[Ppnews] Waterboarding in 1920's Mississippi

[Political Prisoner News]

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/11/waterboarding-i.html

Waterboarding In Mississippi

14 Nov 2007 08:39 am

A fascinating nugget from American history, unearthed
by guest-blogger Shertaugh at the IsThatLegal? blog.
Waterboarding was sometimes used in the Deep South to
torture African-Americans and to extract false confessions
to alleged crimes. And when it emerged in an appeal as
long ago as 1926, even the Mississippi Supreme Court
ruled it categorically "a specie of torture well known
to the bench and bar of the country," and "barbarous."
They over-turned a guilty verdict for murder by an
African-American man against a white man because such
methods invalidated any notion of a reliable confession:

In a case called Fisher v. State, 110 So. 361, 362
(Miss. 1926), Mississippi's highest court ordered the
retrial of a convicted murderer because his confession
was secured by a local sheriff's use of the water cure.

   Here's the court:

   The state offered . . . testimony of
   confessions made by the appellant, Fisher. .
   . [who], after the state had rested,
   introduced the sheriff, who testified that,
   he was sent for one night to come and receive
   a confession of the appellant in the jail;
   that he went there for that purpose; that
   when he reached the jail he found a number of
   parties in the jail; that they had the
   appellant down upon the floor, tied, and were
   administering the water cure, a specie of
   torture well known to the bench and bar of
   the country.

Fisher relied on a case called White v. State,
182, 91 So. 903, 904 (Miss. 1922), in which the court
took -- as I understand history in those parts -- the
unusual step of reversing the murder conviction of
a young African-American male, charged with killing
a white man (it appears), because his confession was
secured by the cure. The court said:

   [T]he hands of appellant were tied behind
   him, he was laid upon the floor upon his
   back, and, while some of the men stood upon
   his feet, Gilbert, a very heavy man, stood
   with one foot entirely upon appellant's
   breast, and the other foot entirely upon his
   neck. While in that position what is
   described as the ~Swater cure~T was
   administered to him in an effort to extort a
   confession as to where the money was hidden
   which was supposed to have been taken from
   the dead man. The ~Swater cure~T appears to
   have consisted of pouring water from a dipper
   into the nose of appellant, so as to strangle
   him, thus causing pain and horror, for the
   purpose of forcing a confession. Under these
   barbarous circumstances the appellant readily
   confessed...


In 2007, we have a US attorney-general who cannot
say what a Mississippi high court was able to assume
was common knowledge in 1926. That's how far this
president has dragged us down into barbarism. This
is how cowardly today's Congress is.



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