunate that the Department of Forensic Sciences functioning under the Union Home Ministry extends full support to this technique, eventhough forensic science or forensic scientists have no role to play in this technique,'' he noted.

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