Author: Jinee Lokaneeta
Publisher:
ISBN: 0472054392
Category : Forensic sciences
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
"Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of "truth serum," Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention"--
Author: Erik Ruhling
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
ISBN: 160925905X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 106
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Book Description
Erik Ruhling assembles an unmatched array of torture tools invented exclusively for the infliction of pain and the ending of life, each carefully researched with an accompanying full-color, highly detailed rendering. This beautifully presented book features classics like the Iron Maiden and the Guillotine, as well as more rarified connoisseur’s fare such as the Scavenger’s Daughter and the Ear Chopper. And if the Tongue Tearer is not to your taste, there’s always the Breast Ripper or the Drunkard’s Cloak.
Author: Laurence Ralph
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022672980X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
Author: Flint Taylor
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608468968
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s political machine, from aldermen to the mayor’s office. [TAYLOR’s BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.
Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Memorable Classics Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 31
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Book Description
In The Penal Colony by Franz Kafka ("In der Strafkolonie") (also translated as "In the Penal Settlement") is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, revised in November 1918, and first published in October 1919. As in some of Kafka's other writings, the narrator in this story seems detached from, or perhaps numbed by, events that one would normally expect to be registered with horror. Internal clues and the setting on an island suggest Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden as an influence. Synopsis: The story focuses on the Traveler, who has just arrived in an island penal colony and is encountering its brutal execution machine for the first time. Everything about the functioning of the intricate machine and its purpose and history is told to him by the Officer. The Soldier and the Condemned, who is unaware that he has been sentenced to die for failing to get up and salute his superior's door each hour during his night watch, placidly watch from nearby. Under the judicial process associated with the machine, the accused is always assumed to be guilty and is not given a chance to defend himself. As punishment, the law the man has broken is inscribed progressively deeper on his body over a period of 12 hours as he slowly dies from his wounds. During their final six hours in the machine, the accused become still and appear to experience a religious epiphany. The machine was designed by the colony's previous Commandant, of whom the Officer is a devoted supporter. He carries its blueprints with him and is the only person who can decipher them, not allowing anyone else to handle them. Eventually, it becomes clear that the machine has fallen out of favor since the death of the previous Commandant and the appointment of a successor. The Officer is nostalgic regarding the torture device and the values that were initially associated with it, recalling the crowds that used to attend each execution. Now, he is the last outspoken proponent of the machine, but he strongly believes in its form of justice and the infallibility of the previous Commandant.
Author: Janet Cardiff
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Pub
ISBN: 9783775720021
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
A concise retrospective, this publication contains previously unpublished written and visual material, as well as pertinent literature on the oeuvre of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. SPECIALIST
Author: Steve Smith
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1460287851
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
When Steve Smith set out to hitchhike from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario to Canada’s west coast back in 1968, he was just an eighteen-year-old hippie with an appetite for adventure. But a short way into his journey, a reckless decision to steal a car landed him in police custody. Afraid of getting caught with the two tabs of acid in his pocket, Steve popped them into his mouth. It was one of the worst decisions of his life. Mistaking his drug trip for a mental breakdown, the authorities placed him in Ontario’s notorious Oak Ridge mental health facility. While there, not only did he find himself shoulder-to-shoulder with people like notorious child killer Peter Woodcock and mass murderers Matt Lamb and Victor Hoffman, he also fell into the hands of someone worse: Dr. Elliot T. Barker. Over the next eight months, Barker subjected Steve and the other patients to a battery of unorthodox experiments involving LSD, scopolamine, methamphetamines, and other drugs. Steven also experienced numerous other forms of abuse and torture. Following his release, Steve continued to suffer the aftereffects of his Oak Ridge experience. For several years, he found himself in and out of prison—and back to Oak Ridge—before he was finally able to establish himself as a successful entrepreneur. Once he began investigating what happened to him during his youth, not even Steve was prepared for what he would discover about Barker, Oak Ridge, and one of the darkest periods in Canada’s treatment of mental health patients. The question remains: Was Oak Ridge and Dr. Barker trying to cure psychopaths or trying to create and direct them?
Author: Andrew S. Baer
Publisher: Historical Studies of Urban America
ISBN: 022670047X
Category : Police brutality
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
"The malign influence of Chicago police commander Jon Burge cannot be overestimated. While it can scarcely be said that Burge was the only violently racist Chicago cop, he has become the very emblem of police brutality and unequal treatment for nonwhite people, and his actions have had widespread reverberations. During his many years on the force, Burge used barbaric methods, including electric shock, beatings, burnings, and mock executions, to coerce confessions and information from the guilty and the innocent alike. After exposure of his actions in 1989, Burge became a totem for police racism in Chicago and nationwide. Andrew S. Baer here shows that Burge arose from a particular milieu, and his actions fueled resistance that might not otherwise have cohered so powerfully"--
Author: Daniel P. Mannix
Publisher: eNet Press
ISBN: 1618867512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Torture has been an intrinsic part of the legal process in most cultures for centuries. Indeed, the violence we witness daily in our own society and recent revelations about the continued use of torture, seems proof that inflicting extreme mental or physical pain on an individual to achieve one's own ends is not a taboo practice buried in the past. This incomparable, extremely thorough book — told with a frightening and factual honesty — examines every aspect of torture: professional torturers, theories and techniques, the role of torture in history, moral implications, and the refinements brought to the practice of torture by individual fanatics, religious groups, the military, and, indeed, entire cultures. For such transgressions against society as adultery, heresy and espionage, from the primitive snake pit to the sophistication of brainwashing, there have been literally thousands of techniques devised to distort both the body and the mind in order to satisfy the sadistic needs of those who command, perform and witness human torture. At the time of its first publication (1964), The History of Torture was the most complete repository of information on the subject ever assembled in one volume.
Author: Deana Heath
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192646168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.
