Introduction Many important court cases depend on memory-based evidence. When there is not enough physical evidence to convict a suspect, law enforcement relies on testimonies and confessions to put criminals behind bars, yet, not all testimonies are reliable. Throughout the years, there have been many people who have been falsely convicted based on inadequate police interrogation methods that allowed for false confessions to occur. Effectiveness of Interrogation Methods Used by Civil Law Enforcement Every level of law enforcement uses some form of interrogation to get valuable information from a person. Police officers interrogate persons of interest to get information such as alibis, motives and witness accounts.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 08 Feb. 2016. This source explains that torture is actually one of the last methods used when they are interrogating someone since many know that it has a very low success rate. If the person is not willing to cooperate, they go down a list.
14). Using torture as a way to extract evidence is an inhumane way to treat those under accusation.The argument that a confession given under these circumstances is legitimate, is a false claim. This is due to the victim's mindset being compromised from the extreme and extensive methods of torture. Another example of the unacceptable evidence used in court against those accused is the presence of the “devil’s mark”. “The belief was that the devil branded the bodies of witches with symbolic yet concrete corporeal malformations such as marks and growths” (Darr, 361).
Entrapment is used by officers to persuade and lure suspicious civilians to commit a crime that they have not been proven guilty of. This article talks about entrapment and explains positives and negatives of they system. The article focuses on the holes and unclear frame work in the entrapment tactic. Entrapment is a useful tactic in catching suspicious criminals before they commit a crime that could possible hurt someone. This is a good and efficient tactic for officers, it keeps the innocent safe.
In early interrogations it was common for police officers to use physically abusive interrogation techniques such as the rubber hose to convince suspects to confess to a crime, whether they are innocent of guilty. Fred Inbau came up with a different technique that relied on presenting a large amount of fabricated or true evidence to get the suspect to confess. This technique was very effective in getting confessions, it has an 80% confession rate. Unfortunately, some of the confessions are false confessions, we do not know how many exactly. The first step of the Reid Technique, a similar coercive technique to the one Inbau devised, was to watch the suspect and determine whether or not he or she is lying during the interrogation based on behavioral analysis; which is severely flawed and does not actually help us determine if someone is lying.
When they say there confession in their own language it can be misinterpreted by lawyers and police to make it say what they want to hear which leaves the victim at a disadvantage. False confessions are miscommunicated by detectives and police because the victim speaks a different language. An example of this happening is with the case of Angel Gonzalez. Angel Gonzalez is a Hispanic man who was convicted of kidnap and rape in 1995. When Angel was arrested for this crime and taken in by police he knew little English.
Torture is the action of willingly hurting a person psychologically or physically. The use of torture by individuals, groups, and authorities has been going on from ancient times until today. In the 4th Century, voices started being raised against the use of torture. In fact, well-known philosopher and scientist, Aristotle, revealed the downfalls of torture, “those under compulsion are as likely to give false evidence as true, some being ready to endure everything rather than tell the truth, while others are really ready to make false charges against others, in the hope of being sooner released from torture”. In order to prevent further terrorist attacks, the CIA had to practice unethical questioning methods such as psychological techniques, sensory bombardment consisting of subjecting the tortured to continuous extremely
The goal is to torture captives until they give up the information the interrogators are looking for. New methods of interrogation
Given these points, people should be able to see that torture should not be the number one option because it leads to unreliable information that cannot even be used against a person in court. In 1984 torture is one of the various ways that the government gets information from people. For example, Winston was caught and put in jail where he is later questioned by O’Brien. O’Brien asks him some questions that rely on how many fingers he puts up but, he can tell Winston has been lying: “No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying.
Torture can be initiated through causing some form of mental anguish or physical pain, usually in order to gain information from the person being tortured. Torture is usually punishment for a serious crime,but is usually for the purpose of extracting a confession from an accused person. Many wonder nowadays should torture still be used in this day and age. Torture has been around since the times of the Ancient Greeks and is still around today, notoriously used in criminal organizations but also utilized by various governments when dealing with terrorist. Once the torture of Jews at the hands of the Nazis in World War II became knowledge to the public.