To the polygraph examiners reading this:

Star-Ledger, The (Newark, NJ)

March 3, 1996

Edition: UNION

Section: UNION

Page: 27



Police polygrapher will retire from a life of uncovering lies

Author: ROBERT E. MISSECK



Article Text:



If Sgt. Peter J. Brannon, a polygraph expert for the Union County Prosecutor's Office, told you his life hasn't been interesting, it would be a lie.



Brannon is a former Roman Catholic priest turned cop, and 25 years after deciding to make the change from ``collar to cuffs,'` he says it's time to turn in his badge.



He retires May1 and will start yet another career working with an ambulance service in his hometown of Green Brook.



The 53-year-old looks back fondly at his brief term as a priest in Jersey City, where he developed an interest in police work while serving as the unofficial chaplain for the Sixth Precinct, as well as his 25 years in law enforcement.



"In both jobs I got to see the worst in people, and good people in the worst of times,'` said Brannon, who obtained his expertise with the polygraph during a four-year stint with the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office prior to coming to Union County.Brannon said the lie detector is an electronic instrument that graphically records some of the physiological reactions that are commonly associated with lying.



He said the device records ``a person's fear of detection of deception. In other words, it can detect when somebody doesn't want to be found out that they are lying.'`



Brannon, who has administered 2,500 polygraph examinations during his career, said ``Whether a subject is male or female is not a factor in how someone will react to a polygraph. The same goes for somebody's race, religion or age.'`



"After administering polygraphs for the last 15 years, you learn some very interesting things about people,'` said Brannon. ``Such as, probably 70 percent of the people tested are being truthful.'`



Why would somebody who is guilty submit themselves to a polygraph test? ``The main reason is that they think they can beat it,'` Brannon said. ``And sometimes they can, if the tester is inexperienced. I would rather make a mistake that way than inculpate an innocent person,'` he said.



Among the more notorious of Brannon's polygraph test ``flunkees'` was Byron Halsey, a Plainfield man convicted of sexually abusing and killing his girlfriend's young daughter and son in 1985. Halsey also hammered five nails into the boy's head while he was still alive.



Halsey was a 24-year old laborer at a plastics plant in Somerset County when he killed 7-year-old Tina Urquhart and her 8-year-old brother, Tyrone. The children's bodies were found in the basement of a rooming house on East Seventh Street where he lived with the victims and their mother, Margaret.



Halsey initially denied committing the killings, but later confessed after flunking the lie detector test. He is currently serving 60 years to life in prison.



In 1988, Ronald Parton flunked Brannon's exam and wound up being convicted of arson for a fire that destroyed a boarding house in Westfield. There are also a number of accused rapists, child molesters and other suspects who could not fool Brannon and his polygraph.



Among those exculpated by Brannon's polygraph was Frederick Douglas, a Newark man who was freed in the midst of his trial for the 1990 drug-related murder of a man in Elizabeth after the polygraph proved him to be truthful when he said he didn't commit the crime.



Most recently, Brannon gave polygraph examinations to two inmates accused of raping a female prisoner at the Union County Jail in Elizabeth.



The 32-year-old Elizabeth woman, who was briefly housed in the jail after being arrested for failing to appear in court on outstanding motor vehicle tickets, accused Monte Johnson, 25, of restraining her while 34-year-old Mark Cannon raped her in a bathroom in the jail's booking and releasing area.



Both inmates denied the rape allegations and agreed to submit to a polygraph examination. They passed and charges against both men were dropped by the prosecutor's office.



In New Jersey, a polygraph examination can only be administered if the subject ``knowingly and willingly agrees to the admissibility of the results in court,'` according to acting Union County Prosecutor Edward M. Neafsey.



He said Brannon ``is one of the most expe- rienced and professional polygraph examiners around. He is so widely respected in his field that his peers elected him Northeast Regional Director of the American Association of Police Polygraphists and also as its president.'`



Neafsey said, ``It is crucial that a polygraph examiner have the expertise and talent that Pete has because the polygraph, when used widely, is a valuable law enforcement tool in helping to establish a suspect's innocence as well as guilt.'`



"One of the things I feel the best about is that a number of innocent people were cleared because they passed my polygraph examination, said Brannon, whose family includes his wife of 25 years, Connie, and their three children, Marybeth, 23, James, 22, and Thomas, 21.



Born in Plainfield, Brannon and his family moved to Marietta, Ohio, when he was 10 because his father, an executive with Union Carbide, was transferred. They moved back to Union County five years later, settling in Scotch Plains.



He graduated Holy Trinity High School in Westfield in 1960, then went to Seton Hall University's Divinity School to study for the priesthood. ``At the time, I thought I was ready to commit my life to the church,'` Brannon said.



After two years, he left Seton Hall and continued his studies at the Immaculate Conception Seminary in Mahwah. He was ordained on May 25, 1968.



He was assigned to St. Nicholas Church in Jersey City, but decided to leave the priesthood in 1970. ``I discovered the priestly life was just not something I felt I was called to do,'` he said.



Learning from friends on the Jersey City police force that the department in Green Brook was looking for additional patrolmen, Brannon took the test and was hired in March 1971.



During his more than eight years with the Green Brook police, Brannon worked patrol and was involved in several prominent investigations, including the slaying of a housewife who was shot by her husband as she was coming home from Christmas Eve Mass in 1976. Brannon took the husband into custody as the man was coming out of his house, gun in hand.



He left Green Brook police in 1979 and joined the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office, where his friend and mentor, the late Capt. Jim Hoffman, got him interested in the polygraph and in child abuse investigations.



"I got into the polygraph because the instrument and its applications fascinated me. I wanted to do child abuse cases because I thought I could help these kids preserve some small part of their world and punish the abusers who had hurt them,'` Brannon said.



He attended the New York School of Lie Detection in 1982 and after seven weeks of training became a polygraph examiner for the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office, where he also served as commander of the Child Abuse Unit.



Brannon left after four years and joined the Union County Prosecutor's Office as the polygraph expert and as a member of the Child Abuse Unit. In 1993, he was transferred to the Domestic Violence Unit.

The polygraph examiner who in 1985 falsely accused Byron Anthony Halsey of deception regarding the rape and murder of his girlfriend's two young children isof Green Brook, New Jersey. Confronted with the polygraph results, Halsey ultimately made a false confession. This year, after 22 years behind bars for crimes he did not commit, Halsey was exonerated by DNA evidence.According to Brannon's website , he is a past president and life member of the American Association of Police Polygraphists no one becomes a polygraph examiner hoping to falsely accuse the innocent. Peter Brannon, a one-time Catholic priest, must be devastated by what he did. But you need to know that no amount of training, no amount of experience, can make up for polygraphy's lack of scientific underpinnings . Understand that you are practicing a voodoo science. It's time you stopped pretending otherwise.For previous discussion of the Halsey case, see DNA proves Byron Halsey's Innocence, falsely accused by a polygraph