Coroner Rules In-Custody Death Homicide [LINK]
It's the usual sequence. Some trivial dispute. An arrest involving use of a taser. Almost immediately, someone notices that the subject is having difficulty breathing. Perform CPR (what does the letter "C" represent?). Subject dies.
Kern County supervising deputy coroner John Van Rensselaer said Thursday that 25-year-old Rory Romal McKenzie's death was a sudden death during restraint by police. Rensselaer said the manner of death is homicide.
Homicide simply means that the death was CAUSED by someone. It doesn't mean that it was or wasn't a justifiable killing, but it does mean that it was a killing.
So what device or method CAUSED the death?
Is it possible that perhaps there was some cardiac effect of the taser? An disturbed cardiac system that presented itself as "difficulty breathing"?
Or maybe it was the dog bite from the K9... [rolls eyes]
There's only one explanation that makes any sense. It's no great mystery.
It's no great mystery why Taser International now advises that police avoid the chest when aiming their tasers.
It's no great mystery why Taser International's newest model emits 40% less charge than the previous X26 model. Wanna bet which model was used in this deadly incident?
This isn't complicated.
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2 comments:
The "silent" Screams ~
It seems to me, that although there are plenty of newspaper and blog reports of stun gun use and abuse, there is a large number of unreported stun gun use. If you take the sales of stun gun cartridges at face value, assuming they are replacing expended materials, it seems that a very small percentage of actual stun gun uses are actually reported and documented in publicly available reports.
I have seen law suits initiated over stun gun events which were never reported contemporaneously to the alleged abuse. Sometimes the events alleged in the stun gun abuse suits took place over a year or more in the past. It suggests that persons who were the subjects of a law enforcement abuse of authority and "use of force" guidelines, are stunned into silence, until they become aware of the fact that they are far from being alone, and are "members" of a growing community of individuals who have been wronged in the arrest and detention process.
Several years ago, I vaguely remember that the Justice Department in the US proposed a national reporting system to collect data on each and every deployment of a stun gun by local and national law enforcement.
If and when the data collected is made available for public scrutiny, a whole new world of "silent screams" from the persons "tasered into silence" may rear its ugly head. We will find out where those tens of thousands of stun gun cartridges were deployed, and what the circumstances were, if we can trust law enforcement to accurately report their own actions.
Personally, and from my reading of the number of stun gun uses reported in the press, I suspect fewer than 1% to 5% of stun gun deployments become stories where witnesses, law suits and non-police infected accounts, give us a reasonable version of what transpired. Tens of thousands of shocking stun gun stories go unreported, leaving their victims to suffer in silence.
If a subject drops dead immediately after being tasered, it would be very tempting to not mention the exact circumstances. Obviously there's no way to ACCURATELY estimate the ratio of incidents to reported incidents, but it's not likely to be exactly unity.
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