Shocking Reflections
by digby
Reader JL sent in this taser tale from Denver. I think it’s the “probe his ass” part that reveals the essential sadism this weapon brings out in people:
“I can’t breathe . . .” Both say that Booker, 56, was asleep in a chair in a holding area of the jail when his name was called and he was ordered to a processing desk. Half-asleep about 3 a.m., Booker walked to the desk in his socks, forgetting to put on his shoes. The female deputy ordered Booker to sit in a chair in front of the desk. Booker responded that he wished to stand. When the deputy threatened to have him placed in a holding cell if he didn’t sit, Booker told her he would go to the holding cell, said Maten, who had been arrested that morning for resisting arrest in a confrontation with a parking-meter attendant. ” ‘Let me get my shoes,’ ” Maten quoted Booker as saying as he walked toward the chairs to get his shoes. The deputy yelled at him repeatedly to stop, got up and followed Booker. Booker turned and repeated that he was getting his shoes, Maten said. The deputy grabbed Booker by the arm and put a lock on him, Yedo said. Booker, who was 5 feet 5 and weighed 175 pounds, pushed her away. At that point, four other deputies wrestled Booker to the concrete floor. They slid down two steps to the floor in the sitting area. Yedo said the deputies each grabbed a limb while he struggled. ” ‘Get the Taser. Get the Taser,’ ” Yedo quoted one of the deputies as saying. Yedo said he was only about 3 feet away, and Maten said he was close enough that if he stood and took one step, he could reach out and touch one of the deputies. None of the deputies involved in the restraint has been identified. One female deputy was treated at a hospital for an injury she suffered in the confrontation, Gale said. A fifth deputy put Booker in a headlock just as the female deputy began shocking him with a Taser with encouragement from one of the deputies, who kept repeating, “Probe his —,” Maten said. He could hear the Taser crackle repeatedly. Booker said, “‘I can’t breath . . .,” Yedo heard. Then, Booker went limp. Booker’s wrists were handcuffed behind his back in an awkward position when the deputies picked him up, each holding an arm or a leg, and carried him stomach-down to a holding cell with an unbreakable glass door. They set him down on his stomach, with much of his weight on one shoulder and his legs bent, Yedo said. They took the handcuffs off and without checking his pulse, the officers left him on the floor of the holding cell. The deputies walked away high-fiving and laughing, Maten said. Several inmates were saying, ” ‘I can’t believe they’re doing this,’ ” Maten said. Yedo said he stared at Booker, watching his chest, which wasn’t moving. One deputy had stayed next to the cell and was also staring at Booker. “I told the guy, ‘Hey, that guy is not breathing,’ ” Yedo said. The deputy turned and yelled at the sergeant. ” ‘Sergeant, come here. Sergeant, hurry,’ ” Yedo said he yelled.
There’s more to this story at the link. I feel fairly confident that the coroner will find that this man had some sort of underlying health condition which rendered him unable to take repeated taserings, which means it was his own fault.
By the way, the charge against him was possession of drug paraphernalia, which is apparently a death penalty offense.
Update: This reminds of an article I haven’t posted in a while, but which needs to be read every now and then as we think about tasering. It’s called Electricity: A Global History of a Torture Technology.
An excerpt:
Why was electric torture first used so broadly and systematically in Algeria and Vietnam and why did it spread so rapidly after that? Prior to the 1940s, many police forces used third degree methods and torture to interrogate prisoners. Since the dynamo and magneto, the car battery and field telephone, were already available by World War I, why was electric torture not used more frequently? The reason lies in the quasi-democratic context in which the Algerian and Vietnamese conflicts developed. Torturers favor electric torture because it leaves no marks other than small burns that, one can allege, were simply self-inflicted. Such a technique was simply unnecessary for police forces that were not held accountable or in war contexts where it didn’t matter or where there were no courts or journalists to investigate the tortures. This is why we can find no record of Gestapo officers using electric torture for interrogation in Europe, although torture they undoubtedly did. Even among Gestapo allies, only one small group of collaborators in Paris, experimented with electric torture. It also explains why we find few references to electric torture in the Soviet bloc.
In Algeria, it was otherwise. There were courts, journalists, human rights activists, left wing politicians, and theoretically, democracy. In fact, in 1955, the French government was obliged to send Wuillaume, a senior civil servant unconnected to the police, to Algeria to investigate the many allegations of torture. In his notorious report, he concluded that torture, especially electric torture, was widely practiced. Wuillaume argued that since the use of such devices was inevitable and so prevalent, torture so effective, and the danger real, torture should be legalized and administered professionally. Though the report was condemned, the technology lived on and the French colonial police and army became the first disseminators of electric torture by dynamo worldwide. The methods they developed continued long after the last French soldier had left Vietnam and Algeria. U.S. Marines sent to Vietnam stated repeatedly and independently that they were trained to use field telephones for interrogation in Camp Pendleton in the 1960s. The technique they learned was the French technique: “take a field telephone, the TP 3-12, and put the connecting wire to it, then take the other end of the wire and attach it to a person’s testicles and crank it — this causes a high-voltage shock, there is no amperage behind it, just voltage, but it is extremely painful.” By the late 1960s, virtually all police forces that used electric torture in interrogation were either former French colonies or had received extensive American training. The devices and methods remained the same until the 1980s.
We’ve refined the method quite a bit but the application is now accepted a perfectly normal method to use on average citizens who fail to immediately comply with police authority. And that’s interesting since the thesis of the article is that electric torture devices only become popular in democratic societies where police are constrained in how much cruelty they can inflict. What exactly does that say about us?
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