Forced confession
[citation needed] Developments in the 20th century, notably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, greatly reduced the legal acceptance of forced confessions.
During his initial detention, police officers "told Mohammed outright that they knew he was innocent", but were punishing him as a traitor for attending pro-democracy demonstrations.
[3] In 2016, human rights organisation Reprieve published an investigative report which argued that seven Bahraini men facing the death penalty had been forced into confessing their crimes after being tortured during interrogations.
The report also revealed that the Bahraini government was employing Northern Ireland Co-operation Overseas, a firm funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, to train its law enforcement personnel.
[5] Sami Mushaima, Ali Al-Singace, and Abbas Al-Samea are all torture victims rendered stateless and condemned to death following unfair trials.
[7]The European Union also condemned the sentences: "This case is a serious drawback given that Bahrain had suspended executions for ... (several) years, and concerns have been expressed about possible violations of the right to a fair process for the three convicted".
[10][13] The owners of Causeway Bay Books – Gui Minhai and Lam Wing-kee – who were abducted by state security agents operating outside of Mainland China, also made such controversial confessions.
[11] Many of those forced to record confessions later explained in detail how the videos were carefully scripted and made under the watchful eyes of the agents of the security apparatus, demonstrating their powerlessness once they are within the opaque Chinese legal system.
[11] According to at least two observers (Ervand Abrahamian, Nancy Updike), the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has systematically used false confessions extracted by torture.
They come in a variety of forms, "pretrial testimonials; in chest-beating letters; in mea culpa memoirs; press conferences, 'debates', and 'roundtable discussions'", but most commonly in videotaped 'interviews' and 'conversations' aired on prime-time television.
[24] Techniques used to extract confessions included whipping, most often on the soles of the feet; deprivation of sleep; suspension from the ceiling and high walls; twisting of forearms until they broke; crushing of hands and fingers between metal presses; insertion of sharp instruments under the fingernails; cigarette burns; submersion under water; standing in one place for hours on end; mock executions; and physical threats against family members.
[26] In June 2020, FIDH and its member organization Justice for Iran (JFI), in a 57-page report titled "Orwellian State: The Islamic Republic of Iran’s State Media as a Weapon of Mass Suppression", reported that between 2009 and 2019, Iranian state-owned media IRIB broadcast the forced confessions of about 355 individuals and defamatory content against at least 505 individuals.
[This paragraph needs citation(s)] The leaders of the interrogation and torture system of the Khmer Rouge were Mam Nai and Tang Sin Hean.
The trials are today universally acknowledged to have used forced confessions, obtained through torture and threats against the defendants' families, to eliminate any potential political challengers to Stalin's authority.
Since 2001, as part of its War on Terror the United States using the CIA operates a network of off shore prisons, called black sites, probably the most well-known of which is Guantánamo Bay detention camp.
The US Supreme Court did not discontinue their usage and repeatedly ruled against hearing from those that underwent forced confessions, even after they were found innocent, claiming that a trial would constitute a breach of national security.
He appealed several times aided by different international human rights movements and lawyers, yet the US Supreme Court retained its usage of forced confession techniques, and denied a hearing of the evidence.
The United States Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Mississippi (1936) established conclusively that confessions extracted through the use of physical brutality violate the Due Process Clause.
In this case, defendants Arthur Ellington, Ed Brown and Henry Shields (three black tenant farmers) had been convicted and sentenced to death in Mississippi for the murder of Raymond Stewart (a white planter) on 30 March 1934.
When the confessions had been obtained in the exact form and contents as desired by the mob, they left with the parting admonition and warning that, if the defendants changed their story at any time in any respect from that last stated, the perpetrators of the outrage would administer the same or equally effective treatment.
It is sufficient to say that in pertinent respects the transcript reads more like pages torn from some medieval account than a record made within the confines of a modern civilization which aspires to an enlightened constitutional government.
