Opus wadr to you $ Dershawitz, I disagree. And would point out to you that requiring a search warrent has not historically prevented illegal warrent-less searches.
No.
I’m in favor of abolishing “prisons as a place of punishment.” I’d like them to serve a purely rehabilitative role for those whom it’s possible to rehabilitate and a “comfortable warehouse” role for those whom it’s clearly not possible to rehabilitate.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
A nuclear bomb is gonna go off in 30 minutes–but we’ll have enough time to find a magistrate who can weigh the evidence and calmly and rationally decide whether or not torture is OK?
It’s wrong. But on the scale of wrong it’s nowhere near “fucking kittens up the ass until they pop” wrong. I’d bop him on the head, apologize to him afterwards, and maybe quietly utter his name during next Sunday’s Prayers of the People.
Those of you advocating torture in certain circumstances: if you knew that torturing the scumbag in your hypothetical would lead to your serving five to ten years in prison, would you go ahead with the torture?
In some of the hypotheticals, I would. And I think that’s what our system ought to do: not allow torture, but recognize that some people are willing to do prison time in order to save lives.
And then make them do the prison time.
It sucks to be caught in the crossfire between two evils, but hey, it happens to innocent people all the time. I see the person making the decision to become a torturer as less innocent than many of the victims of evil; and if we maintain high criminal standards against torture, why, that’s our best safeguard against torture becoming common.
Daniel
I find the term ‘torture warrant’ to be chilling.
Agreed. Of course, decisions about law and public policy should not be made based on how Orwellian the words sound when put together. Would you rather have warrantless torture? Or do you just laugh off all the hypothetical torture situations that have been provided in this thread as too farfetched to ever happen?
The issues raised by this case reminds me of an episode of “Hill Street Blues” (from 20 years ago, yikes) in which Capt. Furillo and the D.A.'s office contrived an unethical, if technically legal, means to extort a confession from two men whom the detectives believed were guilty of raping and stabbing a nun to death in a church. The two suspects were caught, IIRC, when they tried to pawn the candlesticks they’d stolen from the church, but the police were having difficulty finding forensic evidence or locating a single sure eyewitness to tie them to the scene of the crime. (This was “Hill Street,” not “CSI”.) Both men denied having done the crime and claimed they’d innocently found the candlesticks. It looked as though the state would have difficulty proving its case. On the other hand, the men had criminal records of rape and robbery and there was enough circumstantial evidence for the cops to feel certain they were guilty – as was the community; local residents were thronging the police station and clamoring for the suspects in classic lynch mob fashion. The Hill Street station all but had a riot on its hands.
District Attorney Lowenstein decided (with Capt. Furillo’s support) to use the community outrage on display in the bail hearing in order to extort a confession from the suspects. In a courtroom packed with local residents shouting that the suspects be turned over to them for “justice,” Lowenstein argued before the judge that since the only charge pending at that time was possession of stolen property (and of small monetary value, at that), his office was declining to request bail and asked the judge to release the suspects on their own recognizance to the community. In this situation, though, “going free” amounted to being condemned to death by a public lynching, and everyone in that courtroom knew it. The suspects’ public defender, Joyce Davenport, wasn’t fooled for an instant and furiously protested Lowenstein’s motion, exposing the D.A.'s office’s cyncial intent in declining to request bail. The judge understood as much, but conceded that the D.A.'s motion was legally allowable, however unorthodox. He also tacitly agreed with the prosecution. The suspects immediately signalled their desperation to talk further with the cops, promptly surrendered to (protective) police custody while still in the courtroom, and confessed later that day to capital murder with aggravating circumstances.
That evening, Joyce lashed into Frank, with the same moral outrage and ethical and legal arguments voiced earlier in this thread. Furillo could only silently take it; he knew he’d crossed a line, even if the ends ostensibly justified the means and he was basically satisfied with the resolution of the case. He excused himself and drove to his church. The episode closed with Frank in the confessional booth saying “forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…”.
Which brings me around belatedly to this: does it amount to a kind of torture to threaten a suspect with the abuse he’s likely to suffer by persons other than the police? Namely, is it torture by proxy to remand a suspect to either a general holding pen in a jail or prison, or (had circumstances in this case been rather different) to threaten to release him to a hostile community? (The latter hypothetical doesn’t apply in this case, given the kidnapping charge and likely sexual assaults, which are too serious to wave off, as in the “Hill Street” episode… but I think it’s still a worthy hypothetical for purposes of discussion.)
Maximum-security prison populations have a repuation for being extremely harsh towards convicted pedophiles and towards at least some of the most notorious criminals, period. (Remember how Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison? He had, two (or four?) hours’ worth of daily social mixing with fellow cons in a community pod area, spending the rest of his time in solitary confinement.) In such a case the prisoner has two possibilities: either he’s in some contact with fellow inmates, in which case he’s vulnerable to their assaults, or he’s kept in strict isolation 24-7 (with maybe an hour of daily recreation in a caged pen, still in hermetic isolation from everyone else) – which is safer physically but is known to drive some inmates insane.
Thus an argument could be made, however speciously, that since the penal system is the extension of the criminal-justice system and that the disposition of a notorious criminal (say, a pedophile rapist) necessarily involves some form of extralegal torment in violation of the spirit of the law (namely, in being unduly harsh, which the law forbids), then as a juror you’d have to exercise juror nullification and refuse to ever convict anyone of a most heinous crime. That’s a patently absurd conclusion, but that’s what results from reductio ad absurdem argumentation.
You could just as well turn the argument on its head: the system implicitly condones, via negligence, physical abuse and rape on a massive scale; in fact it all but mandates it, given the tensions known to exist in general prison populations and the ways those spaces are structured. Few of us decry this as “torture” per se, probably because of the legal distinctions between readily identifiable, if hypothetical, police interrogation torture of a suspect on the one hand, and the wholesale brutality committed by inmates against inmates in dark corners and undersupervised rooms in state-run prisons. Such tenuous distinctions are what the law must address and uphold, but I suspect there’s a vanishing point in which the distinction between state torture and prison abuse becomes a largely semantic one, at least from the point of view of the poor bastards who suffer it. I’m particularly struck by the contrast between the fetishization of a hypothetical isolated instance of torture (which might save a life, no less!) and the generally ignored casual and pointless brutality of prison life as it has been, and still is, experienced by millions of convicted felons. These must be some powerful semantic categories and distinctions at work, because most of us (myself included) seem more alarmed at the spectre of torture than the existing need for prison reform.
Personally, I wish the system already had a provision for torture in categorically exceptional cases, such as terrorism and kidnapping cases in which a crime in progress could be foiled by a timely confession. But there may yet be a way for it to occur in the system we have now which, while not letting the torturer off the hook entirely, would find ways to lessen the punishment and even tactily condone the act.
Is the following scenario possible? That in a case such as this, where time is of the essence and a victim’s life may be at stake, a police detective uses torture, with the understanding that he will be duly tried and quite possibly convicted (unless the jurors exercise “juror nullification,” or the state declines to prosecute or botches the case)… and then the governor pardons the officer and even makes possible his reinstatement to the force? Would this scenario be more morally palatable if the governor in turn tendered his resignation (if only to run in the next election)? In a scenario like that, I’d bet that such a turn of events would be political dynamite and resistant to accurate polling… it’s one thing to decry “torture” in public or to a pollster, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many people would vote otherwise.
We’ve already had that. I would rather there were no torture. And yes, I find the hypotheticals pretty far-fetched.
And who’s is going to decide in timely fashion whether or not it’s an “exceptionnal case”? Who’s to decide on the spot that a crime in progress could be foiled, and that the person tortured is likely to know about this crime? A police officer on the basis of his gut’s feeling?
Who’s going to define terrorism? Who’s going to tell who is likely enough to be a terrorist for torture to be warranted and who isn’t?
Do you extend the same moral right to torture to everybody else? I’m an Iraki freedom fighter. I took prisonner an american soldier I’ve all the reasons to believe know about an impending attack which will result in many deaths. Do you support my moral right to torture him in order to save the lives of my comrades who rightly defend their country against these evil invaders?
The clock is ticking and the american missiles (I’m sure there will be american missiles) will fall 2 hours later (I know for sure it will be 2 hours later). Besides us freedom fighters there are also innocent civilians/potential “collateral damage” in the area. We need at least 1 1/2 hour to evacuate the area, so we must know within 30 minutes in order to avoid these deaths.
Is it then my moral duty to torture this bad guy to save the life of the good guys (my friends and I) and uninvolved civilians?
We had a similar case here in Germany a while ago. A banker’s son was abducted, a ransom note sent. The ransom was paid, a suspect was caught. There was reason to assume that the boy was still alive and the suspect was unwilling to talk.
So the police kind of hinted that if he would not start singing soon, he would be feeling pain unlike anything ever felt before. And he sang … he had killed the boy right after the abduction, there was never a chance.
The police officials were tried and convicted because of the threat of torture. While I sympathize with them and their frustrations, I am in favour of the verdict. They made a conscious decision to break our law and are willing to accept the consequences. Fine with me.
Here’s a link with a summary of the case in English:
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,328486,00.html
I am against torture for the same reasons I am against the death penalty. Morals and values make the difference between us and the bastards.
I would use any means I could to stop him, including killing him. I’d try to do so as efficiently as possible, but, if we’re talking reality, that probably wouldn’t be very efficient. I’ve never fired a gun, so dropping him with one bullet to the brain is probably about as unrealistic as you can get. I would try not to regret my actions because, in the scenario you describe, they’d be necessary. They would still, however, be morally wrong.
I personally consider myself morally obligated to try to protect others. Under that moral obligation, if preventing harm to others means I have to inflict harm on the person harming these others, I am, to some extent obligated to do so. That doesn’t change the fact that my deliberately harming someone is wrong. Sometimes, one must choose the lesser of the two evils, but that doesn’t exempt one from the consequences.
I would injure or kill your hypothetical maniac shooting up McDonalds, as I would have the not-so-hypothetical one who did just that a few years ago here. I would also be calling my priest for a long talk afterwards which would include confession and accept the legal consequences of my actions. I would also pray that God have mercy on both our souls because I’ve a feeling we’d surely need it.
I think I started a GD thread a few years ago about the idea of a category I think of as “necessary but wrong” actions. I don’t have time to hunt it up now, but it might be worth another look.
Respectfully,
CJ
Getting information from him would be nice, but there are certain types of criminals that I believe should suffer horrific pain simply as one of the consequences of their action. This fellow sounds like an excellent candidate for being broken on the wheel; right after we get finish doing the same with this asshole.
Absolutely, torture might be beneficial in this case or others like it where the perp has clearly committed a crime and someone elses life is in mortal danger unless the knowledge that the perp possesses is revealed.
Its been said that torture only reveals what the perp thinks the torturer wants to hear. Well that should be obvious in cases where the wherabouts of a victim is in question.
It occurs to me that most advanced societies have a mechanism to circumvent their citizens rights. For example, you need a court order to search someones home.
It also occurs to me that we accept shooting perps when the shooter is in imminent danger or when someone else is. Taking a shot in the stomach can be quite torturous.
To address the important slippery slope argument I would suggest the following:
Torture to be used only if:
- A human life is in imminent danger, and the information required is clear and distinct
- A court order has been issued
- It is conducted in the presence of a significant law enforcement official high up in the heirarchy.
- It is conducte in the presence of the media.
It may very well be that other stipulations may be required such as torture protocols developed by professionals to ensure effectiveness.
I could be comfortable with that.
Absolutely.
My point is that I shouldn’t have to go to prison for doing the right thing.
If you hold to some deontology that tells you things like ‘killing/hurting is always, always wrong’ then I don’t know what to tell you. I think you get caught in too many bad situations. You have to think of yourself as immoral because you took the action which was the best! Why do you choose to recognize the bad of killing/hurting while ignoring the GOOD of saving life, protecting the innocent, righting wrongs, etc?
you ignore my comment from prior page - that requiring a search warrent has not historically prevented warrentless searches -why would you believe that warrentless tortures wouldn’t happen? after all if time is of the essence (or so would the rationale go), and you know the cause is just and you believe the warrent would be issued, why waste the time waiting?
wring, I don’t believe your point has any significance for this debate or for my comment for that matter. Warrentless searches do not occur because we have warrented searches. The case for warranted torture or searches is to aid law abiding law enforcement officers.
Does Shasta soda still exist? They were cheap but pretty good.
? if torture is such an extreme that we debate if it should be allowed, why would it not matter that it may be abused? you would be “ok” w/it under these rather elaborate restrictions, but I guess would not be ok w/it w/o the restriction? are you ‘ok’ w/it that the mere allowance of it at all would mean that sometimes it would happen w/o you cautions? how often?
see-I’m ‘ok’ w/ the concept that warrentless searches go on 'cause the consequences of that aren’t abhorrant. torture is.
[QUOTE=wring are you ‘ok’ w/it that the mere allowance of it at all would mean that sometimes it would happen w/o you cautions? how often?
[/QUOTE]
I doubt very much that some law enforcement officers in western countries haven’t used torture now and then up till now. A rigorous legal framework for justified torture can only reduce unwarranted or ineffective torture IMHO.
Why should we torture him? He only killed two girls, he didn’t feel their private parts.
“Depravity is wrong, but institutionalized depravity is OK.” :rolleyes:
Would you feel comfortable living next door to a professional torturer?
In the same house as a professional torturer?
Would you consider it as an occupation for yourself?
Disabling someone to protect yourself/family/innocent strangers from imminent harmis one thing. Torturing a suspect (at this time, Duncan is a suspect) to obtain information is wrong, it is currently illegal and according to most civilized people it is immoral.
Torturing someone for revenge is even worse, IMO. I am pro-death penalty, but I think it should be carried out quickly and efficiently, the same way you would crush a cockroach or kill a rabid dog.