Talk:Torture murder

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Torture murder article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Crime and Criminal Biography: Serial, mass, and spree killers Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Crime and Criminal Biography, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Crime and Criminal Biography articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Crime and Criminal BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject Crime and Criminal BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Crime and Criminal BiographyCrime-related articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Serial Killer task force (assessed as Mid-importance).

Death Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Death, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Death on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.DeathWikipedia:WikiProject DeathTemplate:WikiProject DeathDeath articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Tip: Anchors are case-sensitive in most browsers.

This article links to one or more target anchors that no longer exist.

[[Murder#Country-specific_murder_law|Murder laws worldwide]] The anchor (#Country-specific_murder_law) has been deleted by other users before.

Please help fix the broken anchors. You can remove this template after fixing the problems. | Reporting errors

legal term

Torture murder is a loosely defined legal term Source please. --Philip Baird Shearer 18:47, 2 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

State murder vs. Torture murder

I've removed references to people being killed by police agencies or state organizations vs. persons killed by serial killers. A police agency may torture someone to death, but its questionable if shuch should be called torture murder. Also, if every member of a secret police group who has ever tortured a person to death was listed here as a torture murderer, the list would be very long. This artice, I feel, should stick to private individuals who illegally kill via torture murder. -Husnock 16:33, 16 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This gets back to the definition, as raised in the first part of this talk page. The death of William Wallace is referred to in the main section of the article, but that could be followed by thousands of comparable instances, including deaths in the War on Terror. It's questionable that these should be included, but only because this topic has no verifiable definition. The content should be confined to Murder and Torture - otherwise this is just dwelling on blame and suffering. Not a good thing?--Shtove 00:29, 5 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Feardotcom?

"The film FeardotCom also deals with a torture murderer, kidnapping women and then killing them slowly over the Internet."

This is completely irrelevant to the article - it could possibly be put into a trivia section if there was one but I don't think one should be created for this....information. Removed it. Desdinova 23:29, 18 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Tidy up

I've just done a big change. A couple of notes:

The legal position is interesting, and now included properly
Details of specific cases are not necessary
The "state sponsered" bit really is a differnt thing, as now explained
The pic is gone now because it's related to the state-sponsered thing

Snori (talk) 01:28, 15 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is a completely unjustified deletion of large sourced text (the size of article was two times reduced). Torture murder can be done by an individual or several people for any reason, including an order from a gang leader, a Nazi leader, etc. State-sponsored torture murder fully qualifies.Biophys (talk) 02:05, 15 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please reconsider. My changes were fully justified. Firstly my change regards the legal position is something the article has needed from its start. The details I removed of specific cases are unnecessary, gratuitous - despite being true and well-sourced. (They are also available, more sensibly, though all the Murderes and Victims links). Finally, regarding the state-sponsered bit - where does this stop? Do we add in death squads and Pol Pot and Bagram torture and prisoner abuse? My approach is far more practical I think. Snori (talk) 09:04, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You said: "true and well-sourced". That's right. That is why this should stay here per WP:NPOV - a core WP policy. WP is not censored. My main objection however is about the state-sponsored torture murder. If you argue this is insufficiently sourced and developed - that should be fixed by adding more sourced content. But if you argue that state-ordered torture murder never existed - this is simply incorrect. You provided good examples. Death squads and Pol Pot executioners would certainly qualify if they tortured people before their death. Bagram torture and prisoner abuse probably does not, as long as that was only torture but not murder.Biophys (talk) 17:05, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

More specifically, old version included the following segment:

"Torture murder may also be a legal act of a state, especially in nations which employ torture as a means of interrogation. Nazi Germany was well known for state sanctioned torture murder, as members of the SS were often employed to interrogate enemies of the state under slow torture, often killing them in the process. Death by slow torture was also a common occurrence in Nazi concentration camps."

You replaced it by this:

"By definition murder is "unlawful killing"; so while a nation state clearly can both torture and kill, such acts could be legal by their own laws (and in an authoritarian state or it may be dangerous to raise the question). Those who kill by torture under the authority of a state may however be later tried by another state or authority such as the International Criminal Court."

First version is something widely accepted (and can be easily sourced). Your version is questionable and unsourced.Biophys (talk) 17:14, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Quality

I've just removed one so-called "torture murderer" because the main article on him doesn't have any evidence that he "qualifies". A quick check would seem to indicate that a good few others are similarly listed when they should not be. I'm going to leave this article for now. It really isn't such a big deal for me if this article is crap, but if any others care about it maybe that can look at my (attempted) changes today over the last few days.... Snori (talk) 08:14, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The whole article is a mess. I'm not even sure it should exist at all - murder and torture may often occur at the same time but so may theft and murder. This does mean an article is warranted - it should just be a subsection in both the murder and torture articles. And while we shouldn't censor, the detail in the 'style' section is over-the-top. People can click on the murderers' names to find out more info if they require it. Also the legal definition is too US-centric. The fact that no broader definition can be found again shows that the issue in general is a minor one not deserving of its own article, IMHO. Malick78 (talk) 09:43, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of the image

Can you please explain the deletion? The deleted painting shows a torture-murder. So, what's the problem?Biophys (talk) 03:07, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please prove that it depicts "torture murder" by providing references. It is your opinion that it is torture murder, because the term is imprecise, and I cannot take your word that this dead corpse was tortured. In particular, what makes you think it was "state sanctioned". Please provide corresponding state documents which sanctioned the depicted. In almost all prison systems of the world the prison keepers did horrible illegal things to prisoners. Dzied Bulbash (talk) 16:48, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is description of the image copied from Wikimedia Commons (you can just click at the image and read it) - taken from Jamestown Foundation (the copyright holder): "The torture-death depicted here was known as komariki (little mosquitoes). For even an insignificant misdeed, such as a harsh word to a guard, a prisoner could be stripped naked, hung crucifixion-style to a pine tree, and left to be fed upon by mosquitoes. Within thirty minutes to an hour he would be taken down. By that time, however, he would have lost so much blood that a slow and painful death was almost inevitable. Such executions were carried out beyond the barbed wire, in full view of the other prisoners. In some camps, the victims of komariki were not hung on trees, but were thrown instead into pits.".Biophys (talk) 17:45, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Page meaning

The torture page defines this as state torture to the point of murder for the purposes of punishment. This page uses a very different, neologism-style definition and tries to cover two topics at once. Google news and books searches suggest support for only the legal definition, which appears to be unique to the US [1] [2]. I would be concerned over the use of news articles and the like that are defined by editors as "torture-murders" by serial killers or similar people, without a unifying term of "torture-murder" that is agreed upon by at least one, if not ideally a set of reliable sources. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:^simple/_complex 16:37, 5 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sylvia Likens?

Why isn't Sylvia Likens listed as one of the victims? or Gertrude Baniszewski as one of the murderers? That case was really horrific, and Sylvia was tortured to death.

On another note this page needs to stay up, torture murderers are the worst of the worst, and they should be chronicled somewhere here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.36.236.236 (talk) 01:35, 26 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cases

I've just removed this section. It might be useful to have a section enumerating some of the motives (sexual, religious, criminal etc with examples), but to simply have four random examples doesn't add much value. Snori (talk) 19:34, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]