>>I didn't think you could get a co-conspirator to testify in court against his fellows no matter what you did to or for him. It seems utterly unfeasible to me. And even if you could, how credible would he be? Now, perhaps American juries would not look too closely at whether the witness is credible and just take the opportunity to convict everyone tried, which cuts the legs out from under the habeas corpus right. Then, I suppose, we'd have a movement to free all the unjustly convicted rather than the unjustly held without trial.<<
Karen -
We got Nazi SS officers, even some who started out as complete fanatics and hard cases, to give us all kinds of good information in WWII, without ever torturing one of them. In general, It is very common for co-conspirators to testify against one another. Happens all the time in organized crime cases, drug rings, etc.
If you're suggesting that it will never happen in the case of terrorists, because somehow they are completely different from all other types of criminals we have every had to deal with, then I would just want to know why you think so. They may be dedicated fanatics, but they are still human. Humans respond to certain kinds of treatment and certain kinds of interrogation techniques. Torture, it turns out, doesn't generally yield reliable information.
I don't think that just dropping all the terrorists into our legal system will make everything OK. I also don't think we need to reinvent the wheel with regard to rules of evidence, etc., just because we're dealing with particularly scary people.
- Allen |
