One Examiner, Three Cases: The Pattern Inside Ryan Meier’s Polygraph Room

Three Cases, One Examiner

In February 2025, the Michigan Supreme Court granted Barry County resident Dean Myers a new trial. I went digging into why, and found that Michigan State Police Detective Sergeant Ryan Meier had made false statements to Myers during a polygraph interrogation, telling him the test showed deception when the chart itself was inconclusive.

I called that piece “How Many More?” because Myers was the first case I could document out of the MSP Paw Paw post, and I did not think for a second he was the only one. I spent months afterward tracking a second matter out of Cass County, where Meier is alleged to have told a defendant he had failed a polygraph before it was even scored, where post-exam statements made their way into court despite the polygraph itself going missing from the file, and where St. Joseph Prosecutor Deborah Davis was also involved in a case that raises its own disclosure questions.

Now there is a third.

The Third Case

According to a court filing I reviewed, the woman at the center of this third case had already undergone a private polygraph examination before prosecutors intervened. They told her that result was not good enough. She was directed to sit for a state-administered exam with Meier instead, and that exam became a pressure point in plea negotiations that followed.

That sequence matters on its own. A private exam already existed. The state did not need Meier’s exam to establish anything it did not already have an answer to. What it needed was leverage, and Meier’s exam room is where that leverage got applied.

Her attorney was not in the room for the test itself. That part is standard practice, something defendants typically waive in writing before they sit down. What happened after the test is where it gets sharper. She says Meier began questioning her as though she had failed, on a chart that was inconclusive, and the only reason she was able to end it and walk out is that her attorney had already told her, before the exam, that she had the right to leave the moment he did exactly that.

The Conduct That Keeps Repeating

The same behavior shows up case after case. Meier tightens the blood pressure cuff far past what is needed for an accurate reading. He turns the heat up in a room, in weather that gives him no legitimate reason to do it, and refuses to turn on a fan when asked. He has lied to at least one person about whether the exam was being recorded. People describe him making them physically uncomfortable on purpose, then telling them after the test that they failed, when the chart itself came back inconclusive every time.

No attorney sat in the room for any of the three exams. Dean Myers’s attorney was kept out too. On its own, that is not unusual. Michigan practice statewide lets a defendant waive an attorney’s physical presence during the test. The difference between a lawful waiver and a rights problem is what happens next, and that is where the cases start to diverge from routine. In Cass County, the record shows Meier falsely claiming a defendant’s attorney could not be present at all, not just during the test itself. In the third case, the exam moved into interrogation, and nothing in the account suggests Meier told her she had any right to stop it.

The Right Most People Don’t Know They Have

Under Michigan law, a defendant has the right to have counsel present during a police polygraph once the Sixth Amendment right to counsel has attached. That comes from People v. Leonard, a 1983 Michigan Court of Appeals decision. In practice almost nobody exercises the physical-presence part of that right. Standard practice statewide, not something unique to MSP Paw Paw, is that defendants sign a waiver giving that part up before they sit down. What the waiver does not take away is the right to stop the exam and consult counsel at any moment, including the moment an examiner shifts from testing into interrogation.

That is the moment that mattered in the third case. After the test, Meier began questioning her as though she had failed, on a chart that was inconclusive. She ended it and walked out. The only reason she knew she could is that her own attorney had told her, before she ever sat down, that she had the right to leave the second he did that.

Dean Myers’s attorney was kept out of the room too, the same as every case documented out of this post. I do not know whether anyone told Myers, in the moment his exam turned into an interrogation, that he could stand up and leave.

Michigan courts have thrown out these waivers before when they were not truly voluntary. In People v. Strieter, the Court of Appeals found a defendant’s waiver invalid because she believed, incorrectly, that her attorney had approved of the process. A waiver only protects the system if the person signing it actually understands what they are giving up and what they are keeping. The open question in all three of these cases is how many people sit down for a Meier exam without an attorney who already told them what I just described.

The Law Meier Keeps Testing

Under MCL 776.21, when law enforcement administers a polygraph, the result, whether it is a pass, a fail, or inconclusive, has to be disclosed to the defense. Withholding it can amount to a Brady violation under Brady v. Maryland, which requires the state to turn over evidence favorable to the defense. Continuing to question someone after falsely telling them they failed a test raises separate due process and Fifth Amendment concerns that courts have flagged before.

The woman in the third case says the actual result was not disclosed to her until several days after the exam. She spent that time believing she had failed, on the strength of what Meier told her in the room, not on the chart itself. That delay is its own version of the same disclosure failure I documented in Myers and in Cass County. Clutch has confirmed across multiple cases now that polygraph records from MSP Paw Paw exams surfaced late in discovery, surfaced only after appeal, or did not surface at all.

Why This Pattern Matters

Polygraph results are not reliable enough to be admitted as proof of guilt in most Michigan courts. That has not stopped them from being used to pressure suspects, extract confessions, and shape prosecutorial decisions long before a case ever reaches a jury. The danger is not the machine. It is what an examiner is willing to say about the machine’s output when no one else is in the room to check him.

For a defendant facing a plea deadline, an examiner who claims failure on an inconclusive result is not a technicality. It is the difference between someone who feels they have leverage to fight a charge and someone who feels cornered into a plea they might not otherwise take. That is the human cost sitting underneath the disclosure statute.

The problem is not Meier alone. It is a system that lets one examiner run hundreds of exams with almost no outside check on what happens inside that room, and lets him stay in that chair even after a state supreme court has already granted a new trial in a case built partly on his conduct.

What Comes Next

Clutch Justice is continuing to investigate Michigan State Police polygraph practices statewide. If you or someone you know sat for an exam with Ryan Meier, or if polygraph discovery materials in your case were delayed, altered, or never turned over at all, I want to hear from you. Tips can be submitted confidentially at clutchjustice.com/submit-a-story. A full interactive timeline is in progress as I work through transcripts, complaint records, and defense filings across all three matters.