Frye's Backstory: a tale of murder, a retracted confession, and scientific hubris

The landmark case Frye v. United States is associated with the general-acceptance standard for admissibility of scientific evidence. The standard, still the law in some jurisdictions, has largely been replaced by one based on Federal Rule of Evidence 702. Although it is known from the 1923 Frye opinion's terse wording that the science in question was a systolic blood pressure deception test, the facts behind the case and the story of the device's inventor are rarely discussed. In this article we review the story of the defendant, James Alphonso Frye, and the psychologist, William Moulton Marston, who claimed he could prove that Frye had confessed falsely. The case continues to reverberate whenever scientific evidence makes a claim of finding the truth.