Talk:Third degree

Removed material

I removed the following section; this is material that belongs in an article, not a disambiguation page. Dab pages should not have unique material not found elsewhere in the encyclopedia.

This could be added to an existing article on interrogation, or perhaps create a new article with a title like "Third degree (interrogation)", which you could then add a link to here.--NapoliRoma (talk) 16:49, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

The third degree is a widely used colloqualism for an intensive, possibly brutal, interrogation. This usage is derived from the Freemasons, an extremely popular fraternal organization from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century. Masonic lodges have three degrees of membership; the first is called Entered Apprentice, the second Fellowcraft, and the third is Master Mason. thr granting of the Third Degree involves an extended interrrogation carried out as a scripted play in which the role of the inductee is physically challenging and, to an inductee with a lively imagination, possibly frightening, although no physical harm is inflicted. This interrogation was, by exaggeration, the source of the name of the police interrogation technique unsually attributed to Thomas F. Byrnes of the New York Police Department ca 1890. The term appears in a 1900 edition of Everybody's Magazine: "From time to time a prisoner... claims to have had the Third Degree administered to him."