According to the report, if the lie detector verifies her husband's claims, the woman will not receive custody over her children.
"There is halachic justification to make use of a lie detector in order to deter swindlers from hiding the truth," the judges wrote in the ruling.
"Today, we do not need to torment the swindlers until they confess, but rather, lie detectors may be used to reveal a lying witness."
The rabbinical judges, headed by the court's chief judge Rabbi Haim Hertzberg, ordered the woman to answer three questions related to the suspicions against her.
According to the radio station, the court allowed the woman to formulate a set of questions for her husband to answer while connected to a polygraph machine.
Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, administrative head of the Rabbinical Courts, told the radio station that the ruling would serve as a precedent allowing the use of modern tools, such as the polygraph, in divorce or child custody cases with insufficient evidence.
Comment: One of the biggest problems we now face in Beis Din is unscrupulous witnesses or outright lying. SInce there is no fear pf perjury, and the trappings of the procedures do not necessarily inspire awe or concern, and there is no process of discovery, a claimant or a witness can outright lie without a fear of consequences. This is, therefore, a positive development in my opinion.
This is not a new issue. In a recent article, Rav Shlomo Korach discussed halachic use of the polygraph machine (lie detector), especially in regard to the rules of evidence. He concluded that the polygraph could be relied upon under certain conditions, although not as a single piece of evidence upon which a court decision would be based. Subsequently, the Rabbinic Supreme Court of Appeals (RSCA) published a decision with completely different conclusions, rejecting completely any recourse to a polygraph.... (see link)
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