The Death of Legal Torture

TLDR: The story begins with the collapse of the early medieval vision of reality, which assumed a continuing interpenetration of the human world and the world of the deity, and involves the abolition of judicial torture on the continent of Europe.

Abstract: Torture and the criminal law have a long and ignominious association that continues to the present day. In his short book, poised gracefully between simplicity and learning, John Langbein discusses only one of the many forms of this association. He is concerned with torture as a legally permissible technique of obtaining evidence from the defendant in the course of judicial interrogation. In a further narrowing of focus, the author approaches judicial torture as a student of the law of evidence. He centers on the relationship of torture to standards of proof sufficiency. His main purpose is to propose a novel thesis about the abolition of judicial torture on the continent of Europe. The story begins with the collapse of the early medieval vision of reality, which assumed a continuing interpenetration of the human world and the world of the deity. This conception of reality was reflected in the magical modes of proof predicated on the assumption of divine intervention in legal proceedings. When this operative assumption became problematic, sacred legitimation of judgments had to be replaced by a secular one. One answer to this problem developed in the Roman-canon procedure, where judges, no longer able to consult the deity, began to interrogate persons likely to possess information about crimes. But, says Langbein, the subjective beliefs of terrestrial judges as to what evidence was sufficient to support a judgment could not be accepted in the afterglow of a world where court decisions were legitimated by divine intervention-especially when serious crime was in-