Mission Statement - De-Spinning the Pro-Taser Propaganda

Yeah right, 'Excited Delirium' my ass...

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The primary purpose of this blog is to provide an outlet for my observations and analysis about tasers, taser "associated" deaths, and the behaviour exhibited by the management, employees and minions of Taser International. In general, everything is linked back to external sources, often via previous posts on the same topic, so that readers can fact-check to their heart's content. This blog was started in late-2007 when Canadians were enraged by the taser death of Robert Dziekanski and four others in a short three month period. The cocky attitude exhibited by the Taser International spokespuppet, and his preposterous proposal that Mr. Dziekanski coincidentally died of "excited delirium" at the time of his taser-death, led me to choose the blog name I did and provides my motivation. I have zero financial ties to this issue.



Wednesday, May 7, 2008

The difficulties...

Dr. Matthew Stanbrook of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) says the decision [in the recent Ohio case where Taser sued the coroner in order to have the autopsy report changed] doesn't take into account the difficult of determining an exact cause of death in almost every case. "If we were required to have at the level of scientific and medical certainty that something was the cause of death, before we were permitted to declare it, most of the people who died in North America would have died of unknown causes," Stanbrook said. "It is a physician making their best judgment given all the facts available." [LINK]

Especially when one fact that everyone can agree on is that the various tasers would not leave any physical evidence known to science even if they did cause a death. The current is too low to leave any burn tracks. All you'd have is a dead body (hypothetically speaking) with perhaps one or two small - innocent-looking - entry wounds on the chest.

See a previous post "What exactly would you be looking for?" [LINK]

Perhaps the only data that would be available would be a plot of suspicious taser-associated deaths (raw data) versus month. [LINK]

Pssst. The X26 taser was introduced in 2003.


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