Web Letters: Better Living Through Torture

I'm riding every bandwagon that opposes torture of "terrorist suspects" detained by the Bush administration perpetrators named by Ms. Pollitt in her last column. I believe AG Eric Holder should bypass a Congressional commission and prosecute these principals in a Nuremberg-type trial citing violations of the Geneva Treaties. I believe in equal application of the law.

But let's not forget prisoners in our own US prison system who are being tortured as I write; whose Eighth Amendment protections are shredded before they are processed and who are dehumanized daily in a pattern of brutality, institutionalized neglect, medical negligence and indifference to their grievances.

The US prison system is, de facto, an abrogation of constitutional rights; hence Senator Jim Webb's bill to overhaul the criminal justice system in its entirety. Ms. Pollitt has previously covered this proposed legislation, but public outrage will follow exposure of torture of US citizens within US prison walls.

To paraphrase the Bush defense of torture of detainees, if we don't equally apply the law here, how can we even discuss protecting them there, in the Guantánamos and Abu Ghraibs?

As an advocate for twenty years of a woman serving the longest sentence in Connecticut's history (forty-five years), I have witnessed first-hand how the law is interpreted; how, sui generis, it is designed with Catch-22s and elastic timeframes that promote at the least defeat, and in the case of medical negligence, torture and death.

As the prison population explodes, "cruel and unusual punishment" is tolerated as the nature of the beast.

Unequal application of the law starts in the courtroom, when a woman can be assigned an incompetent public defender who does not present evidence that would change her sentence from murder to manslaughter. The woman I represent has served twenty-three years after seventeen attorneys have sought remedies to no avail.

For more information about a real case, please visit my advocacy site.

Mary Werblin

Waterbury, CT