India India's
Central Bureau of Investigation has used intravenous barbiturates for interrogation, often in high-profile cases. Kasab was a
Pakistani militant and a member of the
Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group. On May 3, 2010, Kasab was found guilty of 80 offenses, including murder, waging war against India, possessing explosives, and other charges. On May 6, 2010, the same trial court sentenced him to death on four counts and to a life sentence on five counts. The Central Bureau of Investigation also conducted this test on Krishna, a key witness and suspect in the high-profile
2008 Aarushi-Hemraj Murder Case to seek more information from Krishna and also determine his credibility as a witness with key information, yet not known to the investigating authorities. Per unverified various media sources, Krishna had purported to have deemed Hemraj (the prime suspect) as not guilty of Aarushi's murder, claiming he [Hemraj] "treated Aarushi like his own daughter". On May 5, 2010 the Supreme Court Judge Balasubramaniam in the case "Smt. Selvi vs. State of Karnataka" held that narcoanalysis,
polygraph, and
brain-mapping tests were to be allowed with the consent of the accused. The judge stated: "We are of the considered opinion that no individual can be forced and subjected to such techniques involuntarily, and by doing so it amounts to unwarranted intrusion of personal liberty." In
Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh High Court permitted narcoanalysis in the investigation of a killing of a tiger that occurred in May 2010. The Jhurjhura Tigress at
Bandhavgarh National Park, a mother of three cubs, was found dead as a result of being hit by a vehicle. A Special Task Force requested the narcoanalysis testing of four persons, one of whom refused to consent on grounds of potential post-test complications.
USSR In 2004,
Novaya Gazeta, with reference to
KGB General
Oleg Kalugin, published an article that said that since the end of the 1980s the
First and Second Directorates of the KGB had used, in exceptional cases and mostly on foreign citizens, a soluble odorless, colorless, and tasteless substance code-named SP-117, an improved successor to similar drugs used by the KGB prior, that was effective in making a subject lose control of oneself 15 minutes after intake. Most importantly, a person who would be given, consecutively, two parts of the drug, i.e. both the "dote" and "antidote", would have no recollection of what had occurred in between and feel afterward as though he had suddenly fallen asleep, the preferable way to administer the "dote" being in an alcoholic drink, as that would serve as a plausible explanation of the sudden onset of drowsiness.
Russian Federation According to the Russian
Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) officer, Alexander Kouzminov, who quit the service in the early 1990s, the officers of SVR′s Directorate S, which runs SVR's "
illegals", primarily used the drug to verify fidelity and trustworthiness of their agents who operated overseas, such as
Vitaly Yurchenko. According to
Alexander Litvinenko,
Russian presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin was drugged with the same substance by FSB agents during his kidnapping in 2004.
United States Scopolamine was promoted by obstetrician Robert Ernest House as an advance that would prevent false convictions, beginning in 1922. He had noted that women in childbirth who were given scopolamine could answer questions accurately even while in a state of
twilight sleep, and were oftentimes "exceedingly candid" in their remarks. House proposed that scopolamine could be used when interrogating suspected criminals. He even arranged to administer scopolamine to prisoners in the
Dallas County jail. Both men were believed to be guilty, both denied guilt under scopolamine, and both were eventually acquitted. and
Project MKDELTA, which involved illegal use of truth-drugs including LSD. A CIA-report from 1961, released in 1993, concludes: In 1963, the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in
Townsend v. Sain, that confessions produced as a result of ingestion of truth serum were "unconstitutionally coerced" and therefore inadmissible. The viability of forensic evidence produced from truth-sera has been addressed in lower courts - judges and expert witnesses have generally agreed that they are not reliable for lie detection. In 1967, during his investigation into the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
New Orleans District Attorney
Jim Garrison arranged for his key witness,
Perry Russo, to be administered sodium pentothal before being questioned about his knowledge regarding an alleged
conspiracy. Russo would later describe "his conditioning by the DA's office as a complete brainwashing job". In 1995, during the search for evidence that could acquit
Andres English-Howard, his defense attorney employed
methohexital. More recently, a judge approved the use of narcoanalysis in the
2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting trial to evaluate whether
James Eagan Holmes's state of mind was valid for an
insanity plea. Judge William Sylvester ruled that prosecutors would be allowed to interrogate Holmes "under the influence of a medical drug designed to loosen him up and get him to talk", such as sodium amytal, if he filed an insanity plea. It is not known whether such an examination was carried out.
Psychology Today Scott Linfield noted, as per Piper, that "there's good reason to believe that truth-serums merely lower the threshold for reporting virtually all information, both true and false". == See also ==