America may have a Democrat president charming the rest of the world but at home Cheney’s heirs are still in charge. And they’re still gaily torturing away willy-nilly, with judicial approval.
After police lost or contaminated an already willingly given DNA sample, Niagara County Court Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza issued an order requiring the suspect to provide another. Not so unusual, you might think except the order was issued ex-parte – which meant defence counsel had no chance to object.
Odd. Why ex-parte? Why would the defence object to a DNA test? It’s a quick and painless operation. Well actually no, it’s not. Not the way Niagara County does it. William N Grigg describes what happned to Ryan S. Smith of Niagara Falls, New York, a 21-year-old charged with burglary:
Smith was brought in handcuffs to the police station and informed that the investigators had been authorized to use physical force. Although nobody intended to harm him, Smith was told, the sample was going to be surrendered; it was just a question of how much he wanted to endure before it was. Smith still refused to comply.
Confronted with an intransigent suspect who refused to provide critical evidence, the investigators reluctantly strapped the handcuffed Smith to a downward sloping table, covered his face with a towel, and waterboarded him. He broke within seconds, and meekly permitted the DNA sample to be taken.
On the basis of the DNA evidence, Smith was hit with a 24-count criminal indictment. He was also charged with “criminal contempt of court” for forcing his interrogators to torture him.
When Smith’s defense counsel filed a motion to suppress the evidence based on Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections, the same Judge who issued the ex parte orders produced a ruling validating the use of waterboarding as means of forcing compliance, as long as it’s not done “maliciously” or to “excess.”
This account is true and accurate in every detail, save one – the specific torture protocol that was used to compel Smith to surrender a sample of his DNA.
He wasn’t subjected to water torture; instead, he was given a brief taste of electroshock torture by way of a Taser that was used to inflict a “drive stun.” This involves placing the prongs of the device directly on the body of the victim for a brief, painful, paralyzing charge.
Oh, so that’s why it was ex-parte. I think should think the defence would have been sure to object if they’d known their client was to be tortured into compliance with a taser.
It may have been only a tasering (!) and not an actual waterboarding but that’s hardly the point. It was no abberation; those were no bad apples or rogue cops acting on their own warped initiative. The official torturers were acting on the direct orders of both a DA and a judge.
As Detective Lt. William Thomson would later testify, Assistant Niagara County D.A. Doreen M. Hoffmann, who is presiding over the prosecution of Ryan Smith, instructed the police that “we could use the minimum force that was necessary” to force the suspect to submit to a DNA test.
Now, think carefully about that formulation: In principle, it authorizes the use of any amount of force needed to extract the sample, since the critical term is “necessary.” As long as the police were reasonably careful in calibrating the duress the applied, they could continue escalating the level of force until it broke the suspect; wherever they end up would obviously be the “minimum” necessary to accomplish their objectives.
Exactly. It doesn’t matter what method of torture the official torturers use; it’s almost irrelevant, though there’s something particularly distasteful and reminiscent of Pinochet’s Chile about Tasers. Torture is torture is torture. You’re using pain to make someone do something. Once that’s been judicially ordered the dam is breached and torture is official policy. In no time at all physical coercion becomes the norm – never the last option, but always the first. It’s practical everyday fascism; it may be red in tooth and claw but it’s always covered by the paperwork.
This week we’ve seen waterboarding reportedly used in London against drug suspects by the Met. Bad apples, say the police. That time it wasn’t, thankfully, court-ordered and was entirely unofficial – but given that British police methods slavishly follow the US as night follows day, it can’t be long before it is.