The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: "14 Nov 2007 08:39 am A fascinating nugget from American history, unearthed by guest-blogger Shertaugh at the IsThatLegal? blog. Waterboarding was sometimes used in the Deep South to torture African-Americans and to extract false confessions to alleged crimes. And when it emerged in an appeal as long ago as 1926, even the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled it categorically 'a specie of torture well known to the bench and bar of the country,' and 'barbarous.' They over-turned a guilty verdict for murder by an African-American man against a white man because such methods invalidated any notion of a reliable confession:"