To Force Confessions
Attempting to force a confession may be one of the most common uses of torture today. Several countries, both autocratic and democratic, have police forces that do this fairly regularly.
First a little background on how torture in a judicial setting works.
Torture can be used to force confessions, but it might well surprise you how often it doesn’t work. Anecdotal accounts tend to suggest or assume that sooner or later everyone confesses because of physical torture. However statistical analysis of the little data we have suggests that is no where near true.
The main piece of data comes from France between 1500 and the mid 1700s, concerning 785 people who were put to torture, in accordance with French law at the time, to make them confess. Only between 3 and 14% of them did.
Similarly of the 3,573 German prisoners in the infamous ‘London Cage’ around 1,000 confessed, and it is worth noting that bribery, incentives for double agents and threats were as much a part of the London Cage as torture.
Forced confessions have been used to get rid of politically inconvenient people but it’s also regularly used to disguise failings in particular police forces. When judges and juries prize confessions, police are underfunded, poorly trained and under pressure to produce results now coercion and torture can very quickly become common practice.
The Wickersham Commission in the United States identified police brutality and torture across the country, often for the purpose of extracting confessions. In particular a pattern of practices known as ‘sweating’ was widespread.
Bright lights were kept aimed at the suspects eyes, they were prevented from sleeping, kept uncomfortably hot by the lights and interrogated constantly by relays of people over several days. If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s practically identical to Soviet ‘Conveyer’ techniques.
The Communist ‘brainwashing’ that Americans were told to fear was the same thing that had been going on in American prisons for decades.
Police in Chicago have a history of torture stretching back to at least the 1920s when the Wickersham Commission said they used sleep deprivation, beatings (famously with the Chicago telephone book), exhaustion exercises, stress positions, tear gas, suffocation and something that sounds an awful lot like waterboarding.
By the 70s they’d moved on to electrical torture though beating (with phone books and rubber hoses) was still common as was suffocation (now using plastic bags).
And in the 80s Chicago’s area 2 was under the jurisdiction of Commander Jon Burge a man who is estimated to have tortured at least 200 people. They were variously sweated, beaten, suffocated and tortured using the electric charge of telephone magnetos to extract confessions.
Burge’s police career started in 1972 and the first accusations of torture came soon afterwards. Burge’s actions, over a two decade career, have led to a review of the police force costing $17 million, a settlement costing almost $20 million, a compensation fund for victims of police torture of over $62 million and a further $50 million for ‘defence of officers’.
The overall estimate for the monetary cost to Chicago’s police force is almost $400 million.
At least 17 innocent people were put on death row based on confessions obtained by torture.
With the cost, monetary, moral and human, so high the obvious question is how did this go on for so long?
Burge was a veteran who’d received three medals in Vietnam. He received multiple commendations as a police officer and by the time he was suspended in 1991 (before being fired in 1993) he was an Area commander, outranking the vast majority of police in the city.
Burge was seen as upstanding and believable.
One of the most important victims in the cases against him was a young black man named Andrew Wilson. Wilson had spent most of his life in institutions and a significant period of time homeless. He was described as impulsive and emotional and ‘his ability to function in the community [was] severely limited’. (via Rejali, pg 241)
The police accused him of murdering two of their fellow officers.
Wilson described a pattern of electrical torture via magneto, suffocation and beatings that matched the testimony of other complaints. He was admitted to hospital with second degree burns and multiple lacerations.
Juries did not believe him. In fact they returned the bizarre verdict that police had used excessive force but not torture, a contradiction in terms.
It took years of concerted effort from journalists, activists and victims to finally bring Burge to justice. He was finally arrested in 2008 and convicted in 2011.
His sentence was just four and a half years. Burge was released in 2014. Many of his victims died in prison.
Several of the officers he trained have been promoted to high positions. At the time of writing the city of Chicago can not consider an officer’s prior record of complaints when investigating allegations of brutality.
Convictions for torture rely on establishing patterns of behaviour over time and multiple victims. It’s pretty safe to say that with a rule like that in place Burge would never have been convicted. It’s a simple pattern, sleep deprivation, beatings, suffocation, electricity.
And I’m told that those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.
[Sources: ‘Torture and Democracy’, Princeton, D Rejali (Glorious 850 page, kill them with data, monster of a book)
Wickersham Commission
‘Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People’, J Conroy]