Author: Michael Kerrigan
Publisher: Spellmount, Limited Publishers
ISBN: 9781862274358
Category : Criminal justice, Administration of
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description

Author: Michael Kerrigan
Publisher: Spellmount, Limited Publishers
ISBN: 9781862271159
Category : Criminal justice, Administration of
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This text looks at torture tools and techniques used throughout history and upto 20th century inventions, such as the use of electrons to administer electric shocks, as well as enduring instruments such as the rack, which was first mentioned in Ancient Greece.

Author: Brian Innes
Publisher: Amber Books Ltd
ISBN: 190827395X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The History of Torture tells the complete story of torture, from its earliest uses right up to the present day, from the tools and techniques used, to the campaigns to abolish its use.

Author: Erik Ruhling
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
ISBN: 160925905X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
Erik Ruhling assembles an unmatched array of torture tools invented exclusively for the infliction of pain and the ending of life, each carefully researched with an accompanying full-color, highly detailed rendering. This beautifully presented book features classics like the Iron Maiden and the Guillotine, as well as more rarified connoisseur’s fare such as the Scavenger’s Daughter and the Ear Chopper. And if the Tongue Tearer is not to your taste, there’s always the Breast Ripper or the Drunkard’s Cloak.

Author: George Ryley Scott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136191674
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
First published in 2005. Torture, an enduring and seemingly not declining aspect of man's relationship to his fellow man, is an enduring thread through human history. Whether it be practiced by primitive people, the ancient Greeks or the Catholic Church, whether it be ancient China, Japan, 1930's Germany, or Northern Ireland today, torture is alarmingly systematic and consistent in its methods. Impaling, burning, rack or wheel, mutilation, drawing and quartering, burning or hanging alive in chains. A very comprehensive and readable work.

Author: John D. Bessler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611639261
Category : Capital punishment
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Death Penalty as Torture: From the Dark Ages to Abolition was named a Bronze Medalist in the World History category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards and a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards (2018). During the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, Europe's monarchs often resorted to torture and executions. The pain inflicted by instruments of torture--from the thumbscrew and the rack to the Inquisition's tools of torment--was eclipsed only by horrific methods of execution, from breaking on the wheel and crucifixion to drawing and quartering and burning at the stake. The English "Bloody Code" made more than 200 crimes punishable by death, and judicial torture--expressly authorized by law and used to extract confessions--permeated continental European legal systems. Judges regularly imposed death sentences and other harsh corporal punishments, from the stocks and the pillory, to branding and ear cropping, to lashes at public whipping posts. In the Enlightenment, jurists and writers questioned the efficacy of torture and capital punishment. In 1764, the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria--the father of the world's anti-death penalty movement--condemned both practices. And Montesquieu, like Beccaria and others, concluded that any punishment that goes beyond absolute necessity is tyrannical. Traditionally, torture and executions have been viewed in separate legal silos, with countries renouncing acts of torture while simultaneously using capital punishment. The UN Convention Against Torture strictly prohibits physical or psychological torture; not even war or threat of war can be invoked to justify it. But under the guise of "lawful sanctions," some countries continue to carry out executions even though they bear the indicia of torture. In The Death Penalty as Torture, Prof. John Bessler argues that death sentences and executions are medieval relics. In a world in which "mock" or simulated executions, as well as a host of other non-lethal acts, are already considered to be torturous, he contends that death sentences and executions should be classified under the rubric of torture. Unlike in the Middle Ages, penitentiaries--one of the products of the Enlightenment--now exist throughout the globe to house violent offenders. With the rise of life without parole sentences, and with more than four of five nations no longer using executions, The Death Penalty as Torture calls for the recognition of a peremptory, international law norm against the death penalty's use.

Author: Ron E. Hassner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501762052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture, Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide. The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the torture chamber. Their transcripts reveal that Inquisitors used torture deliberately and meticulously, unlike the rash, improvised methods used by the United States after 9/11. In their relentless pursuit of underground Jewish communities in Spain and Mexico, the Inquisition tortured in cold blood. But they treated any information extracted with caution: torture was used to test information provided through other means, not to uncover startling new evidence. Hassner's findings in Anatomy of Torture have important implications for ongoing torture debates. Rather than insist that torture is ineffective, torture critics should focus their attention on the morality of torture. If torture is evil, its efficacy is irrelevant. At the same time, torture defenders cannot advocate for torture as a counterterrorist "quick fix": torture has never located, nor will ever locate, the hypothetical "ticking bomb" that is frequently invoked to justify brutality in the name of security.

Author: Geoffrey Abbott
Publisher: Eric Dobby Publishing
ISBN: 9781858820576
Category : Torture
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Grisly and blackly humorous, the book details the gruesome history of torture, restraint and punishment from the days of the Normans to the late nineteenth century. How it must have felt to be faced with horrifying torture and to have lived during a time when torture was considered an acceptable form of punishment, is chillingly conveyed through eyewitness accounts of the time. This is a fascinating account of torture, in all its various and gruesome guises and provides vivid insights into the lives and times of both torturers and tortured.

Author: Mark P. Donnelly
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780752459479
Category : Corporal punishment
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For millennia, mankind has devised ingenious and diabolical means of inflicting pain on fellow human beings. This deplorable but seemingly universal trait has eaten away at mankind's very claim to civilisation.

Author: Marnia Lazreg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691173486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Torture and the Twilight of Empire looks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture--its methods, justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule. She shows how torture was central to guerre révolutionnaire, a French theory of modern warfare that called for total war against the subject population and which informed a pacification strategy founded on brutal psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements. Lazreg seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian population--especially women--and also on the French troops who became their torturers. She explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these acts, and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even acceptable. Written by a preeminent historical sociologist, Torture and the Twilight of Empire holds particularly disturbing lessons for us today as we carry out the War on Terror.