Former Tehran's Prisoners Paint Harrowing portrait of life in Evin Prison

Interviews
Iran's Evin Prison Likened to Torture Chamber

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"I was an actor in their play"--Ali Afshari

"The cells are 6 feet long and less than 6 feet wide"--Ali Afshari

Former student leader Ali Afshari ( who was placed on TV) and human rights lawyer Mehrangiz Kar both spent time at the facility where two Iranian-American scholars are now detained. They describe their time in captivity.

So many students and intellectual have been jailed in Evin prison that the prison is nicknamed "Evin University". "The political prisoners are not allowed to have lawyers", said Mehrangiz Kar.

What horrifies us are the techniques of physical and psychological torture that are used to extract confessions from innocent people and inflicting pain, using psychotropic drug, artificially addicting them to narcotics, coffin method (speciality of Islamist interrogators), and sleep deprivation to break them down are the tools Iranian interrogators used to get confessions from people reluctant to confess. "They put a blank piece of paper in front of them to write the answer they want you to write and ask you to develop the story for them", said Ali Afshar.The Unreliability of Coerced Confessions is a Lesson to be Learned from these stories and the danger of relying on coerced confessions to obtain convictions of innocent people.