THE THIRD DEGREE.
THE recent strange murder of a girl missionary in Chinatown, New York, has brought to the notice of Englishmen the third degree" system of questioning prisoners by which be New York police extracted a con- fession from a supposed accomplice of the murderer. The police are said to be "pleased with the working of the system." If their purpose is to extract the greatest possible number of confessions without reference to their value, we can believe it. For the "third degree" is nothing less than • torture,—torture of the mind, it is true, but torture of the mind is a very difficult thing to distinguish from physical torture. The mental and physical processes are so closely locked that the one is inevitably merged in the other sooner or later. In different persons the one passes into the other ' at different stages. In the case of the Chinaman who was subjected to the "third degree" the other day the success of the police was complete. They extorted a full, and even a picturesque, confession. The prisoner described how he had looked through the keyhole of the door in which the murder was committed, and how he had seen another Chinaman—the one whom the police are trying to prove guilty, of course—seize the girl and kill her in exactly that manner which fitted in with all the hints and promptings of the police. The fact is that as one can "prove anything by statistics," so one can prove anything by torture. The Chinese victim of the "third degree" was not the man the police supposed him to be at all, and bad not been near the scene of the murder, as they afterwards discovered. But we shall expect confessions to become as plentiful as blackberries if the "third degree" continues to be practised. A fanatic, a religious enthusiast, an melte, might no doubt refuse to confess under the mental battering-rams of the "third degree " ; but a simple creature, such as we may suppose the persecuted• Chinaman to have been, who has no daemon within him to direct or to save, caves in and purchases relief with the desiderated lie.
Accounts in the newspapers have informed us that the "third degree" exposes the prisoner to unceasing questioning for many hours. The Times correspondent says that the prisoner is sometimes treated in this way for thirty hours without a break, and swoons at the end. He is threatened and hectored, and his feelings are worked upon by a pretence among his inquisitors that they have learned all about his guilt, and that a confession will be for his own good. It is said that in the case of murder the body of the dead person is sometimes brought, and the prisoner is forced to touch it, and to handle the weapon with which the deed was done. Many readers will be reminded here of the ancient, barbaric, and superstitious trial by ordeal by which the contact of the murderer was supposed to make the blood flow forth again from the wounds of the dead. Among poor people in some districts of England it is still the custom, we believe, for visitors to a bereaved household to touch the dead body to show that there was no ill-feeling between them and the deceased. And who can forget the awful force with which Shakespeare plays on the same idea in Richard III., when Richard approaches Henry's body ?— " 0 gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry's wounds Open their cougeard mouths and bleed afresh!"
We do not wish to refine too much upon this point, but it is at all events right to say as much as this : that ignorant minds are affected terribly by methods which might seem only a dull melodrama to those more cultivated, and that any system which plies superstition and stupidity to extort confession is infamous. The Manchester Guardian mentions that Professor Hugo Miinsterberg in a recent book on "Psychology and Crime" cites an instance in which an innocent man, arrested by mistake, was induced to confess to a murder which he had not committed. He confessed simply to escape the mental agony of the "third degree" questioning. He was executed. After his death his innocence was established. That may be the only case of the kind. We cannot say. It may be that all other cases are only like that of the Chinaman, in which the police put themselves to infinite pains in order to get themselves fooled. But whatever the truth, enough has been seen of the "third degree" to make it probable that every respectable American will wish to have it abolished on the ground that it conflicts with common-sense as much as with humanity. Torture never did, and never can, prove anything. History has shown that the tenacity, even the callousness, of victims in resisting torture equalled the ingenuity and persistence of the tormentors. Resistance proves as little as surrender. Religious devotees, the pro- fessors of shining and heroic faith, should have a dignified history of torture to themselves, for their resolution is a thing apart: If there is a source of endurance more splendid than religious faith, it is surely the unwillingness of a man to betray his friends. But the prisoner who is conscious of his guilt under such a method as the "third degree" has a stronger motive for coming through the ordeal than an innocent man has. That is an unnatural inversion which alone condemns the "third degree" as futile.
The name "third degree" has such ugly associations that one marvels at the daring or cynicism which ventured to revive it. In the dungeons of Nuremberg, and similar places, the torture known as the "second degree" included the crushing of the head, feet, or thumbs, while the "third degree" included burning the sides, arms, and finger-nails with red-hot irons. Probably the use of the latter name in New York is supposed, however, to denote a certain circum- spectness, leniency, or at least legitimacy, in the application of mental torture. But we should still think it utterly wrong even if it were in name and fact torture of the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh degree. It is well known that after torture had been generally abolished in England, where it was never legal and never common—perhaps it was even unknown before the fourteenth century—it was retained in the trials of witches. At length it became evident that there was a remarkable singularity in the confessions of the so-called witches; they all adopted the same form, and in many cases the same words; there was a kind of professional under- standing apparently among the sisterhood as to what it would be best to say if the worst came to the worst. No one who is not ignorant of that established example of vague preparatory collusion could ever, we should think, look with anything but contempt on efforts to arrive at the truth by means of torture. Voltaire denounced such folly with pitiless logic. Even the Romans, wl,o were good lawyers, if unmerciful masters, recognised the impropriety of torture. "The deceitful and dangerous experiment of the criminal quaestion, as it is emphatically styled," says Gibbon, "was admitted rather than approved in the jurisprudence of the Romans. They applied this sanguinary mode of examination only to servile bodies, whose sufferings were seldom weighed by those haughty republicans in the scale of justice or humanity : but they would never consent to violate the sacred person of a citizen till they possessed the clearest evidence of his guilt." We venture to hope that the latest experience of the "third degree" in New York, which seems considerably to outrun the vices of "reconstructing the crime" in France, and which, after all, is only the newest kind of way of doing the oldest kind of wrong, will cause every one to see that it is removed a great many more than three degrees from usefulness and decency.
Previous page
