State Torture: August 2008 Archives

Posted per request, under the category State Torture, whereby torture is enacted by the state at the level of local police right on the street in full view of the community (much like the open torture and punishment of convicted criminals in the town square): http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9635

Excerpt from article:

According to Winn Parish coroner Dr. Randolph Williams, police officers delivered nine taser shocks to the handcuffed man over a 14-minute interval. Williams further noted that Pikes showed no response to the last two taser shocks, which were fired as police pulled him from a patrol car into the police station. Pikes was already unconscious and died soon after.

Williams consulted about the case with Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally prominent forensic pathologist. After that consultation, Williams ruled that Pikes¢ death was a homicide. The cause of death was listed as "cardiac arrest following nine 50,000-volt electroshock applications from a conductive electrical weapon."

Baden noted that what the police did to Pikes that afternoon "could be considered to be torture." (Italics mine, George C.)

by Scott Horton

Remarks to the ASIL Centennial Conference on The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial         Bowling Green, Ohio                                                                                               October 7, 2006

"In France, innumerable summary executions occur, even as I sit here writing. Each day certainly more than a thousand people are killed, and thousands of German men experience murder as a matter of routine. And yet all of that is child's play compared to what's going on in Poland and Russia. Can I learn about this and just sit at the table in my heated apartment and drink tea? Don't I establish my complicity simply by doing nothing? What will I say in the future, when someone asks me: and what did you do during this time?"               - Helmuth von Moltke, in a letter to his wife, Oct. 19, 1941

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/10/when-lawyers-are-war-criminals.html