A criminal trial is likely the most significant interaction a citizen will ever have with the state; its conduct and adherence to norms of fairness bear directly on the quality of government, extent of democratic consolidation, and human rights. We trace the emergence and evolution of a judicially sanctioned regime of torture in the investigation of criminal matters and we show that this system survived Mexico's democratic transition. We exploit a survey of the Mexican prison population and the

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... implementation of reforms of the Mexican judicial system to assess how reforms to criminal procedure reduce abuse. We find that changes to procedures around arrest and the conduct of criminal trials can induce quick changes in police behavior. We also explore the role of democratization in constraining state abuse. We find evidence that alternation of political power at the local level produces a temporary decline in torture but that this disappears with the onset of the Drug War and militarization of security, which produced marked increases in torture.