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Is Torture an Effective Interrogation Device?

As early as the third century A.D., the great Roman Jurist Ulpian noted that information obtained through torture was not to be trusted because some people are “so susceptible to pain that they will tell any lie rather than suffer it” (Peters, 1996). This warning about the unreliability of information extracted through the use of torture has echoed across the centuries. As one CIA operative who participated in torture during the Vietnam War put it, “We had people who were willing to confess to anything if we would just stop torturing them” (Andersen, 2004, p. 3). Indeed, the Army Field Manual explains that strategically useful information is best obtained from prisoners who are treated humanely, and that information obtained through torture has produced faulty intelligence (Leahy, 2005).

It is important to acknowledge that torture may sometimes lead to the dis- closure of accurate information. That is, confronted with excruciating pain, some

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people tell what they know. However, many survivors of torture report that the truthful information they revealed was intentionally incomplete or mixed with false information (Harbury, 2005). The goal was to appease the torturer, not to reveal the truth. And, because the interrogators were not omniscient, they could not discern which bits of information were true and which were false. Misreading their victims, torturers often failed to recognize the truth and continued to inflict pain. Victims continued to disclose, often fabricating information to in an effort to stop the pain (Conroy, 2000; Haritos-Fatouros, 2003). Many survivors of tor- ture report that they would have said anything to “make the torture stop” (Mayer, 2005; McCoy, 2006). And, even in cases where torture may have preceded the disclosure of useful information, it is impossible to know whether less coercive forms of interrogation might have yielded the same or even better results.

False Confessions in the Criminal Justice System

Because torture-based interrogations are generally conducted in secret, there is no direct research on the relationship between torture and false confessions. However, there is irrefutable evidence from the civilian criminal justice system that techniques much less coercive than torture have produced verifiably false confessions in a surprising number of cases. An analysis of DNA exonerations of innocent but wrongly convicted criminal defendants revealed that false confes- sions are a major cause of wrongful convictions, accounting for 24% of the total (see www.innocenceproject.org). In a large-scale study, Drizin and Leo (2004) identified 125 proven false confessions over a 30-year period. Two characteristics of these known false confessions are notable. First, they tended to occur in the most serious cases—80% confessed to the crime of murder, and another 9% confessed to the crime of rape. Second, because only proven false confessions were included in the study (e.g., cases in which the confessor was later exonerated by DNA evidence, or cases where the defendant was in another country when the crime occurred); the actual number of false confessions over that period is far higher. The fundamental finding from this and other studies of false confessions is that as the coerciveness of the interrogation increases, so does the probability of eliciting a false confession (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004; Leo, 2008; Leo, Costanzo, & Shaked, 2009). Because the amount of coercion in torture-based interrogations is exponentially greater than that in criminal interrogations torture is likely to elicit a substantially higher portion of false confessions.