Suspicious Trials in Iran

To the Editor:

The conditions for the Iranian trial of Jews accused of spying (front page, May 2) are indicative of a process in which any confession by those accused has to be considered coerced. Keeping the accused isolated, denying them the presence of a lawyer during interrogation and then staging a media show trial of members of a minority group are age-old methods of coercion and domination by totalitarian regimes.

As a forensic psychiatrist who has occasion to examine torture victims of dictatorships who eventually become asylum seekers in the United States, and as a treating clinician for such victims, I find the current conduct of the Iranian proceedings all too painfully familiar.

HAROLD J. BURSZTAJN, M.D.
Cambridge, Mass., May 8, 2000

The writer is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.