Who said split the baby

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Philip Krause. Click here to cancel reply. One woman withdrew her claim and asked that the child be given to the opposing party; the second woman sought to enforce the judgement. Originally published in Legal by the Bay on September 4, Do you have a specific case you want to discuss with one of our attorney? Or do you have questions about our practice? Who was telling the truth?

Solomon hears exactly the same story from the women, which makes traditional interrogation useless—it is a matter of finding out who is telling the truth. Naturally this would kill the child instantly. However, Solomon looks at the reactions of the women to the story. One of them likes the solution; she has no attachment to the child and, having lost her own baby, finds jealous comfort in knowing the other woman will, too. Liberia, if you're not familiar, is a political-economic basket case.

Its government is corrupt, its public judicial institutions are dysfunctional, its people are impoverished, and a large portion of them have strong superstitions supporting the effective use of judicial ordeals. Enter sassywood. In fact, sassywood is a catchall term for a variety of medieval-style ordeals currently in use there, including hot water and hot iron ordeals. The sassywood ordeal, however, is trial by poison ingestion. It takes its name from the concoction that criminal defendants in Liberia are asked to drink, made from the toxic bark of the Erythrophleum suaveolens tree.

Like medieval ordeals, sassywood is reserved for important crimes in difficult cases, where ordinary evidence is lacking. Accused criminals can respond to the charges against them by confessing their guilt or proclaiming their innocence. In the latter case, they're invited to undergo sassywood.

A spiritual leader mixes the brew, administers it, and acts as the trial's judge. The defendant's physiological reaction to imbibing the potion decides his guilt or innocence: "If the drinker by vomiting throws up all the [poison] before the sunrise the following morning or much more if he does it during the very trial then he is innocent and publicly declared not guilty of the crime for which he was accused. But if he should die on the spot," or display signs of intoxication, "then he is believed and proclaimed Guilty.

According to a widely held Liberian superstition, sassywood's power to correctly identify the drinker's criminal status resides in a spirit that "accompanies the draught, and searches the heart of the suspected individual for his guilt. If he be innocent, the spirit returns with the fluid in the act of ejection, but if guilty, it remains to do more surely the work of destruction. Given the paucity of conventional evidence-gathering technologies, such as reliable police and government courts, there's little for residents to go on when criminal accusations are made.

But given their superstitions, these communities can tap into defendants' private information about their guilt or innocence through ordeals. So that's exactly what they do. Such practices aren't limited to Africa. America's legal system leverages superstition to improve its judicial outcomes, too. Our "ordeals" just have a fancier name: polygraph tests. Better known as lie-detector tests, more than a dozen states permit polygraph results under certain circumstances as evidence in judicial proceedings.

Like astrology, they have their supporters, but the scientific community overwhelmingly rejects their validity. There's about as much science supporting the idea that you can physiologically measure whether someone is lying or telling the truth by strapping them to one of those funny-looking machines as there is supporting the idea that God intervenes in trials of fire and water to reveal defendants' guilt or innocence.

Although lie-detector tests don't really discover whether people are lying or telling the truth, if people believe they do, they can facilitate sorting in the same way as ordeals. The innocent believer has nothing to fear by taking a polygraph. He expects it to exonerate him, and therefore has an incentive to take the exam. The guilty believer fears being outed by the results. He expects to be condemned, giving him an incentive to refuse.

Polygraph administrators probably realize this, and they interpret the sophisticated-looking squiggly lines on the polygraph paper accordingly. This works only if people hold the appropriate belief—that lie detectors are really capable of discovering whether they're lying or telling the truth.

But lots of modern Americans who pride themselves on their scientific approach to life nevertheless heed this superstition. So law enforcement officials keep on truckin'. Superstitious elements in modern America's legal system don't stop at the polygraph test. You can also find them in at least one other notable place: the courtroom. Ever notice that movies depict people swearing an oath to tell the truth in God's name, even on the Bible, before testifying in court?

That's not movie magic: Until relatively recently, God swearing was, and in some cases still is, customary in the United States. The country's religious history may be part of the reason for this.

But a more important part may be the very same logic discussed above. When testifying is voluntary, and testifiers have to swear before God to speak the truth, who do you think is more likely to provide testimony: truth tellers or bullshit artists? If people believe that swearing before God has real meaning—that God might punish them if they lie—the answer will be the former. In fact, God swearing may produce more reliable testimony even when testifying is mandatory.

If you have to swear to tell the truth in God's name before you testify, and you believe that God dislikes lying, you're going to think twice before committing perjury. God swearing helps the legal system weed out horse hockey. This isn't to say most Americans think God will smite them if they lie after swearing to tell the truth in His name.

But a few probably do. Given that the practice costs next to nothing to use, it's not hard to see why it would have some role in the courtroom. Superstition, it turns out, can provide a useful foundation for securing criminal justice. And even clever people, it turns out, can believe in superstition.

Societies of superstitious but nevertheless clever people, past and present, have developed institutions that leverage their beliefs to incentivize fact finding. Beneath the strikingly senseless surface of medieval judicial ordeals, Liberian sassywood trials, and even American polygraph tests and courtroom God swearing, there's actually a lot of sense. This article was adapted from WTF?! This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Split the Baby. Drink the Poison.

Carry the Hot Iron. Swear on the Bible". Veronique de Rugy Jacob Sullum Damon Root Scott Shackford Bruce Yandle Search for:.