LIE DETECTORS BLOG & NEWS: NADAC GROUP

Convict’s request for polygraph backfires

Full 45-year sentence will stand as test-taker ‘did not appear to be truthful’
October 16, 2008

Trent Lee Banks maintained his innocence last week in an April 2006 shooting outside his home. Only this time, Banks’ audience was not a judge or a jury but a polygraph he had asked to take.

Unfortunately for Banks, the polygraph did not believe him either.

“The examinee did not appear to be truthful,” examiner Billy H. Thompson wrote in a test evaluation delivered to Judge Lawrence R. Daniels in Baltimore County Circuit Court.

Daniels had allowed the polygraph as part of Banks’ attempt to shorten his prison term for probation violations stemming from an attempted murder conviction. The judge will formally deny Banks’ motion to modify the sentence at a hearing later this month.

Stephen Roscher, the assistant state’s attorney who prosecuted Banks on the attempted murder charges, was not surprised by the polygraph result.

“I was confident when we convicted Mr. Banks in the shooting case,” he said.

A jury convicted Banks last year in the attempted murder of his then-girlfriend, Ebony James, and her friend, Kimberly Horton.

Banks, 29, was sentenced to 35 years on the attempted murder counts.

But the shootings also constituted a violation of his probation under prior convictions. His consecutive five-year terms on those counts brought his total sentence to 45 years.

In a highly unusual move, Daniels granted Banks’ request in August to take the polygraph in an effort to shave time off his five-year sentences. The judge made clear the results would have no impact on the second-degree murder conviction and that passing did not automatically equal a sentence reduction.

Banks hired Thompson, founder and director of the Maryland Institute of Criminal Justice in Millersville, to administer the test. He took it on Oct. 8 in the courthouse after passing a urinalysis test.

Charging documents in the attempted murder case allege Banks shot at James and Horton as they drove away from his house, after James had slashed his car’s tires. The couple had been arguing about Banks’ alleged cheating, according to the charging documents.