Many categories of criminal offenses name the active party making reference to a particular characteristic ("the driver," "the public officer," "the obligor," etc.) instead of just referring to "any person who". This has led scholars to study the justification for such restriction of subjects in order to solve, mainly, liability and participation related problems. One of such crimes is that of "torture", which names the active party as "the public officer", and then states\nthat "private individuals" shall also be punished. This ambivalent reference (in\nthe first place to the specific subject and then to the generic one) leads to strange courts" decisions. The easiest way out to explain such confusing ambivalent reference is for the interp...