A former Oklahoma City law enforcement officer and the owner of Polygraph.com has been sentenced to two years in prison for training customers to lie and conceal crimes and other misconduct during polygraph examinations.
Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Assistant Commissioner Matthew Klein of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Internal Affairs and Special Agent in Charge Scott L. Cruse of the FBI’s Oklahoma City Division made the announcement.
Douglas G. Williams, 69, of Norman, Oklahoma, pleaded guilty on May 13, 2015, to two counts of mail fraud and three counts of witness tampering. Chief U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange of the Western District of Oklahoma imposed the sentence.
According to admissions made in connection with his plea, Williams owned and operated Polygraph.com, an Internet-based business through which he trained people how to conceal misconduct and other disqualifying information when submitting to polygraph examinations in connection with federal employment suitability assessments, background investigations, internal agency investigations and other proceedings. In particular, Williams admitted that he trained an individual posing as a federal law enforcement officer to lie and conceal involvement in criminal activity from an internal agency investigation. Williams also admitted to training a second individual, posing as an applicant seeking federal employment, to lie and conceal crimes in a pre-employment polygraph examination. Williams also admitted to instructing the individuals to deny receiving his polygraph training.
The investigation was conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Internal Affairs and the FBI’s Oklahoma City Division. The case was prosecuted by Trial Attorneys Heidi Boutros Gesch and Brian K. Kidd of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section.
7 comments:
If the guy had trained people in "how polygraphs work and are rendered inaccurate" and not had conversations about crimes, he would have been in the clear.
He should not be charged. People learn how to comitt crimes all the time. And they're taught as well. It's the person who takes the test who is responsible for their own actions.
The government lies to us all the time, police can lie to us to conduct a search or get a confession, but it is illegal for us to lie to them under any circumstances. What a messed up country we live in. I do believe it is coming time.
Until Akmed Uliq Mideek takes the course and becomes an federal agent/sleeper cell.
I saw an interview with him and one thing I remember (among others) is what he said about a lie detector, which was something along the lines of "a lie detector is not designed to detect lies --- no machine can do that. Its designed to intimidate you into saying something that will incriminate you. There is NO benefit in anyone taking a lie detector test".
Yeah, only the government is allowed to train people to beat the polygraph.
"Mail fraud" and "witness tampering" is what the Feds charge you with, when you do something they don't like but there's no specific law against it, or they can't pin it on you.
That's why they came up with the "racketeering" laws years ago, and "tax evasion" if they couldn't come up with anything else.
Since he presumably paid taxes on the income, and the government was all too happy to take the money, that ought to be de facto legitimacy of whatever he was doing.
If someone files a legitimate tax return, keeps records, and pays in taxes quarterly, if he puts down "marijuana wholesaler" as his occupation on the return and paperwork, the government shouldn't be able to both collect the money and prosecute him.
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