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The Guardian reports on a controversy in Germany over whether evidence extracted under torture should be admissible in court. The article recounts an instance in which the threat of torture was used to force a kidnapping suspect to speak.

One morning last October, for example, [Frankfurt police deputy commissioner] Wolfgang Daschner, deputy commissioner of the Frankfurt police, found himself with an agonising dilemma.

His officers had arrested a man whom they were convinced was
responsible for the kidnapping of 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler, son
of a rich Frankfurt banker.

For seven hours interrogators tried every trick in the book to get
Magnus Gafgen to tell them where he was keeping the boy.

Unknown to them, Jakob had already been murdered. But, as Gafgen sent
the police off to search one false location after another, the fear
grew that the boy’s life might be slipping away in some hide-out.

Mr Daschner decided that the time had come for a radical, but illegal,
step. He instructed his subordinates to try to extract information “by
means of the infliction of pain, under medical supervision and
subject to prior warning”.

The warning alone proved enough. A terrified Gafgen told them where
the boy was and confessed to the crime.

He has since said that a police officer told him a specialist was
being flown to Frankfurt who could “inflict on me pain of the sort I
had never before experienced”. The officer allegedly also told him
two big men were waiting in his cell to rape him.

– Guardian, Germany racked by torture controversy.