A legal instrument that broke bodies and eventually broke the law itself.

Описание: The rack was medieval justice's most controversial tool — a wooden frame designed to extract confession through unbearable physical stress. But historians have long recognized its fundamental flaw: torture doesn't extract truth. It extracts compliance.
This short examines the rack's mechanical operation and its role in historical interrogations, following the 1597 case of Thomas Lad in the Tower of London — a confession so clearly shaped by duress that modern historians question every detail. The rack didn't find guilty people. It created them.
But the rack's legacy extends beyond its victims. The abuses of forced confession became impossible for legal systems to ignore. False confessions led to wrongful executions, and legal scholars began building arguments against coerced testimony that would eventually shape modern legal protections — the right against self-incrimination, standards of evidence, and protections from cruel interrogation.
The rack stretched bodies. Its abuses stretched justice until the system itself finally broke — and rebuilt itself more carefully.
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