After decades of exile from US courts, the science of lie detection is gaining new accepta

nce. But the federal government wants to put a stop to it, and the US Supreme Court has now agreed to consider a request from the Department of Justice to bar the technology from military courts.

Uncertainties surround the science of lie detection, which uses a device called polygraph. In 1991, President George Bush banned lie detector evidence in military courts. But that ban has since been overturned by the US Court of Military Appeals, which ruled that it restricts defendants' rights to present evidence of their innocence.

In the past two years, some federal courts have also ruled 'that polygraph evidence can be heard. This follows a decision by the Supreme Court in 1993 that gave federal judges more discretion to decide on the admissibility of evidence.

A polygraph consists of monitors for pulse rate, sweating and breathing rate. The device is supposed to uncover lies by recording increases in these measures as the subject answers questions.

Critics have always argued that cunning defendants can control their physiological responses and sway polygraph results. But supporters of the technique argue that recent research has found it to be reliable. A psychologist named Charles Honts at a state university in Idaho, points to laboratory studies, some of them being his own, in which student-subjects were offered cash to sway the test results.

This argument is rejected by Leonard Saxe, a psychologist at a Boston university. "There is a huge difference between students in a lab and a defendant," he says. Guilty defendants have time in which to rehearse their lies, and can even come to believe them to be true.

Saxe believes that the entire theoretical basis of lie detection is invalid. "It assumes you will be more nervous lying than telling the truth." But he says that for some people lies are trivial, while certain truths can be hard to swallow.

David Faigman of the University of California says that if the Supreme Court upholds the military appeal courts decision to allow polygraph evidence, polygraph bans would be overturned in federal courts across US. "That will put a big burden on judges to understand the science, and lead to a lot more expert testimony in the courts," he predicts. The justice department fears that this will greatly increase the cost of trials.

According to the passage, which organizations raised the proposal to stop the practice of lie detection evidence in military court？______

A．Federal Government

B．US Supreme Court

C．Department of Justice

D．Military Courts