Torture

Despite the possible benefits of torture, such as using information extracted through torture to save lives, it still seems like it will be doing more wrong than good. While many argue that torture is to be used in extreme cases such as with terrorists or murderous criminals, there is not much of a fail safe to prevent torture from being used on anyone accused of a crime in order to get a confession out of them, since it can just be said it's for the public's safety. This problem was mentioned in Fernando's article about torture in Asia where he talks about forced confessions, impunity for lawmakers, and the absence of follow up investigations. He mentions that this would happen in a dysfunctional or lawless legal system, but by allowing officials to use torture whenever they deem it necessary you give them to the potential to abuse their power. While it seems like this wouldn't happen in many cases, the state only seems to benefit from abusing this legal power. As mentioned in the Asia article, confessions were forced from people using torture and the charges were then fabricated from those confessions with very little follow up investigations to actually try to then prove their guilt. However, there is almost an incentive for the state to do this because works out to the state's advantage. The case is "solved", someone was punished, and the legal system seems like it's doing an effective job. However, this is a gross human rights violation and has the problem of lies being said due to torture. If someone is being tortured horribly to their breaking point, they'll probably say anything that they can in order to stop it from happening. This brings up another problem with torture, which is that due to extreme duress that the accused is under they're mostly likely to not tell the truth and just say whatever the prosecutor wants to hear. So while torture is not only inhumane, it's not even that effective for getting the truth in some cases.