HOW IT IS USED

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3428, 4 October 1932, Page 8

HOW IT IS USED

DREAD THIRD DEGREE. BEATING OF PRISONERS. SYSTEMATIC CRUELTY. Hyman Stark, a drug' peddler and burglar, died of brutal police treatment in a Nassau County police station, and his death has focussed the attention of the nation 'once again on the third degree. Defenders and enemies of the practice of using physical violence or mental torture to force information from criminals renew the debate, writes Meyer Berger in the New York Times. Both sides present strong arguments. The police and some prosecutors defend the third degree, and insist that there is no available method of wringing the truth from murder and hold-up specialists. Opponents of the system retort with the cry of barbarism; they contend there is no way of restricting the use of the third degree within reasonable bounds; they maintain that the police of other nations use their brains and not theii’ fists in the solution of crime and get better results. Hyman Stark, it might be pointed out, was not, strictly speaking, a victim of the third degree, but of ’outright police sadism mingled with personal resentment over the fact that he was supposed to have fractured the skull of a 65-year-old woman, the mother of a brother officer. The police had all the evidence they needed—a revolver and some of the loot taken from the woman’s home. In ordinary cases the third degree ends when the detectives are satisfied that they have sufficient evidence to convict the suspect in a court of law. In the Stark case the condition of the prisoner—the marks on his face and body—indicated that he ws the victim of savagery unloosed. Ordinarily in administering the third degree the police are always careful to leave the exposed parts of their victims unmarked. Whether Stark died while undergoing the third degree or not is, however, now beside the point. The cry of third degree has been raised, and the issue is attracting the interest of the country. This time something may be done about it.

An Age-Old Practice. The third degree is as old as history, and down through the centuries has always had its advocates and apologists. Aristotle and Demosthenes regarded torture as the surest means of extracting evidence; Cicero, Seneca, and St. Augustine denounced it. Some of the ancient governments recognised torture as a necessary part of judicial proceedure. The Church used it in its more rigorous forms during the Middle Ages in dealing with heretics. The ancients, of course, did not call it the third degree. That term was borrowed from the third Masonic —or Master Mason’s—degree, which is conferred with great ceremony, and was first applied to the police treatment of prisoners and witnesses in New York in the early ’Bo’s. Detectives on the staff of Chief Thomas F. Byrnes were sweating “Frenchy,” a sailor, as a suspect in a Slaughterhouse Point murder when a reporter at headquarters referred to the procedure as “the third degree.” The name stuck. In the past few decades the term has often been misapplied; nevertheless, the third degree is practised in most large communities throughout the country, denials of Police Commissioners and Police Chiefs notwithstanding. From day to day new methods are devised by ingenious detectives for making witnesses loosen up. When a gunman with a long police record is brought into the station house he expects—and gets—the toughest kind of treatment. He is trained for it. The hired gunmen in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and other large cities get their jobs as killers not only because they can shoot straight, but also because they have the ability to absorb punches without “squealing.” Words Useless. Therein lies one of the chief arguments in the policeman’s defence of the third degree. With the professional killer, the police insist, wheedling and direct oral examination is utterly useless; he does not yied information in return to police questions, but he does fear the fists, the “number twelves,” the rubber hose, and the blackjack of a heavy-set detective. The gun-toting criminal on a racketeer’s pay-roll carries into the back of the station house, when he is brought in for questioning in a murder or a hold-up, the gangster’s golden rule: “Don’t squeal on a pal.” Detectives feel it is their business to show the prisoner, by forceful argument if necessary, that the code is all wrong’. “If you know tough mugs,” the policeman will tell you, “you know you can’t appeal to their sense of civic obligation. You can’t coax them into telling who helped them on a homicide, a kidnapping, or a robbery. There is only one thing they understand, and that’s a good kicking around.”

“Kicking- around” is one way of putting it. It is also described as “shellacking,” “sweating’,’ “giving him his lumps,” “massaging,” and sometimes as “the coffee and cake.” The last description usually applies to the treatment of little crooks just starting out, with a pistol and ambition, to make places for themselves in crime. “Coffee and Cake.” When a youngster is brought in, swaggering and defiant after the fashion of the film gangster, he may be left unmolested in some part of the station house for six or seven hours while his accomplices are sought. He begins to feel hungry and thirsty. He appeals to one of the detectives. “Hey! Do I get somethin’ to eat?” “Sure,” says the detective, obligingly. “How about coffee and cake?” The prisoner nods. “Hey!” shouts the detective, “this guy wants his coffee and cake!” Then the prisoner, prepared to break his fast and quench his thirst, gets his cake in the shape of pounding fists, lengths of rubber hose, and kicks in the stomach. The ci’ude practitioners of the third degree know lots of other tricks. They may set the prisoner in a chair that has no bottom, and stick pins or apply their brogues from behind; pins make tiny wounds that close quickly. They pull the prisoner’s hair. They take off his shoes and give him the bastinado with a blackjack. They poke a nightstick between his ribs. All this must be done with skill. Old-timers in the department know that visible bruises and lumps always excite the curiosity of magistrates when the prisoner is arraigned, and call for the time-honoured explanation: “The prisoner fell down the stairs, your Honour.” The cardinal rule of the beat-up men is “Keep away from his face.” A damaged face on a prisoner betrays the work of the novice in backroom entertainment. The blackjack and the rubber hose, expertly wielded, reach places where wounds do not show. Refinements. Sometimes a prisoner shows amazing endurance. He may drop unconscious as many as three 'or four times during a “workout,” but each time he is carefully revived and the process goes on until he “comes clean.” So much for the less subtle form of third degree. It is crude, barbarous—everything that the critics call it —but the police argue that it gets results. One hour of beating, some officers maintain, is better than ten days of hopeless sleuthing. It simplifies the art of crime detection. The more refined methods of third degree are so varied as to be almost endless. The favourite means of the exponents of the gentler treatments include withholding food and drink from the prisoner or witness over olng periods, forcing him to sit manacled to a chair and waking him every time he tries to fall asleep; bringing him face to face with the corpse (in murder cases); questioning him hour after hour, with the inquisitors working in shifts. One of the favourite tricks is to keep the most important of a group of prisoners segregated from his fellows. Hours pass and no one goes near him. He wonders how his friends are faring. The mental strain increases with every turn of the clock hands. Finally, a detective walks in with a sheet of paper in his hand, ignores the prisoner for a time, and then looks up. “Okay, guy,” he says, “your pals have split. You’ll burn.” The prisoner, worn down by long and anxious waiting, may break at that point and tell all he knows, in the belief that his confederates have thrown the blame on him. It frequently works. As often as not his friends have told the police nothing. The “confession” in the detective’s hand may be nothing but a requisition form.