Download or read book A History of Torture in Britain written by Simon Webb and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2019-10-19 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is an ancient and quite baseless myth that the use of torture has never been legal in Britain. This old wives' tale arose because torture had been neither endorsed nor forbidden by either statute or common law. In other words; the law has, until the late twentieth century, never had anything to say on the subject. In fact, torture, inflicted both as punishment and as an aid to interrogation, has been a constant and recurring feature of British life; from the beginning of the country's recorded history, until well into the twentieth century. Even as late as 1976, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British Army was guilty of the systematic torture of suspected terrorists. In 'A History of Torture in Britain' Simon Webb traces the terrible story of the deliberate use of pain on prisoners in Britain and its overseas possessions. Beginning with the medieval trial by ordeal, which entailed carrying a red-hot iron bar in your bare hand for a certain distance, through to the stretching on the rack of political prisoners and the mutilation of those found guilty of sedition; the evidence clearly shows that Britain has relied heavily upon torture, both at home and abroad, for almost the whole of its history. This sweeping and authoritative account of a grisly and distasteful subject is likely to become the definitive history of the judicial infliction of pain in Britain and its Empire.
Download or read book The History of Torture in England written by Leonard Arthur Parry and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cruel Britannia written by Ian Cobain and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A award-winning book from an acclaimed investigative journalist, Cruel Britannia tells the hidden story of Britain's secretive and shameful record of torture, for the first time
Download or read book Torture and the Law of Proof written by John H. Langbein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Torture and the Law of Proof John H. Langbein explores the world of the thumbscrew and the rack, engines of torture authorized for investigating crime in European legal systems from medieval times until well into the eighteenth century. Drawing on juristic literature and legal records, Langbein's book, first published in 1977, remains the definitive account of how European legal systems became dependent on the use of torture in their routine criminal procedures, and how they eventually worked themselves free of it. The book has recently taken on an eerie relevance as a consequence of controversial American and British interrogation practices in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In a new introduction, Langbein contrasts the "new" law of torture with the older European law and offers some pointed lessons about the difficulty of reconciling coercion with accurate investigation. Embellished with fascinating illustrations of torture devices taken from an eighteenth-century criminal code, this crisply written account will engage all those interested in torture's remarkable grip on European legal history.
Download or read book The History of Torture written by Brian Innes and published by Amber Books Ltd. This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The History of Torture written by and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The History Of Torture written by George Ryley Scott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The History of Torture Throughout the Ages written by George Ryley Scott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Execution written by Simon Webb and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judicial hanging is regarded by many as being the quintessentially British execution. However, many other methods of capital punishment have been used in this country; ranging from burning, beheading and shooting to crushing and boiling to death. Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain explores these types of execution in detail. Readers may be surprised to learn that a means of mechanical decapitation, the Halifax Gibbet, was being used in England five hundred years before the guillotine was invented. Boiling to death was a prescribed means of execution in this country during the Tudor period. From the public death by starvation of those gibbeted alive, to the burning of women for petit treason, this book examines some of the most gruesome passages of British history. This carefully researched, well-illustrated and enthralling text will appeal to those interested in the history of British executions.
Download or read book Twisted Words written by Katherine Judith Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applies critical terrorism studies to fiction by Eliot, Trollope, and others to argue that Victorians ushered in our modern definition of torture as a tool of the state.
Download or read book The History of Gibbeting written by Samantha Priestley and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2020-03-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening guide to the public execution practice of hanging criminals in body-shaped cages as a crime deterrent or religious punishment. The history of gibbeting is the story of one of Britain’s most brutal forms of punishments, the hanging of criminals in a body shaped metal cage as a warning and as a form of justice. From the folklore of live gibbetings to the eerie historical documenting of this weird post-execution tradition, The History of Gibbeting examines how and why we dealt with murderers and other serious criminals in this way. The book uses case studies through history and takes a look at how the introduction of the Murder Act shaped our relationship with gibbeting for years to come, and how we as a society demanded the most shocking post-mortem treatment of criminals. Whether gibbeting was ever a successful deterrent, it is still a fascination today and gibbet cages remain on display in museums all over the country. “I have to say that I was not aware that gibbeting involved metal cages, nor how society clamored for post-mortems on gibbeted victims. Absolutely fascinating, but not for the faint-hearted!” —Books Monthly
Download or read book Torture and Democracy written by Darius Rejali and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.
Download or read book Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland written by Aoife Duffy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a compelling and highly sophisticated politico-legal history of a particular security operation that resulted in one of the most high-profile torture cases in the world. It reveals the extent to which the Ireland v. United Kingdom judgment misrepresents the interrogation system that was developed and utilised in Northern Ireland. Finally, the truth about the operation is presented in a comprehensive narrative, sometimes corroborating secondary literature already in the public domain, but at other times significantly debunking aphorisms, or, indeed, lies that circulated about interrogation in depth. The book sets out the theoretical reference paradigm with respect to the culture and practice of state denial often associated with torture, and uses this model to excavate the buried aspects of this most famous of torture cases. Through the lens of a single operation, conducted twice, it presents a fascinating exposé of the complicated structures of state-sponsored denial designed to hide the truth about the long-term effects of these techniques and the way in which they were authorised.
Download or read book The Big Book of Pain written by Mark P Donnelly and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Despite how repugnant the practice of torture appears to us today, for at least 3,000 years it formed part of most legal codes throughout Europe and the Far East. The Big Book of Pain is an exploration of the systematic use throughout the ages of various means of punishment, torture, coercion and torment. It takes the reader into the Ancient Roman Coliseum, the medieval dungeon, the Inquisitional interrogation, the auto-da-fe, the witch-trial, and the worst of prisons. It is a shocking and compelling study of the shameful methods and motives of the torturer and the executioner, and of the heinous duty they have performed through the ages.
Download or read book Civilizing Torture written by W. Fitzhugh Brundage and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Finalist Silver Gavel Award Finalist “A sobering history of how American communities and institutions have relied on torture in various forms since before the United States was founded.” —Los Angeles Times “That Americans as a people and a nation-state are violent is indisputable. That we are also torturers, domestically and internationally, is not so well established. The myth that we are not torturers will persist, but Civilizing Torture will remain a powerful antidote in confronting it.” —Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell “Remarkable...A searing analysis of America’s past that helps make sense of its bewildering present.” —David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution Most Americans believe that a civilized state does not torture, but that belief has repeatedly been challenged in moments of crisis at home and abroad. From the Indian wars to Vietnam, from police interrogation to the War on Terror, US institutions have proven far more amenable to torture than the nation’s commitment to liberty would suggest. Civilizing Torture traces the history of debates about the efficacy of torture and reveals a recurring struggle to decide what limits to impose on the power of the state. At a time of escalating rhetoric aimed at cleansing the nation of the undeserving and an erosion of limits on military power, the debate over torture remains critical and unresolved.
Download or read book The Power to Silence written by Anthony Babington and published by Pergamon. This book was released on 1968 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Medieval Punishments written by William Andrews and published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The brank may be described simply as an iron framework; which was placed on the head, closing it in a kind of cage; it had in front a plate of iron, which, either sharpened or covered with spikes, was so situated as to be placed in the mouth of the victim, and if she attempted to move her tongue in any way whatever, it was certain to be shockingly injured. She thus suffered for telling her mind to some petty tyrant in office, or speaking plainly to a wrong-doer, or for taking to task a lazy, and perhaps a drunken husband.“ Dive into the macabre history of England and Old Europe in this treasure chest of historical punishments. In the pages of Medieval Punishments are punishments from a less enlightened period, creating a thoroughly researched historical document that sheds light on the evolution of society and how humans have maintained social order and addressed crime. In a town called Newcastle-on-Tyne, a drunkard cloak was a barrel that offenders were made to wear. In Anglo-Saxon times, each town was required to build stocks to hold breakers of the peace. To the Romans, beheading was considered the most honorable of deaths. It’s these details that make Medieval Punishments a compelling read for social historians and important component of human history.
