The Third Degree in America The Wickersham Commission's last interim
report is a document on which, if it had been published two hundred or three hundred years ago, civilization could not look back without a feeling of shame and revulsion. To-day its revelations are almost unbelievable. The Commission's comprehensive investigations have dis- closed that the police in more than half the States in the Union habitually use "physical brutality or other forms of cruelty" to extort confessions from persons under arrest. The professional criminal is rarely tortured. It is the poor man, the alien, the man who can get no redress, who is submitted to methods the atrocity of which is not condoned by their service to the cause of justice—witness the Commission's list of a hundred cases in which violence produced a false confession. Beyond a number of recommendations regarding pro- cedure in the courts, where the cumbrous judicial pro- cedure is liable to cheat the police of the credit attending a swift conviction, the Report pins its faith to the Press and public opinion to remedy this national scandal. We trust that the inevitable outcry will result in prompt and effectual action. The American police system would be a disgrace to any country, in any age.
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