this person should be tortured

'Bob has established that he is guilty per his arrest, because he admits it all...and he shows by his affirmations that he knows vital information and very highly knows more.' First of all, I'm not really sure what 'very highly knows more' means, but I will assume that Pro means 'very likely knows more'. Pro puts forward the case that because Bob has confessed, this means he is guilty. I would strongly contest this. Since the advent of DNA identification, many criminals have since been exonerated of their crimes. 25% of these criminals made incriminating statements about themselves, which have later proven to be false. [1] This shows that a confession of guilt does not imply actual guilt. Second, Pro is quick to dismiss the circumstances of his arrest as irrelevant, and has changed the pretence: 'the facts as said do not tie to him. let's say he turned himself in as teh spokesman'. So we now have the case of a man walking in off the street, going to a police office, and claiming to know that many women are going to be raped and killed, with no evidence to prove this. If there is no serious evidence, and it is simply a man claiming these things, confessing this plan, and then refusing to give further information, it is common sense that Bob should be committed to an insane asylum until such time as which the facts and evidence match with his claims, at which time the case may be treated differently. Third, I would like to say that I concede to Pro that there are situations that have happened, and could happen in the future, where torture has bought evidence to light that has eventually led to some positive. However, the problem with torture is that it, by it's very nature, encourages a stream of information, the true parts of which cannot be discerned from the false. If Bob is tortured, and names 5 cities where the attacks could happen, then when pressed further names 10 more rather than stating which is true, this is not useful information. He may have had useful information, but the psychological damage of torture has prevented him from being any use. Pro says that there are no better uses of our resources than trying to find out where the terrorists are and capturing them, but as their location is uncertain, I would argue it is a better use of resources to raise general awareness and increase policing, check activity on the internet, upgrade monitoring of surveillance cameras, etc., than to spend time and effort looking for things that are likely not there. Finally, Pro asks why we should care about his mental health. It is not the wellbeing of Bob that I am concerned for, when I say we should care about this. It is simply the fact that a mentally ill person can display complete honesty in their admission of guilt for a crime they did not do. Schizophrenics have episodes of hallucinations which they find impossible to determine from reality - if it turns out that Bob is a schizophrenic, then torturing him for information would be morally indefensible and abhorrent, and again, would produce no results. Pro keeps making this assumption that 'Bob has the info', but I would once again assert that in any situation where the government knows for certain that Bob has this information, the government already has this information. In any other situation, the government thinks that Bob might no something, whether it is because of his admission of guilt, evidence surrounding him, or any other number of factors - the fact remains that it is never certain that he knows something, and torture and coercion produces false evidence just as easily as it produces real evidence. Therefore, it would not be useful to torture Bob in any real situation. [1] http://falseconfessions.org...