The history of law is full of exceptions that corroded the legal systems of societies who employed them.

The bald product of our experience is that we must assert the rights of the guilty few to protect the rights of the multitude of innocent from the raw power of the state. Make one exception today because you know someone is guilty, and there will be exceptions tomorrow for someone another person "knows" is guilty.

It comes down to the burden of proof displayed and challenged in public. When we can credibly translate our instant gratification society to provide a means of instant public sober deliberation, then we can instantly punish the guilty. This is what you are actually talking about.

You are, incidentally, basing your argument upon the evidence provided by surveillance cameras. Please note that the accused's own neighbors did not initially recognize him from that video tape, and that law enforcement officials had to enhance the images to get better detail. This was not instant either.

You have ignored the system failures that left this man on the street to commit the crime. He could have been picked up earlier, but law enforcement only has so many people and so much time. They went after him, but were stymied in the courtroom and hadn't the resources to push harder. Line officers, parole officers, detectives, lower-echelon prosecutors: these people are all up to their eyeballs. They take a swing, they win, they lose, they move on to the next case, they come back to a loss when time allows.

We have better and better forensic tools for police to use, but not all departments can afford them. They have officers willing to use them whose departments cannot afford to train. They may have officers who do know how to use them but have a backlog of cases to wade through. Even a case that is bumped to the top because of the Today Show still had to wait to be bumped up.

Because of the political climate in which police departments function, police are territorial and lack a co-operative network of information-sharing except at the most rudimentary level. Police departments also are not the highest paying profession in the world, so they are chronically understaffed, and the weak among them succumb to graft. They do difficult and dangerous work which makes them prone to burn-out. Because of the nature of the work, they tend to attract more than their share of people who, like you, think a good beating might be an effective shortcut to the desired result, much the same way that fire departments attract pyromaniacs.

You want quick detection? Pay the police what they're worth, give them abundant counselling and team-building resources, treat them like the princes of the city that they really are, encourage interdepartmental cooperation, and equip them with state-of-the-art tools that they are continually trained and retrained to use. It really is possible to enforce the law without mangling it. Our police officers know this.

If you want a serious opinion on whether to get and use forced confessions, I suggest you ask police whether they want to work with people trained to get such evidence, ask psychologists about the credibility of such evidence, and ask judges about the effects of using such evidence on the legal system. You can also interview people who have worked for systems that routinely use evidence gathered by such means. Start in Baghdad.