At the most recent Republican debate in South Carolina, candidates Cain and Bachman advocated a return to the use of waterboarding. That reminded me that when we were doing research for Lawtalk, I learned that in the 1931, the Wickersham Commission’s Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement documented every method used by US police departments to extract confessions, including the “water cure, a species of torture well known to the bench and bar of the country . . . which consisted of placing the victim on his back and slowly pouring water into his nostrils until he nearly strangled.”
The Commission’s Report revealed and condemned the fact that use of “the third degree” was widespread. One of its most celebrated practitioners, New York police inspector Thomas F. Byrnes, was famous for extracting confessions and did his best to glamorize the process. The newspapers ate it up. One story – under the headline “The Third Degree: How It Was Worked on Suspects by Inspector Byrnes” – spun out an elaborate tale of the calculated staging of an interrogation which, together with a “searching glance” from Byrnes’s “penetrating eyes,” did the trick. The suspect “literally sprang from his chair, and falling to his knees clasped Byrnes about his legs, crying like a child, confessing and begging the inspector not to have him hanged.” In 1905, ten years after his departure from the force, Byrnes wrote a lengthy description of his method as purely a battle of wits, in which he first put suspects off guard with what “might be called ‘The Sympathetic Talk’” and then patiently drew out information: “This,” he said, “is the much discussed, much criticized ‘Third Degree.’ Never has it done injustice to the innocent.”
But no one involved in the criminal justice system in those days was under any illusion about what was going on. Byrnes’s own chief until 1885 described a suspect about to be interrogated by Byrnes as about to “pass a bad quarter of an hour, or what is known in police slang as ‘getting the third degree.’” Police reporter turned social reformer Jacob Riis said that Byrnes’s “famous ‘third degree’ was chiefly what he no doubt considered a little wholesome ‘slugging.’ He would beat a thief into telling him what he wanted to know.”
The Wickersham Commission’s Report was greeted with howls of outrage, with officials claiming that “the forces of the law wouldn’t get to first base in combatting criminal elements if we adhered strictly to the letter of the law.” Nevertheless, the Report was a turning point: public opinion, Supreme Court decisions, and police procedures gradually turned away from torture as other methods of interrogation proved more humane, more consonant with the Constitution, and more reliable.
Comments