A Principle of Justice

Just about dinnertime, on May 11, 1941, a garment worker named Santo Caminito was picked up by New York police for the holdup-murder of Coney Island Merchant Murray Hameroff. Although Caminito had never been arrested before, the cops were sure they had their man. They set out to get a confession--and they did.

Santo Caminito was thrown into a bedless cell. His family and a lawyer retained by relatives were denied permission to see him. Relays of detectives questioned him for 27 hours, giving him almost no rest. To show Caminito how hopeless his cause was, the police worked a trick: a male detective and two women from the pickpocket squad, posing as witnesses to the crime, confronted Caminito and pretended to identify him as the driver of the getaway car. Caminito finally signed a confession (he later signed a second one) and was duly sentenced to life in prison after the confessions were used as evidence in court. Last week, after 13 years behind bars during which he appealed vainly in New York state courts, Santo Caminito won the right to a new trial. Said a U.S. Court of Appeals decision written by Judge Jerome Frank:

"The confessions obtained by these loathsome means were no more evidence than if they had been forged."

Reminder from Korea. Excoriating the police methods as "satanic," Judge Frank recalled some facts that Americans learned long ago, and of which they have been reminded by Communist brainwashings in Korea: "It has no significance that in this case we must assume there was no physical brutality. For psychological torture may be far more cruel, far more symptomatic of sadism. Many a man who can endure beatings will yield to fatigue.

"To keep a man awake beyond the point of exhaustion, while constantly pummeling him with questions, is to degrade him, to strip him of human dignity, to deprive him of the will to resist, to make him a pitiable creature mastered by a single desire--at all costs to be free of torment. Any member of this or any other court, to escape such anguish, would admit to almost any crime.

"Indeed, the infliction of such psychological punishment is more reprehensible than a physical attack: it leaves no discernible marks on the victim. Because it is thus concealed, it has, under the brutal-itarian regimes, become the favorite weapon of the secret police, bent on procuring confessions as a means of convicting the innocent."

Basic Difference. "The important difference is that in Russia the coercion of confessions is ... legal and avowed, while with us it is always illegal and secret.

That difference is basic. It means that we have a principle of justice on which we can rely to bring such coercion into disrepute and disuse . . .

"Recently, many outstanding Americans have been much concerned--and justifiably--with inroads on the constitutional privileges of persons questioned about subversive activities. But concern with such problems, usually those of fairly prominent persons, should not blind one to the less dramatic, less-publicized plight of humble, inconspicuous men (like Caminito) when unconstitutionally victimized by officialdom."

Concluded the decision: "The test of the moral quality of a civilization is its treatment of the weak and powerless."

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