Re: Van de Velde passed lie detector test, police unmoved
Van de Velde passed lie detector test, police unmoved
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BY MICHAEL KOLBER
YDN Staff Reporter
Published 2/16/00
Former political science lecturer James Van de Velde passed a lie detector test confirming his claim of innocence in the December 1998 murder of Suzanne Jovin '99, the New Haven Register reported Tuesday citing an unnamed source. Van de Velde, who has not been charged, is the only suspect police have named in the crime.
An expert obtained by Van de Velde's lawyer, not police, administered the test within the past six months, the Register reported.
Van de Velde's lawyer, David Grudberg, would not comment Tuesday on whether his client had taken such a test.
New Haven Police Chief Melvin H. Wearing told the Register he still wants Van de Velde to be interviewed by local detectives. Wearing first urged Van de Velde to sit for a polygraph last December.
Van de Velde offered to sit for a polygraph in the days immediately following the murder but withdrew his offer as it became clear the police investigation was narrowly focusing on him. Van de Velde no longer trusts the New Haven Police Department to conduct a fair investigation, his lawyer said.
The former Yale lecturer has repeatedly urged the department to release the case to any number of authorities -- from military investigators to the chief state's attorney's cold case squad.
But Jovin's parents are increasingly confident the New Haven police will be able to make an arrest, they wrote in an e-mail message to the Yale Daily News in January.
The Jovins would not discuss the significance of the report that Van de Velde passed a polygraph on Tuesday.
"The Jovin family has no intentions of engaging in a public exchange with individuals involved in any way with the investigation of our daughter's death," Suzanne Jovin's father Thomas Jovin wrote in an e-mail from Germany.
Earlier this month the Jovins urged Van de Velde to sit for a polygraph, but they said they are not satisfied with the conditions under which he reportedly took the test.
"The questioning and the polygraph test would make sense only if conducted together and in cooperation with the New Haven police," Thomas Jovin wrote.
Whether Van de Velde passes a polygraph may be irrelevant. Even polygraphs administered in police investigations are inadmissible in court. David T. Lykken, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota who has written about lie detectors, said Tuesday the test cannot be trusted.
"Any sophisticated criminal can find out how to beat a polygraph," Lykken said. "The polygraph is voodoo science."
In a U.S. Department of Defense study that Lykken described as "quasi-valid," 17 percent of "guilty" subjects passed a polygraph.
Media reports linked Van de Velde to the case shortly after Jovin's Dec. 4, 1998 murder.
Jovin was found bleeding to death from multiple stab wounds in the East Rock section of the city, about a mile from campus. Area residents told police they heard what sounded like a man and a woman shouting shortly before Jovin was found.
Van de Velde was Jovin's senior essay adviser. The University did not renew Van de Velde's one-year teaching contract last spring.
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