DEPORTATION CASE FOCUSES ON DEFINITION OF TORTURE: From the NY Times:

…No one disputes that for ex-convicts like Mr. Auguste, 28, who completed a 10-month jail sentence for the attempted sale of cocaine, deportation to Haiti is a grim prospect. Under Haitian policy, federal and immigration courts have found, deportees with a criminal record are placed in indefinite preventive detention, without food, water or toilets, in cells so crowded that they cannot lie down; prisoners are subjected to police beatings, and sometimes are burned with cigarettes, choked, hooded and given electric shocks. Some have died in custody.

But is that tantamount to torture under the law? The answers have varied in the last four years. The Third Circuit panel, while likening the conditions to “a slave ship,” ruled in January that indefinite detention in Haiti did not constitute torture because Haitian officials intended the detention to prevent crime, not specifically to inflict severe pain and suffering amounting to torture.

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