When is Torture Justified?

Kidnapping Has Germans Debating Police Torture

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: April 10, 2003

The two most important facts of the case were readily accepted today by the prosecution and the defense as the trial of a 27-year-old law student named Magnus G�fgen opened in a standing-room-only courtroom here.

The first fact is this: on Sept. 27, Mr. G�fgen kidnapped Jakob von Metzler, the 11-year-old son of a prominent banker, and murdered him by wrapping his mouth and nose in duct tape.

Four days later, Mr. G�fgen was arrested after the police watched him picking up the ransom, but after hours of interrogation he was still refusing to disclose where Jakob was being kept.

That is what produced the second undisputed fact: imagining that Jakob's life might be in imminent danger, the deputy police chief of Frankfurt, Wolfgang Daschner, ordered subordinates to extract the necessary information from Mr. G�fgen by threatening to torture him.

Mr. G�fgen was told, his lawyer later said, that ''a specialist'' was being flown to Frankfurt by helicopter and that he would ''inflict pain on me of the sort I had never before experienced.''

A few minutes after being threatened, Mr. G�fgen told the police where Jakob was -- at a lake in a rural area near Frankfut -- but when officers arrived there they discovered that Jakob, his body wrapped in plastic, was already dead.

The murder, involving a member of one of this country's oldest and best-known families, horrified Germany and obsessed the media for weeks.

But in the months and weeks leading up to the trial, it has not been so much the murder itself but the police resort to the threat of torture that has aroused intense and heated debate about means and ends: whether the case against Mr. G�fgen should be dismissed because the police themselves broke the law, or whether in this particular case a resort to torture was justified.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germans-debating-police-torture.html