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Richard A. Leo

Selected Works

Third degree

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

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Police Interrogation And Coercion In Domestic American History: Lessons For The War On Terror, Richard Leo, K. Alexa Koenig Dec 2009

Police Interrogation And Coercion In Domestic American History: Lessons For The War On Terror, Richard Leo, K. Alexa Koenig

Richard A. Leo

The use of torture during interrogations conducted by U.S. special forces, military police, CIA agents, the FBI, and private contractors during the War on Terror has been widely documented. While many chroniclers of the use of torture have characterized its use as a dramatic break from the past, the use of torture by American interrogators and the tacit sanctioning by U.S. officials are not new. The routine use of torture by American domestic police during the early part of the twentieth century has been largely ignored by scholars who study contemporary uses of torture in the international context. This chapter …


The Third Degree And The Origins Of Psychological Interrogation In The United States, Richard Leo Dec 2003

The Third Degree And The Origins Of Psychological Interrogation In The United States, Richard Leo

Richard A. Leo

This chapter describes and analyzes third degree interrogation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The chapter begins with a detailed description and analysis of the various kinds and types of third degree interrogation, describing both the physical and psychological components of the third degree. Next, the chapter discusses how the ideology and practice of so-called "scientific" lie detection and psychological interrogation came to replace the third degree following the Wickersham Commission's Report in the 1930s. Although the third degree is, for the most part, a relic of the distant past, its demise represents a crucial turning point in the history …