<<IN THEIR [referring to police] INVESTIGATING, ITS NECESSARY, PRETTY MUCH MANDATORY, TO TRY AND DETEMINE WHAT THE TRUTH IS. >>
But that is exactly what you just don't seem to understand. It is not necessary for them to find out what the truth is. All they have to do is build a case that a prosecutor will take to court, i.e., that both they and the prosecutor feel confident has a good chance of being proven in court. It is the Court that determines the truth of the accusations.
<< It's kind of important when they go to arrest someome.>>
You have a really skewed understanding of police work. They don't arrest some guy because they've found out the truth and have to inflict punishment on him for his crime. Arrest before trial is basically for the purpose of ensuring that he will appear at his trial, where his guilt or innocence will be determined. That's why in a bail hearing, the court doesn't even want to hear the details of the case against him, they only want to know the seriousness of the crime alleged (if it's capital murder, obviously, the guy is a huge flight risk because his life's at stake) and they want to feel safe (through posting of money bail, usually) that the guy will show up for trial.
<<I realize the need to try and find some form of (ir)rationalization to limit the damage these facts are causing your side of the argument, but good gravy, this is pathetic. You make the Police to look like a bunch of mind numb robots, sweeping up anything and everything, then just hand it over to the DA and say "here...you figure it out". It's a wonder not a majority of your country is under investigation, if not incarcerated >>
That's not at all what I said. The police aren't robots and they don't hand over a mass of random facts and tell the DA to figure it all out. If I could, just for a moment, get back to the real world, which you obviously have no connection with, it looks something like this:
First of all, the police do not investigate every crime, not even every murder. A guy can be poisoned, die a "natural death" and go to his grave with no one the wiser (except the perp) as to what really happened. Studies of policing have indicated cases where victims were murdered by ice-pick or small-caliber bullet fired into the brain through the back of the neck and no murder detected if external bleeding had been minimal or cleaned up.
Assuming signs of foul play are detected, police will investigate and try to build a theory of the case - - what happened. They will develop lists of suspects and try to eliminate the least likely, but the lists are preserved regardless of who is eliminated. They try to narrow it down to a single suspect or small group of suspects, and then try to build a case against each suspect. When they have finished building their cases, they bring them to the DA, who examines each case to determine if it's worth pursuing. The issue for the DA is, is there a reasonable prospect of winning this case, or is it more likely to get thrown out of court? The police don't simply throw a bunch of unorganized facts at the DA and say "Here, you figure it all out." That is just patently absurd.
Incidentally, if anyone wants a rough idea of how the DA's office determines if a case is good enough to take to court, I strongly recommend the TV show, Law and Order. It's a very well-thought-out show which is particularly good at showing the working relationship between police and prosecutors. The DA, "Aaron" is modeled on a real-life DA, Robert Morgenthau, and while the discussions between he and his staff, particularly "Jack" and his babealicious assistants are somewhat dramatized, the issues and the considerations that they argue over (sometimes with their police liaisons too) are IMHO highly realistic.
Polygraph or VSA analyses are never the subject of argument when a case is considered ready for court or not ready for court. Everyone understands that these things are meaningless and won't even be considered in evidence.
Obviously, there may be cases in which police feel strongly that they have a good case and the DAs or Crowns feel otherwise. It would be a very rare occurrence for the police to base their feelings on lie detector or VSA test results, but nothing is impossible. It would be akin to basing the same feeling on tea-leaf readings. Anyone with half a brain knows that the results depend on the operator, and on his observation and interpretation of measurable phenomena which could be related to stress, stress due to lying, stress due to embarrassment or fear, or stress of unknown origin. Or they could be related to factors other than stress but not yet identified. So, whatever the officer's feelings are about the case, if they are based on the test results of junk science, they are meaningless.
<<[Dontcha just hate them pesky facts that] . . . both the Judicial System, AND law enforcment, across this country, using this "junk science", in order to attempt to ascertain who's telling the truth, and who isn't. Damn those facts, your attempted marginalizing aside. >>
Well that's just not true. Those aren't "pesky facts," in fact, they're not even facts. By "the judicial system," you mean no courts at all in the USA, Canada, Australia, Israel and Europe, except for the courts of New Mexico. By "law enforcement" you mean some unidentified uncounted number of police organizations, and even there, the police have chosen, wisely or not, to use them as TOOLS of investigation, a distinction which you seem apparently unable to grasp. They do not use them to ascertain who is telling the truth, except in peripheral issues of lesser importance to the investigation. If the only thing in the whole investigation that points to a suspect's guilt is that he "failed" a VSA test, then there is no case to present and the police themselves understand that better than anyone.
<<Completely torpedos the notion that this is all junk science, akin to tarot car readings and psychics>>
It is BECAUSE it is junk science like tarot card readings and psychics that the courts will not accept it. End of story.