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58 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 183 (2016-2017)
Criminalizing Private Torture

handle is hein.journals/wmlr58 and id is 193 raw text is: CRIMINALIZING PRIVATE TORTURE TANIA TETLOW* ABSTRACT This Article proposes a state crime against torture by private actors as a far better way to capture the harm of serious domestic violence. Current criminal law misses the cumulative terror of domestic violence by fracturing it into individualized, misdemeanor batteries. Instead, a torture statute would punish a pattern crime the batterer's use of repeated violence and threats for the purpose of controlling his victim. And, for the first time, a torture statute would ban nonviolent techniques committed with the intent to cause severe pain and suffering, including psychological torture, sexual degrada- tion, and sleep deprivation. Because serious domestic violence routinely involves the use of torture techniques, other scholars have proposed stretching the state action requirement of international law against torture to apply it to domestic violence. This Article proposes a simpler solution, urging states to pass statutes banning torture by private actors. Indeed, California and Michigan have already done so, seemingly without controversy and without any real scholarly comment. Both states have used their general torture statutes to prosecute serious domestic violence. This proposal would better tailor a torture statute to * Felder-Fayard Professor of Law, Tulane Law School; Chief of Staff and Vice President, Tulane University; J.D., Harvard Law School. The author would like to thank Jancy Hoeffel, Becki T. Kondkar, Katherine Mario Mattes, Pam Metzger, and Kenneth Allen Polite Jr. for their helpful comments, and Joshua Bowman, Melissa Secor, Marcus Foster, and Meliosa Miller for their excellent research assistance. The author would like to dedicate this Article to Sara LaMont, a Tulane law student shot by her boyfriend in an apparent murder/suicide last spring. To read tributeos to her remarkable life published by her fellow law review editors, see In Memoriam: Sara Lament, 89 TUL. L. REV. 997, 997-99 (2015).

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