Tortured Souls
Torture (last updated February 21, 2005) (back to top)
Alan defends a police officer accused of torturing a suspect connected to a kidnapping.
While no federal law specifically bans torture within the United States, prohibitions on torture can be seen as embedded in the Constitution, specifically the Fifth Amendment, which specifically provides that "no person," whether or not he or she is a citizen, shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Any government agent or official who violates due process risks civil or criminal liability for such actions.
Still, such prohibitions can be difficult to enforce and have some exceptions.
First, it may be difficult to prosecute those who engage in torture, due to the difficulty in amassing evidence and given juries' likely sympathies to claims that such acts might have been necessary given the circumstances. Still, the conviction of military personnel associated with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (Spc. Charles Graner was convicted on Jan. 14, 2005 for his role and was then sentenced to 10 years in a military prison) indicates that torture not associated with public emergencies may not be accepted.
Second, some in the Bush administration did try to define "torture" in a much narrower way than is commonly accepted.
Federal law (18 USC 2340A) does define acts "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering … upon another person within his custody or physical control" as torture. This law is limited in scope since it only makes torture a criminal offense when committed outside the United States (some in Congress also have sought to amend this law and make it applicable within the United States). Still, it stands in contrast to an August 2002 memo that then White House Counsel (now Attorney General) Albert Gonzales received from a Justice Department lawyer (on-line as a PDF here). This memo defined torture narrowly in order to allow interrogation techniques that might be "cruel" or "inhuman" so long as they did not provide pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
(Gonzales was grilled in a January 2005 Senate confirmation hearing about this memo; Gonzales renounced the use of torture in this hearing.)
Third, evidence obtained through torture could be used in certain circumstances, which does allow the government occasionally to benefit from the use of torture.
For example, constitutional protections such as the Fourth and Fifth Amendments do not apply to foreign governments and do not limit their actions. Thus, a foreign government could conceivably torture someone and then turn over the resulting statements to the United States. The United States government could then use the statements to build its own case against a suspect, as some say it did in the case of Abdul Murad, a terrorist captured in the Philippines in 1995 and reportedly tortured before being turned over to the United States.
At the same time, courts have refused to admit some evidence obtained through the use of torture. For example, a statement obtained by Mexican police who threatened to kill the defendant, beat him about the face and body, poured water through his nostrils while he was bound and gagged, and applied electric shocks to his wet body was excluded from evidence at trial in a 1987 case because the conduct "shock[ed] the conscience." A court also noted in a 1988 case that statements obtained via torture would be inadmissible if U.S. agents were so involved in the foreign officials' actions that the conduct was effectively a joint venture between them.
Sources: International Criminal Law, 2000 edition (pages 515-34). Stephen A. Saltzburg, The Reach of the Bill of Rights Beyond the Terra Firma of the United States, reprinted in International Aspects of Criminal Law: Enforcing United States Law in the World Community, edited by Richard Lillich (1981). Jordan J. Paust, Constituional Limitations on Extraterritorial Federal Power: Persons, Property, Due Process, and the Seizure of Evidence Abroad, in International Criminal Law: A Guide to U.S. Practice and Procedure, edited by Ved P. Nanda and M. Cherif Bassiounni (Practising Law Institute, 1987). Human Rights Watch, The Legal Prohibition against Torture, is on-line here. Supreme Court cases are on-line via Findlaw.com.
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Contract to Marry (last updated February 21, 2005) (back to top)
Donny Crane, who once thought he was Denny Crane's biological son, represents the woman who sues the man who left her at the altar. He loses the case, though he actually should have easily won a motion to dismiss before the case ever got to a jury and he should be able to appeal successfully.
Courts will generally not enforce a breach of contract to marry, and any lawsuit based on a breach of such a contract should be thrown out quickly and without a trial unless there are other, more viable allegations involved. Lawsuits based on breach of contract to marry, or on the "alienation of affections," used to be allowed under common law, but are now banned by statute in most states.
Chapter 207, Section 47A of the General Laws of Massachusetts (on-line here), for example, holds that "breach of contract to marry shall not constitute an injury or wrong recognized by law, and no action, suit or proceeding shall be maintained thereafter." New York, Ohio and Arizona are just some of the many other states that have statutorily abolished actions based on two people not getting married.
Denny Crane effectively argues that the way the man decided to call off the engagement constitutes a civil claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Massachusetts law does recognize such civil claims if the plaintiff can show four elements defined by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court :
- "(1) that the defendant intended to inflict emotional distress, or knew or should have known that emotional distress was the likely result of his conduct, but also
- "(2) that the defendant's conduct was extreme and outrageous, beyond all possible bounds of decency and utterly intolerable in a civilized community,
- "(3) the actions of the defendant were the cause of the plaintiff's distress, and
- "(4) the emotional distress suffered by the plaintiff was severe and of such a nature that no reasonable person could be expected to endure it."
Courts generally focus on the second element in deciding whether such a claim can go forward. Courts have rejected many claims, including one brought by a husband and his teenaged son against the man who conducted an open affair with the husband's wife for 11 months before the husband filed for divorce; an appellate court dismissed such a lawsuit in July 2000 on the grounds that the affair was not outrageous enough behavior. Similarly, a court probably would easily reject Denny Crane's client's suit as not involving conduct "beyond all possible bounds of decency and utterly intolerable in a civilized community" given the available facts.
Sources: Chapter 207, Section 47A of the General Laws of Massachusetts is on-line here. Tetrault v. Mahoney, Hawkes & Goldings (Mass. 1997) (discussing intentional infliction of emotional distress) is on-line here. Quinn v. Walsh (Mass. App. Ct. 2000) is on-line here.
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