Baby steps to a taser ban?
by digby
Let’s hope so. Taser International lost an appeal in District Court today. They were held liable for the death of a young man who’d been electrocuted with a taser to the chest. At the time of the incident they knew that shooting electricity directly into the heart could cause cardiac arrest and they failed to warn police officers of that.
Now, I think we should all be aware by now that tasers are anything but “safe.” They kill people and there’s no way of knowing in advance whether you’ll be one of the unlucky ones who will die from them. And people are injured by them all the time, especially when they’re deployed on people who are already in handcuffs. You’d think this wouldn’t be an uncommon legal result but sadly, it is.
(The award was deemed excessive and it was remanded back to the original court for a new trial over damages, so who knows if Taser will feel any financial pain.)
My favorite part of this opinion is this:
TI contended that Turner was contributorily negligent by failing to exercise ordinary care for his own safety in instigating the dispute at the supermarket, and in failing to comply with Officer Dawson’s directions after the police arrived at the scene.
The district court granted Fontenot’s motion and barred TI from submitting its contributory negligence defense to the jury. The court later explained that the statutory language at issue bars any recovery when the “[t]he claimant failed to exercise reasonable care under the circumstances in the use of the product.” See N.C. Gen. Stat. 99B-4(3) (emphasis added).The district court also noted that the North Carolina product liability cases addressing contributory negligence all involved plaintiffs who actually had used the allegedly defective products, and that, in this case, Turner did not “use” the taser. Additionally, the court reasoned that:
Finding contributory negligence in this circumstance would immunize [TI] from ever being liable for a product defect. Police officers do not deploy a taser unless a suspect has acted at least unreasonably.Therefore, a person who has been tased would always be barred by contributory negligence from suing [TI].
I’m quite sure that Taser International was hoping for just that finding which, in everyday language, just means “they were asking for it” when they failed to comply with police officers. If they could get the courts to agree that by “getting themselves tasered” victims had caused their own deaths then Taser is off the hook forever. These courts were not convinced. Thank goodness.
I would just add, however, that there is ample evidence that Taser, by insisting its weapon is not dangerous or deadly, in spite of the many injuries and deaths that result from them, have given the police a sort of license to shoot people full of electricity on the thinnest of pretexts, so this belief that
“police officers do not deploy a taser unless a suspect has acted at least unreasonably” is just not true. They use them on deaf people who cannot hear the orders they’ve been given to comply. They use them on bedridden elderly women. They use them on little children. They use them on epileptics in the middle of a seizure. I’m sure they don’t mean to kill any of those people. And maybe most of them don’t see these weapons as instruments of punishment (although they are.) One hopes that at some point soon a court will have a case that addresses this aspect of their use.
We can also hope that some day people in this country wake up to the fact that casually using electricity to force citizens to comply, often on the thinnest of pretexts and for no reason other than convenience, is un-American. This case, for instance, featured a belligerent young man who’d just been fired for insubordination and refused to leave the premises. The police officer walked into the scene and immediately deployed his taser and when the young man didn’t drop instantly — and left the building with the taser prongs still attached to his chest — the police officer kept shooting him with electticity for more than 30 seconds.
It killed him, which proves that shooting electricity into someone’s chest can be deadly.(Duh.) But shouldn’t we ask ourselves whether this dangerous weapon needed to be deployed at all? Did this police officer feel his or others’ lives were being threatened? Could he have tried to calm the situation first? Moreover, the reason they called the police was to get this person off the property. But when he did what they wanted, they kept shooting him full of electricity anyway.
Policing is a dangerous job, although no more dangerous than a lot of other jobs. And it is an extremely important one to our society requiring a mixture of physical courage, psychological savvy and philosophical knowledge of the principles of our justice system. I think cops deserve every bit of benefits and perks they earn and I don’t begrudge them one single cent of their generous retirement and health benefits. But they have tremendous power and it needs to be carefully monitored. Tasers (and our culture’s casual acceptance of them as some kind of entertainment) have made too many of them lose their common sense and psychological skills. It’s made them lazy.
In a free society you simply cannot give police the authority to force compliance with torture devices. I would have thought that was obvious but we seem to think that police having full discretion to use electric shock (as opposed to a nightstick) is not a form of brutality. We’ve given the government permission to inflict pain on citizens without due process or really much of a pretext in the erroneous belief that it’s harmless. It’s anything but harmless, and not just because it can kill or injure. It’s dangerous to Americans’ understanding of what freedom and liberty are supposed to mean in our constitutional system. Let’s just say that “if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” wasn’t the original idea.
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