The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Traumatic memory recall is disinformation: forensic scientist

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Sep 14, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Traumatic memory recall is disinformation: forensic scientist

Special Correspondent

"No drug to force informant to report all the information he had" "Even under best conditions, the drug will elicit an output contaminated by deception, fantasy"

CHENNAI: "Pentothal Sodium [used in narco-analysis], hitherto considered by certain cadres of Indian police to be the panacea to solve all crimes, has now proved to be a strong weapon for mudslinging in the hands of politicians," says Chandra Sekharan, an eminent forensic scientist and a former Director of the Tamil Nadu Forensic Sciences Laboratory.

His statement comes in the wake of the multi-crore fake stamp paper scam mastermind, A.K. Telgi's claim during narco-analysis that he paid up to Rs. 2,000 crore to politicians and policemen in Karnataka and Maharashtra.

Prof. Sekharan, who was recently elected Vice-President of the Indo-Pacific Association of Law, Medicine and Science, said that he watched with amusement the tapes (relating to Telgi's claim) on television channels.

The expert said that traumatic memory recall was disinformation.

Interrogation was a method employed by trained investigators to obtain information from a person who would not willingly disclose.

"Memory recalls under the influence of drugs and the acceptance of this technique as well as the existence of electromagnetic weapons technology and all other privacy encroaching technology [brain finger printing and polygraphy] can be devastating to our justice system."

Clinical studies

Prof. Sekharan claimed that clinical and experimental studies conducted by many researchers had concluded that there was no such magic brew as the popular notion of truth serum. "Even under the best conditions, the truth drug will elicit an output contaminated by deception, fantasy, garbled speech, etc."

Studies and reports dealing with the validity of material extracted from reluctant informants indicated that there was no drug that could force an informant to report all the information he had.

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