Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 5-2015
Journal / Book Title
Columbia Human Rights Law Review
Abstract
This article examines the use of torture by the U.S. government in the context of the late 20th-century preventive turn in criminal justice. Challenging the assumption that the use of “enhanced interrogation tactics” in the war on terror was an exceptional deviation from accepted norms, this article suggests that this deviation began decades before the terror attacks, in the context of conventional criminal procedure. I point to the use of the “ticking time bomb hypothetical,” and its connection to criminal procedure’s “kidnapping hypothetical.” Using case law and criminal procedure textbooks I trace the employment of that narrative over several decades, prior to 2001, including growing support for the use of physical brutality in obtaining information from criminal suspects. Far from “unimaginable,” I argue that the use of torture had been imagined, and gained increasing acceptance, in the increasingly preventive focus of these standard criminal procedural debates.
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Laguardia, Francesca, "Imagining the Unimaginable: Torture and the Criminal Law" (2015). Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 178.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/justice-studies-facpubs/178
Published Citation
Laguardia, Francesca. "Imagining the Unimaginable: Torture and the Criminal Law." Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 46 (2014): 48. Harvard
Included in
Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Other Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons, Other Sociology Commons, Peace and Conflict Studies Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public Administration Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Social Justice Commons, Social Policy Commons, Terrorism Studies Commons