How Should Judge Candlass Rule?

[Wojtek_Pod]

They got the confession while the defendant was under the threat of losing her health or life, so I think the confession is inadmissable in the court of law.

[Sute]

They interrogated her for 5 hours without the pheromones. It was only when Luga was brought in that the suspect was introduced to them. so the prosecutions statement that the defendant withstood the pheromones for the whole interrogation false. The evidence should be thrown out.

Luga was there for the entire time on the tape. The suspect was able to hold out under the pheromones for five hours. Of course, that doesn't mean that she wasn't drugged. I agree that the confession should be thrown out for many of the reasons that have been brought up in this thread.

[Chad]

Lugasharmanaska's action was incidental to the entire process was it not? Nothing more than the same as a truck backfiring outside convincing you that God has set your date to die, or some other sort of superstitious nonsense which sometimes makes paranoid criminals confess. Not the Succubus' fault that she got hungry while interviewing the woman, is it? Nothing happened between the two except for an exchange of words. This isn't waterboarding, and a reasonable judge could well conclude that our dear little traitor had no actual reason to expect that she would actually lose parts of her body as demon food; she was simply being scared.

Except Luga did much more than just use words. She admitted under oath that she entangled the accussed mind into seeing an illusion where she was threatened with being eaten. If you want to argue that an illusion is different than reality that is fine but you certainly can't argue that luga didn't do anything.

Is saying to a suspected child molester that you're going to put him in genpop unconstitutional as well? Because this really isn't any different from that.

There is a HUGE difference between saying that if convicted you will go to prison and confess now or I am going to blow your brains out. The former is just the result of being convicted of the crime while the latter has nothing to do with their conviction and is an extralegal attempt to get them to confess.



The best real world analogy that I can think of is if a police officer points an unloaded gun at a suspects genitals and tells them they are going to pull the trigger if the suspect doesn’t confess to the crime. (Ie in both cases the suspect thinks they are in mortal danger while in reality there is no chance of anything happening.)

In my opinion the intent and motives of the interrogator isn’t even remotely relevant. The only thing that matters is state of mind of the suspect. If they can reasonable believe that their life is in danger than that is more than enough to toss out the confession. (That doesn’t mean the government can’t use the information obtained they just can’t use it in a court of law to convict anyone.)

[R011]

Did you support the waterboarding of suspected/known al-Qaeda members at Gitmo, by any chance?

I do (not that it was done at Gitmo or has been done for several years). The information has proved invaluable. Any information from those interrogations, though, is inadmissible in court. Use outside of court is a different matter.

This confession may not be the only evidence against her and they may still have grounds to hold her for espionage and treason.

She was both drugged and coerced. That confession is so clearly inadmissible, that I'm surprised the prosecution is even defending it, let alone introducing it as evidence.

[VX-145]

Did you support the waterboarding of suspected/known al-Qaeda members at Gitmo, by any chance?

Actually, no. Hence why I was emphasising the entire "In light of the circumstancrs" thing; the situation in the story (That is, the eternal slavery to another species or something along the same lines IE an all-or-nothing scenario) is the ONLY situation in which I would consider torture to be a viable option.

The reason I bring it up is because they believed that in light of the circumstances (i.e. getting these people to spill the beans about possible future terrorist plots, before they could be brought to fruition,) so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques (pronounced: "torture") were authorized by The Powers That Be.

By any other name, this is what's known as "making excuses." Which, while it may give you a warm-fuzzy, doesn't necessarily hold up in court.

I have to repeat myself here; the ONLY time I could condone torture FOR ANY REASON, is if the Death Star showed up in orbit and it was the ONLY way to stop it firing. I agree with you, torture is bad (mmkay? (:P)), all I'm saying is that the ends do occasionally justify the means.


PS. Apologies if I'm sounding incoherent or just plain stupid, 9:54 pm is not the time I do my best thinking.

[Thanas]

Did you support the waterboarding of suspected/known al-Qaeda members at Gitmo, by any chance?

I do (not that it was done at Gitmo or has been done for several years).

You, sir, are a barbarian. I hope you soon get arrested in a third-world hellhole so that you might experience some of these techniques first hand. Doesn't matter if you are innocent, since according to you, it is okay to torture suspects.

[Jamesfirecat]

(I voted against it being allowable)

By the way what do you guys think of (if you care to comment on) an idea I had for using sucubi in future court cases over on the main thread?


That said in the future as a way of breaking down criminals it would seem that as part of their Miranda rights there should be a bit included about how they may experience Sucubus entanglement related to the crimes they are believed to have comited. Or possibly it becomes something you need to get a court order for ("We have here permission from a judge to have you be entangled within the following situation, thought the images and sensations you are about to see and feel are entirely fictious and can not harm you though they may prove to be disturbing. Based on the nature of your supposed crimes you will experince .... in our hopes that this experience will leave you realizing just how wrong the actions words and convince you to confess to your wrong doings...) Then during interrigation the person will be subjected to the best we can create of a victums recollection of the crime. In this case the girl should probably have been entangled into knowing how it felt to be attacked by Uriel for example.

It would only be allowed to be done once, to prevent the "confess in order to make it stop" problem that causes information gained through torture to be untrustworthy by nature, and with consuling made available afterwords (and paid by the court for in the case of a non guilty verdict) but since if I remember correctly seeing the films of the concentration camps at Nuremburg left even some of the top Nazi's feeling horrified and disgusted, imagine what having the genuine feeling of a concentration camp member would have done to them!

[Simon_Jester]

It was only images, right? That was the impression I got from the chapter, but I've been known to miss out on subtleties before. If it was only images, I'm inclined to allow it, if it involved the victim actually feeling the pain of being eaten, I'm all against it. Most of the trauma here seemed to stem from the girl's religious background and Luga's nature, made it hard to figure out how much the images actually did on top of that stress.

There's a big problem lying in here.

If I just say something, you can generally choose (to some degree) how much you'll let it shake you. But with demonic mind entanglement like what Luga was doing, you can actually make her think it's happening. You can create an arbitrary threat level, and make the threat arbitrarily imminent.

If one of the human FBI investigators had held a scalpel up to Ms. Branch's breast and threatened to start cutting, I think the consensus would be much stronger that something inadmissible was going on. But it's an empirical fact that to Branch's perceptions, that's precisely the sort of thing that happened. And if it's not acceptable to mutilate a suspect during interrogation, it can't be acceptable to convince the suspect that you're going to mutilate them.

Now, under the circumstances, Candless might very well rule in favor of the prosecution. But I don't think he should do that. I think he would be falling down on the job if he did, and I do not think that he would be truly promoting the interests of his country even if he thought he was.

We aren't paying him to uphold the interests of his country (our country) by gathering intelligence for the government, or even by assisting others in doing so. We're paying him to uphold the interests of his country by keeping its constitution secure and the rights of its citizens safe.
________

Besides the fact that she was under duress, she was drugged. The Prosecutor acted as if the ineffectiveness of the drugging proved it didn't occur. If you drugged me with LSD, sodium pentathol or xanax today for the purpose of interrogation and I didn't respond, that doesn't mean that the drugging was okay or didn't happen. The whole purpose of bringing Luga in was to use her pheromones to get information from Branch.

Agreed.

Frankly, bringing Luga in on this was the FBI MAJORLY dropping the ball.

Agreed.
________

I have to repeat myself here; the ONLY time I could condone torture FOR ANY REASON, is if the Death Star showed up in orbit and it was the ONLY way to stop it firing. I agree with you, torture is bad (mmkay? (:P)), all I'm saying is that the ends do occasionally justify the means.

There's a problem with that, though.

David Luban explains it in depth in his essay "Liberalism, Torture and the Ticking Bomb." The relevant bit begins on page 1440 (don't panic, the first page is numbered 1425, and it's a journal article so a lot of the pages are about half footnotes).

I'll summarize the issue here. When talking about torture, we often construct a "ticking time bomb" scenario, in which we have to get information out of a suspect in a hurry to prevent some disaster. The bomb is ticking, we only have two hours, and the ONLY way to get information from the guy in two hours is by beating it out of him.

Firstly, even in specific examples where someone actually did get time-critical information out of a prisoner through torture, we often find that long periods of torture were required... before the prisoner actually gave any information that would have justified the torture. Luban cites a case in the Philippines where a bomb maker spilled the beans about an Al Qaeda assassination plot after weeks of torture... during which time the Filipino police didn't know of anything specific to beat out of him and were, I can only assume, beating him for pleasure or as a sort of perverse fishing expedition on the off chance that he had useful information for them.

Secondly, even when you have reason to believe that the prisoner knows things that are worth torturing out of him, you can't know. People have been falsely suspected of espionage before, you know. How long do you keep beating them before you give up? If they don't tell you what you want to know, is it because they haven't cracked yet, or because they honestly don't know?

Thirdly, imagine that I accept the argument that avoiding future harm to civilians justifies torturing a prisoner, and that the arithmetic justifies the torture in that case. Imagine that there's a 10% chance that by torturing the right person, I can get information that will let me save a million people (in this story, some technique that will let me find a portal to reach Heaven). 10% of a million people is a hundred thousand. Does that mean that I am justified in torturing, say, fifty thousand people to give me that 10% chance of saving a million? What if none of those fifty thousand people know anything? Am I further justified in grabbing another ten or twenty thousand? Remember, on percentages we still come out ahead. But even if we ignore the fact that this kind of arithmetic is horrifying, accepting that sometimes horrifying math is compelling... what are the future consequences of living in a society that's decided it's acceptable to torture the entire population of a medium sized town on the (low) chance of avoiding a disaster? Even assuming they got the math right this time, what security do I have that they'll do the math correctly next time, that they won't just be torturing masses of people to avoid a disaster that existed only in their minds?

To quote the author: "The real debate is not between one guilty man's pain and hundreds of innocent lives. It is the debate between the certainty of anguish and the mere possibility of learning something vital and saving lives."

And on top of that, there's another risk. If we're going to do "ticking bomb" torture effectively, we need people on call who know how to torture, who are good at it. In real life, that is not a one-off decision; you cannot find or create such people on the spur of the moment. You need, not just the decision to practice torture just this once and never again, but a systematic set of rules about when it is acceptable to torture a prisoner and what to do when that situation arises. You need professional torturers.

And once you create a professional cadre of torturers, how do you guarantee that they will torture responsibly, and only in situations that really are "ticking bomb" scenarios? The fact that this phrase probably sounds wrong to you should be a tip-off; "torture responsibly" is practically an oxymoron.

Professional interrogation, whether or not torture is allowed, is by nature a very nasty business. Not many people can do it well, and squeamish people won't be good at it at all. So the interrogators are not going to be the ones who restrain themselves from using loathsome tactics; if they weren't willing to use loathsome tactics they'd find another line of work. Once you remove the restraints placed on them from above by hard and fast rules, they're going to go lower and dirtier until they hit the next set of rules... if there.
________

Anyway, for those reasons and some other related ones, I don't think it's wise to argue in favor of permitting torture "only in emergencies." The practical problems with the idea overwhelm the theoretical merits, and practice is more important than theory.

[Sea Skimmer]

Mind entanglement might as well be the same thing as using drugs, its blatantly illegal. Plus it’s not like it’s that awful if they can’t use the confession, she’s in the military after all so she doesn’t get to walk away from this even if no other compelling evidence of treason can be found. Building a gravel road to nowhere on Kiska ought to do fine.

[Serafina]

Ok, so i obviously are a moron for not seeing this thread an posting this in the Pantheocide-thread:

They influenced her via mind-influencing substances. Whether or not they were effective does not matter.

Luga used threath on that woman. Whether or not she would have done it is irrelevant to that fact.

Is Luga guilty of any crime? I would say yes. Not for her miamsa - she can not controll it, after all. But for the mindrape - she invaded the mind of an unwilling woman and caused her considerable harm.
I would rule this as an assault, but at the very least as a threath of physical violence.

But, as they say, extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures.
I would like to see the following: Luga is guilty of assaulting that woman, but she is not convicted - after all, the US are already using shady methods in the "war against terror".
Given that Heaven is a way more real and dangerous threat than this, borderline actions should at least be possible (if not universally allowed).

[Chad]

(I voted against it being allowable)

By the way what do you guys think of (if you care to comment on) an idea I had for using sucubi in future court cases over on the main thread?


That said in the future as a way of breaking down criminals it would seem that as part of their Miranda rights there should be a bit included about how they may experience Sucubus entanglement related to the crimes they are believed to have comited.

I would argue that those are the kinds of images I would not want in my head and are not the kinds of images I want in the head of any innocent person. That sounds like a perfect recipe for Post traumatic stress disorder.

I would also argue that the majority of violent criminals are seriously lacking in empathy and as such this is not very likely to convince them to confess. If it was changed to e part of their prison sentence that they would have to undergo this kind of treatment that would be something I might support. (Depending on the effectiveness of the treatment and the cost of doing it.)

[Gil Hamilton]

At this point the United States, hell most of humanity, is in a formally declared war against Heaven. That being the case, and in light of the fact that they captured the spy by feeding her false information, there's already indirect evidence of the girl's scheming with Michael and against humanity in general. Perhaps it should have been handled by Military Intelligence, rather than the FBI, but I imagine manpower's stretched just as thin as production capacity and they were called in for the interrogation because they're skilled at it.

Stuart, on page 100 of the story thread, revealed that Spoiler

the video taping of the interrogation will show the FBI agents and Lugasharmanaska standing, without any contact with the suspect. In other words, there will be no physical evidence of coercion.

Luga's miasma may provide a corner for a defense attorney to pick apart the prosecution's case, but there's also one other consideration: this is set in the current day, with B. Obama as President. To my knowledge, even though Guantanamo is/is going to be/was closed, U.S. rules against enemy combatants, as well as the Patriot Act, are still in effect. I can't see this girl walking under any scenario. In fact, the cruelest punishment for her betrayal would be a life sentence in prison, followed by a default second life in Hell.

The obvious problem with that is that Miss Branch is NOT an enemy combatant. She was a US citizen that was arrested by the FBI (which by definition investigates criminal matters). That makes her trial a criminal trial with specific crimes and due process. The USA PATRIOT Act has nothing to do with it.

This automatically means that, like any evidence gathered illegally, if her confession was gathered under extreme duress, such as as far as her senses could tell she was being physically assaulted and possibly having parts of her consumed by someone working on the behalf of the government, then the judge will have to instruct the jury to disregard her confession. Luga has admitted that that was exactly what she did to Miss Branch and given that it is illegal to gather information that way, unless her defense attorneys are utterly stupid, then she actually stands a good chance of being found innocent of the charges against her.

[declan]

In this case I would dismiss the charges and let her walk. It seems to me that its politically more expedient and does not set a precedent for a legal case in the future when Earth has reverted to a peacetime cycle.

In the real world, this lady would be burned as a intel asset for the other side and either pulled out or shunned, how Michael-lan does intel ops is in question. While we cannot use the information harvested to roll up the network through legal means, still does not deny the value of the harvested information for the military.

Declan

[R011]

Did you support the waterboarding of suspected/known al-Qaeda members at Gitmo, by any chance?

I do (not that it was done at Gitmo or has been done for several years).

You, sir, are a barbarian. I hope you soon get arrested in a third-world hellhole so that you might experience some of these techniques first hand. Doesn't matter if you are innocent, since according to you, it is okay to torture suspects.

If he were a suspect in a criminal proceeding (or should I say, only a subject in a criminal proceeding) as opposed to an enemy combatant not covered by the Geneva Convention, then it your point would be relevant. He wasn't, so it isn't. If I ever become the undoubted number two man in an international terror organization, I'll regret my stand here.

Do note, though, that the senior Al Qaeda people so treated supported and carried out stuff far more brutal than a simulated drowning. Karma's a bitch.

[Beowulf]

This is a bit of a solipistic argument... perception is reality, and so the reality is that Ms Branch could have been accurately have been described as having had force threatened to coerce a confession. That seems to be a fairly obviously bad idea. However, that isn't to say that the confession can't be used to guide to other investigations to people that should have eyes kept on them.

[Thanas]

I do (not that it was done at Gitmo or has been done for several years).

You, sir, are a barbarian. I hope you soon get arrested in a third-world hellhole so that you might experience some of these techniques first hand. Doesn't matter if you are innocent, since according to you, it is okay to torture suspects.

If he were a suspect in a criminal proceeding (or should I say, only a subject in a criminal proceeding) as opposed to an enemy combatant not covered by the Geneva Convention, then it your point would be relevant. He wasn't, so it isn't.

The UN convention against torture still applies whether he is an enemy combatant or not, so your amateuring lawyering falls flat.

If I ever become the undoubted number two man in an international terror organization, I'll regret my stand here.

Do note, though, that the senior Al Qaeda people so treated supported and carried out stuff far more brutal than a simulated drowning. Karma's a bitch.

Oh, it is all about the senior people now, is it? When you supported it being carried out on suspected people back then, right? Would you like to backpedal some more?

Thus, we get back to my orignial point: You are a barbarian.

[Mr Bean]

Do note, though, that the senior Al Qaeda people so treated supported and carried out stuff far more brutal than a simulated drowning. Karma's a bitch.

So do you support removing the skin of suspects one inch at a time? Ripping off their fingernails? Locking them in a metal box in the hot sun for days at a time with water popred in a hole at the top and them being unable to stand up, let alone turn around?


As soon as you accept one form of torture as acceptable, you can not logically argue against any other kind of torture without having to disprove the arguments you used to accept the first form. If something is torture, then it's torture.

Also as noted elsewhere on previous torture debates. You know once you start using torture, you find an awful lot of witches?

[Eulogy]

The confession is thrown out. That doesn't mean the cunt's troubles are over.

[Chris OFarrell]

As much as I might loathe the idea of letting the traitor go, legally, thats the way it works -unless of course the Patriot Act has been beefed up since the war started in this universe, and this falls under 'coercive techniques' or something.

I wonder if OTOH we get the FBI investigating all the other traitors this girl fingered and scoping THEM out properly, charging them properly and getting THEM all to point at this crazy girl and get her that way...

[Simon_Jester]

Double jeopardy, I'm afraid.

And the FBI is going to have to be very careful about how it uses evidence from the tainted Branch interrogation to pursue other spies.

[R011]

So do you support removing the skin of suspects one inch at a time? Ripping off their fingernails? Locking them in a metal box in the hot sun for days at a time with water popred in a hole at the top and them being unable to stand up, let alone turn around?

If those things worked better than what was used, then yes. As they don't work any better than the techniques used, there's no point to them so I don't support them.

I'd rather do those things, though, than have several thousand more victims on my conscience. How about you?

You know once you start using torture, you find an awful lot of witches?

We already found the "witches" here, and unlike the victims of the witch hunts they actually exist. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for instance, even made videos boasting of his terror activities.

Waterboarding wasn't to extort confessions. That's pointless as you note. It was to gain actionable intelligence.

[R011]

As much as I might loathe the idea of letting the traitor go, legally, thats the way it works

I'm fairly sure she can still be held as an enemy combatant under current legislation, even if she can no longer be prosecuted for treason and espionage. That assumes, of course, that they had no other evidence against her that was admissible. That she was caught passing along classified information may well be evidence enough. Recall, Stuart wrote:

"She'd been trapped by the oldest of all investigative techniques, information leaked to various people with subtle differences that identified the recipients."

[LadyTevar]

Fuck.

I wanted to keep the confession, but there's just no way to justify what was done. Branch was drugged then mind-raped to get the confession.

[Simon_Jester]

We already found the "witches" here, and unlike the victims of the witch hunts they actually exist. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for instance, even made videos boasting of his terror activities.

Waterboarding wasn't to extort confessions. That's pointless as you note. It was to gain actionable intelligence.

And if your "actionable intelligence" includes names... what is your security that you get real names, or the names of real terrorists, as opposed to getting the name of Hamza the rug merchant?

That's what the "you will find many witches" problem means. Once you start torturing people, you will find exactly what they think you are looking for, in great quantities... regardless of whether it actually exists. That's why you find witches when you torture accused witches. The witches don't exist, but the woman on the table knows damn well that you believe they do, and she'd rather make up names than have her arms and legs ripped out of their sockets.

Do the same thing to terrorists and you will find many terrorists and terror plots... some of which might even exist, but virtually none of which will be nearly as dangerous as your victim wants you to believe.

[bobnik]

I have to agree with the majority opinion that her legal rights as an American citizen have been violated. However, I should think it would be easy to hold on to her - some form of protective custody would seem to be in order. After all, she has been brainwashed by enemy combatants into believing that they serve an omniscient omnipotent lord - which is clearly crazy, right? She has been in the presence of creatures from other dimensions who want to kill us all - some kind of medical quarantine is in order, especially as the enemy has already used biowarfare. And lastly I imagine that there are those among the general population of the nation who would seek to harm her if the full nature of her activities came to light, and they will because this trial will receive media attention - because of Luga's involvement, because of the nature of the charges and probably also because of the mistakes made in handling the intelligence. So I imagine Branch will be in the hands of the Government whether or not the charges are dismissed.