TASER: Myth of Menace?

May 10, 1999
Darren Stewart, The Martlet, Victoria

A fascinating report from 1999 re the taser's introduction into Canadian law enforcement via the Victoria Police Department.

According to the report, Victoria Police Officer "[Darren] Laur who has been shot with a TASER himself, calls the weapon extremely humane, and says it doesn't cause the subject any extended pain. He likens the experience to getting a shock while changing the spark plugs on your lawnmower."

The article goes on to quote Terence Allen, a specialist in forensic pathology who served as deputy medical examiner for both the Los Angeles and San Francisco coroners' offices: "The problem is when it starts getting used in less than critical situations," said Allen. "In L.A. they'll shoot you for reaching for your wallet. People need to realize that this isn't 100 per cent safe, and it doesn't have a very good track record. As pathologists, we should warn law-enforcement agencies that the TASER can cause death."

In a 1991 letter to the Journal of Forensic Sciences, he noted that he was one of only two medical examiners in the L.A. office to list the TASER on a death certificate. "This was because pathologists in L.A. were under pressure from law enforcement agencies to exclude the TASER as a cause of death," wrote Allen. He suggested that the L.A. coroner's office has a strong bias and exonerates the law enforcement agencies of that city. "The L.A. coroner's office is the handmaiden of law enforcement [in that city,]" he said. Allen also said that the TASER could cause heart defibrillation depending on where the two probes strike the targeted subject, suggesting that the use of this weapon could have dire effects on the hearts of weaker or older individuals or those under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Too bad no one was listening.

TASER: Myth of Menace?
darren stewart, the martlet, victoria

Police cornered a dangerously violent woman in a Victoria bathroom last month. High on drugs and not responding to pain, she wasn't affected by pepper spray. She began to threaten suicide, and the officers were trying to decide when to go in after her, risking injury to the woman and themselves. She decided for them. The woman burst through the door and rushed the officers with a pair of scissors in her hand. But the officers stopped her cold and were able to handcuff her calmly. Thanks to Victoria police's new TASER unit, the incident ended without injury.

According to Sgt. Darren Laur of the Victoria police, the peaceful end to this situation was only realistic because of the TASER, a new weapon his department is test-running. The TASER shoots two electrically charged barbs that catch into the clothing of a subject up to four metres away and deliver a debilitating electrical charge intended to override the brain's message to the muscles, knocking the person to the ground. The TASER can penetrate up to two inches of clothing and penetrate a bulletproof vest.

"The police officer supervisor said right in his report that if it wasn't for the TASER there could have been dire consequences," said Laur. "They probably would have had to use lethal force in that situation."

With advanced anti-terrorist technology and special permission from the Office of the Attorney General, Victoria police don't have to wait until the 24th century for effective weaponry intended to stop a violent subject with less risk of killing them. Similar to Spock and Kirk's phasers-on-stun approach, they can shoot a subject with less risk of seriously injuring them than if they had to draw a gun. The police are testing two new TASER units (short for Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle, after the inventor) similar to ones already used by many American policing agencies to detain potentially hostile individuals without causing them bodily harm.

Attention from across the country is focused on Victoria's proposed six-month TASER test period that ends in June 1999. According to Laur, the officer overseeing the test, other departments and agencies across the country may follow Victoria and put the TASER into general use if the test is successful. Laur suggests that the units are being tested in Victoria because the local police and its administration are one of the most progressive in the country. In the six Victoria incidents the TASER has been used in, all have ended without injury. In two of these incidents the sight of the unit alone was enough to calm the individual, and the officers didn't have to fire the barbs.

But Terence Allen, a specialist in forensic pathology who served as deputy medical examiner for both the Los Angeles and San Francisco coroners' offices, has a more grim view of the "non-lethal" weapon. "The problem is when it starts getting used in less than critical situations," said Allen. "In L.A. they'll shoot you for reaching for your wallet. People need to realize that this isn't 100 per cent safe, and it doesn't have a very good track record. As pathologists, we should warn law-enforcement agencies that the TASER can cause death."

Laur, who has been shot with a TASER himself, calls the weapon extremely humane, and says it doesn't cause the subject any extended pain. He likens the experience to getting a shock while changing the spark plugs on your lawnmower. Laur estimates that the TASER has been employed by over 350 policing agencies in the U.S. since the 1970s.

According to Steve Tuttle of Taser International, the company responsible for manufacturing and marketing TASERs for private use in the U.S., the weapon's inventor created the weapon in the late 1960s to be used against airplane terrorists.

"The TASER was perfect for such circumstances as the probes that are fired are not lethal and will not penetrate the hull of an airplane," said Tuttle. This prevented an extremely dangerous situation should a bullet pierce the skin of the plane and depressurize it.

Tuttle explains why police would be particularly interested in the weapon. "[The TASER] reduces the injuries to both suspects and officers alike," said Tuttle. "The remaining options are fists, blunt instruments and chemical sprays, which are very effective, but since they use pain to stop individuals, [drug] users can overcome the pain and swarm tactics, resulting in potential injuries for all involved."

Tuttle also suggests that the TASER has significantly reduced injuries in U.S. prisons where pepper spray is commonly used in removing unco-operative and violent prisoners from their cells.

"[Pepper spray] drifts to other cells, contaminates the air conditioning and requires cleanup," said Tuttle. "Meanwhile you have an inmate who is not real pleased and is going to have burning lungs and eyes, with lots of salivation for 30 minutes to an hour or more."

But shoot the inmate with a TASER and cuff them while they are stunned, and they recover in a moment without injury or incident. Another advantage to the TASER over other force options is that it doesn't rely on pain to be effective. The TASER will still take down a subject under the influence of drugs or having a psychiatric episode who isn't responding to pain.

According to Tuttle, the concept of the original inventor's dream expanded when he realized the new weapon's potential. He believed he could create a powerful self-defence tool for law enforcement and public use.

Now, according to Taser International, there are 60,000 TASERs owned by private individuals for personal self-defense in the U.S. Americans can order a $250 U.S. TASER unit complete with a practice target and free fanny pack, "great for carrying (the weapon) while jogging or biking," according to the catalogue, on the company's internet site, with the option of black or "sports yellow" handles. For a couple hundred dollars more, you can buy a unit fitted with a laser sight.

It's illegal for a member of the public to own a TASER in Canada. In the U.S. the TASER was classed as a firearm until 1993 when Taser International redesigned the weapon enabling it to be classified differently by the American Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The redesigned Air TASER hit the market using compressed air as a propellant rather than gunpowder, and the weapon is now available to registered owners in all but seven states.

Lobbyists for the TASER tout it as a perfect public self-defence tool and suggest that government control of the weapon is based on fallacies of its potential harmfulness. Laur supports the use of the weapon in policing agencies and hopes the Victoria police's test period will dispel the myths regarding the TASER.

"Canada has never, ever used an electronic stunning device," said Laur. "It was hard for me to understand why it hadn't been adopted here sooner when you look to the United States and look at how effective this tool is. There's still a lack of knowledge surrounding it. Most people think it's just a cattle prod."

According to a report on the effects of the TASER in The Journal of Forensic Sciences by Dr. Sara Reddy and Dr. Ronald Kornblum, chief medical examiner in Los Angeles, the TASER has been used several thousand times by the Los Angeles police department in attempts to control violent suspects. During that time the TASER has been an effective immobilizer 80 per cent of the time. There have been 16 deaths associated with its use in L.A. County.

The report, which Laur read when he researched the TASER's potential for use in Victoria, explains that the TASER doesn't rely on damage or destruction of tissues or organs to be effective; instead, it knocks the target to the ground after causing a generalized muscle contraction. Under ordinary circumstances, these effects are temporary and completely reversible. But used on an older individual, somebody with heart trouble, or somebody weakened by excessive drug use, the weapon can be fatal. Included in the report were accounts of volunteer targets that described the experience as painful and who required several minutes to recover from the experience. The electrical current generated by the TASER is not lethal when the weapon is used as directed on an average healthy adult.

But Allen suggested the report may be misleading. In a 1991 letter to the journal he noted that he was one of only two medical examiners in the L.A. office to list the TASER on a death certificate.

"This was because pathologists in L.A. were under pressure from law enforcement agencies to exclude the TASER as a cause of death," wrote Allen. He suggested that the L.A. coroner's office has a strong bias and exonerates the law enforcement agencies of that city. "The L.A. coroner's office is the handmaiden of law enforcement [in that city,]" he said.

Allen says that the TASER could cause heart defibrillation depending on where the two probes strike the targeted subject. He suggests that the use of this weapon could have dire effects on the hearts of weaker or older individuals or those under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

UVic criminologist Daniel Koenig suggests that the introduction of this weapon will be a positive influence on Victoria policing but adds there are some drawbacks to be considered.

"Police are operating on the same plane of existence as the rest of us," suggests Koenig. "So there's always the danger that [the TASER] will be used inappropriately. We're talking about humans here."

The U.S. exportation of stun guns was listed as one of the top 10 censored articles of 1997 by Project Censored, an annual nationwide media research project that casts a revealing spotlight on relevant issues that don't make the news.

The article, titled "Shock Value: U.S. Stun Devices Pose Human-Rights Risk" by Anne-Marie Cusac, suggests that the potential misuse of these weapons in countries with poor human rights records means the U.S. ranks as the leading producer and seller of instruments of torture. According to the article, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Amnesty International both claim the devices are unsafe and may encourage sadistic acts by police officers and prison guards, both here and abroad.

The article suggests that, though the non-lethal weapons leave no visible mark on the flesh or tissue damage, they can cause long-lasting injury and even death. This prompts groups like Amnesty to argue that these weapons give police officers the freedom to use extreme force with impunity. But according to Laur, the Victoria police have implemented proper training, education and supervision to ensure the weapon will not be misused.

"Any tool we give police officers can be used excessively," said Laur. "If a member uses this tool or any other tool in an excessive manner they should be held criminally and civilly liable for their actions. I can't emphasize that enough."

Murray Mollard, policy director for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, suggests that their only concern regarding the TASER will be to ensure that there's adequate training for those using it and an accountability process each time it gets used. "And there are these things in terms of citizen complaints," said Mollard. "And the police can set up internal procedures for reporting on the incidents whenever it gets used."

Without some longer-term experience in knowing its major effects, Mollard sees no reason to be opposed to the introduction of the weapon.

Similarly, Andrew Hume, spoke-sperson for the Capital Region Mental Health district in Victoria, suggests that any negative effects are yet to be seen. "We'll wait and see what effects this will have on the mental health community. If we see any negatives we'll certainly be initiating some discussion with the police. Right now we don't know anything about the TASER's possible effects."

The Victoria police are aware of the potential risks the TASER poses and feel the pros of its introduction will outweigh the cons. "You've got to put this in perspective," said Laur. "This unit is going to be used on individuals who're extremely violent and needing to be controlled. Prior to the use of this tool these people could get shot or seriously injured by a baton strike. Nothing's 100 per cent safe. Anything used to control an individual always has the potential to cause injury or death."

Use of the units will be under strict control during the six-month test period. According to Laur, the units will be used when there is a violent individual that needs to be controlled, and it's up to the road supervisor to decide when it will be used.

"Our ultimate goal as a police officer is to solve by voluntary compliance," said Laur. "When we have to physically control somebody who doesn't want to be controlled it gets ugly real quick, and there's no easy way to control those people. We're looking to technology to give us a hand, but we have to understand that technology has its limitations. It's not the cure-all."

As police use of tasers rises, questions over safety increase

July 18, 2004
Alex Berenson, The New York Times

AZARETH, Pa. — As the sun set on June 24, something snapped in Kris J. Lieberman, an unemployed landscaper who lived a few miles from this quiet town. For 45 minutes, he crawled deliriously around a pasture here, moaning and pounding his head against the weedy ground.

Eventually the police arrived, carrying a Taser M26, an electric gun increasingly popular with law enforcement officers nationwide. The gun fires electrified barbs up to 21 feet, hitting suspects with a disabling charge.

The officers told Mr. Lieberman, 32, to calm down. He lunged at them instead. They fired their Taser twice. He fought briefly, collapsed and died.

Mr. Lieberman joined a growing number of people, now at least 50, including 6 in June alone, who have died since 2001 after being shocked. Taser International, which makes several versions of the guns, says its weapons are not lethal, even for people with heart conditions or pacemakers. The deaths resulted from drug overdoses or other factors and would have occurred anyway, the company says.

But Taser has scant evidence for that claim. The company's primary safety studies on the M26, which is far more powerful than other stun guns, consist of tests on a single pig in 1996 and on five dogs in 1999. Company-paid researchers, not independent scientists, conducted the studies, which were never published in a peer-reviewed journal. Taser has no full-time medical director and has never created computer models to simulate the effect of its shocks, which are difficult to test in human clinical trials for ethical reasons.

What is more, aside from a continuing Defense Department study, the results of which have not been released, no federal or state agencies have studied the safety, or effectiveness, of Tasers, which fall between two federal agencies and are essentially unregulated. Nor has any federal agency studied the deaths to determine what caused them. In at least two cases, local medical examiners have said Tasers were partly responsible. In many cases, autopsies are continuing or reports are unavailable.

The few independent studies that have examined the Taser have found that the weapon's safety is unproven at best. The most comprehensive report, by the British government in 2002, concluded "the high-power Tasers cannot be classed, in the vernacular, as `safe.' " Britain has not approved Tasers for general police use.

A 1989 Canadian study found that stun guns induced heart attacks in pigs with pacemakers. A 1999 study by the Department of Justice on an electrical weapon much weaker than the Taser found that it might cause cardiac arrest in people with heart conditions. In reviewing other electrical devices, the Food and Drug Administration has found that a charge half as large as that of the M26 can be dangerous to the heart.

While Taser says that the M26 is not dangerous, it now devotes most of its marketing efforts to the X26, a less powerful weapon it introduced last year. Both weapons are selling briskly. About 100,000 officers nationally now have Tasers, 20 times the number in 2000, and most carry the M26. Taser, whose guns are legal for civilian use in most states, hopes to expand its potential market with a new consumer version of the X26 later this summer.

For Taser, which owns the weapon's trademark and is the only company now making the guns, the growth has been a bonanza. Its stock has soared. Its executives and directors, including a former New York police commissioner, Bernard B. Kerik, have taken advantage, selling $60 million in shares since November.

Patrick Smith, Taser's chief executive, said the guns are safe. "We tell people that this has never caused a death, and in my heart and soul I believe that's true," Mr. Smith said.

Taser did not need to disclose the British results to American police departments, he said. "The Brits are extremely conservative," he said. "To me, this is sort of boilerplate, the fine print." In addition to Taser's animal trials, thousands of police volunteers have received shocks without harm, Mr. Smith said.

But the hits that police officers receive from the M26 in their Taser training have little in common with the shocks given to suspects. In training, volunteers usually receive a single shock of a half-second or less. In the field, Tasers automatically fire for five seconds. If an officer holds down the trigger, a Taser will discharge longer. And suspects are often hit repeatedly.

Over all, Taser has significantly overstated the weapon's safety, say biomedical engineers who separately examined the company's research at the request of The New York Times. None of the engineers have any financial stake in the company or any connection with Taser; The Times did not pay them.

Relatively small electric shocks can kill people whose hearts are weakened by disease or cocaine use, said John Wikswo, a Vanderbilt University biomedical engineer. But no one knows whether the Taser's current crosses the threshold for those people, Dr. Wikswo said.

"Their testing scheme has not included the possibility that there is a subset of the population that is exquisitely sensitive," Dr. Wikswo said. "That alone means they have not done adequate testing."

Mr. Smith said Taser would eventually run more tests. "In a perfect world, I'd love to have studies on all this stuff, but animal studies are controversial, expensive," he said. "You've got to do the reasonable amount of testing." Comparing Taser's tests with the studies conducted by makers of medical devices like pacemakers is unfair, he said.

Dr. Andrew Podgorski, a Canadian electrical engineer who conducted the 1989 study, said he was certain that Tasers were dangerous for people with pacemakers. More research is needed to determine if other people are vulnerable, he said.

"I would urge the U.S. government to conduct those studies," Dr. Podgorski said. "Shocking a couple of pigs and dogs doesn't prove anything."

In More Officers' Hands

Many police officers defend the Taser, saying the weapon helps them avoid using deadly force and lowers the risk of injury to officers. Tasers let police officers subdue suspects without wrestling with or hitting them, said David Klinger, a former police officer and a criminology professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. And Tasers are surely safer than firearms.

"I think it is appropriate for deployment in the field," Mr. Klinger said. "You trust this guy or gal with a gun, you should be able to trust them with a less lethal device."

But human rights groups say the police may be overusing the Taser. Because the gun leaves only light marks, and because Taser markets it as nonlethal, officers often use it on unruly suspects, not just as an alternative to deadly force, said Dr. William F. Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International USA. In recent incidents, officers have shocked a 9-year-old girl in Arizona and a 66-year-old woman in Kansas City.

"We think there should be controlled, systematic independent medical studies," Dr. Schulz said. "We would like to see these weapons suspended until these questions are answered."

A study by the Orange County, Fla., sheriff's office showed that officers used pepper spray and batons much less after getting the guns. But the use of Tasers more than made up for that drop, and the department's overall use of force increased 58 percent from 2000 to 2003. Last week, several police departments in Orange County agreed to restrict the use of Tasers to situations where suspects are actively resisting officers. The sheriff's office is not part of the agreement and says it is still studying the matter.

State and federal agencies do not keep tabs on Taser use, so no one knows how many times officers have fired the weapon. Officers have reported close to 5,000 uses of the M26 to Taser, but the company says the actual number is much higher.

Little evidence supports the theory that Tasers reduce police shootings or work better than other alternatives to guns, like pepper spray. Because of their limited range, Tasers are best in situations where an officer using a Taser is covered by another with a firearm, officers say.

A 2002 company study found that nearly 85 percent of people shocked with Tasers were unarmed. Fewer than 5 percent were carrying guns.

In Phoenix, which has equipped all its officers with Tasers, police shootings fell by half last year. Taser trumpets that statistic on its Web site. But last year's drop appears to be an anomaly. This year, shootings are running at a record pace, according to the Phoenix police department.

A 2002 study in Greene County, Mo., found that Tasers were only marginally more effective than pepper spray at restraining suspects. Pepper spray worked in 91 percent of cases, while the Taser had a 94 percent success rate.

The largest police departments have been slow to embrace the Taser. The New York Police Department owns only a handful of Tasers, which are used by specialized units and supervisors, a spokesman said.

'Gold in Those Hills'

The M26 was introduced only five years ago, but the technology is much older. John Cover, an Arizona inventor, created the Taser in 1969. Its name stands for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle," an allusion to the Tom Swift series of science fiction novels.

Engineers have known for generations that relatively small electric currents cause painful and uncontrollable muscle contractions. Tasers operate on that principle, firing barbs that are connected by wire to the gun and flood the body with current. The gun can deliver its shock even if the barbs do not break the skin because its current can jump through two inches of clothing.

Weak currents are not inherently dangerous if they stop in a few minutes. But stronger shocks can disrupt the electrical circuitry of the heart. That condition, ventricular fibrillation, causes cardiac arrest in seconds and death in minutes, unless the heart is defibrillated with an even larger shock.

The exact current needed to cause fibrillation depends on technical factors like the current's shape and frequency, as well as the heart's condition, said James Eason, a biomedical engineering professor at Washington and Lee University. But because fibrillation is so dangerous, scientists can conduct only limited human trials. They must estimate the threshold of fibrillation from animal trials and computer models.

Still, the broad parameters for fibrillation are known, and the first Taser from Mr. Cover had a large safety margin. In 1975 the Consumer Product Safety Commission concluded that weapon, which was 11 percent as powerful as the M26, probably would not harm healthy humans.

Then, in March 1976, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms claimed it had jurisdiction over the weapons because gunpowder propelled their barbs. The firearms bureau essentially outlawed them for civilian use; no federal safety standard was ever created.

But the original Tasers were bulky and often ineffective. For almost two decades, they remained a niche product used by a few police departments.

That began to change after 1993, when Mr. Smith and his brother Thomas created a company to market electric weapons to civilians. Patrick Smith, who had just graduated from the University of Chicago business school, saw enormous potential for an alternative to firearms.

"I just figured I'm going to go to out to Arizona, and I'm going to scratch and sniff and dig, and figure there's going to be gold in those hills," Mr. Smith said in an interview.

In January 1995, the Smiths introduced their first electric gun, which was powered by compressed nitrogen. As a result, the weapon was not regulated by the firearms bureau and could be sold to civilians.

For the next several years, the company struggled, as concerns over the gun's power kept sales slow. By 1999, the company, now known as Taser International, was near bankruptcy, with only $50,000 in the bank and $2.7 million in debt.

"It was pretty humiliating," he said. "We had completely wiped out my parents financially."

Testing

Hoping to stay afloat, the company introduced the Advanced Taser M26 in December 1999. The weapon closely resembled a handgun, a feature many police officers liked, and was very powerful.

According to Taser, the gun produced 26 watts of power, four times the power of the earlier model. A field test in 2001 by the Canadian police showed that the M26 was even stronger, with an output of 39 watts.

(Stun gun power is usually gauged in watts, a measure of electrical energy, even though the biological effects of electricity are more closely related to current strength, measured in amperes. Electrical engineers often compare the flow of electricity to a river: amperes are like the river's speed, while watts are the amount of water flowing by each second. As watts increase, amperes rise, but more slowly.)

Taser's sales rose as officers learned about the new gun. At meetings with police officers, company representatives encouraged them to receive a half-second shock to feel the weapon's power for themselves. "These guys would leave just absolutely evangelical about the product because we would just drop them all," Mr. Smith said.

In its marketing, the company touted the safety of the M26, saying it had been extensively tested.

But Taser had performed only two animal studies before introducing the M26.

In 1996, Taser hired Robert Stratbucker, a Nebraska doctor and farmer, to test the weapon. Dr. Stratbucker, who is now Taser's part-time medical director, shocked a pig 48 times with shocks as large as those from the M26. The pig suffered no heart damage.

Three years later, the company hired Dr. Stratbucker and Dr. Wayne McDaniel, an electrical engineer, for an animal test at the University of Missouri. The scientists shocked five anesthetized dogs about 200 times with the M26. The dogs did not suffer cardiac arrest, although one animal had changes in its heartbeat, according to a report.

Taser has repeatedly said the studies proved that the M26 was safe. But the biomedical engineers who reviewed the gun's safety for The Times said Taser should have conducted far more research.

"I don't think there has been a definitive study saying that yes it can contribute to death or no it cannot," said Dr. Raymond Ideker, an electrophysiologist and a professor in the cardiology division at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Taser must test more animals and vary the shocks they receive to find the gun's safety margin, Dr. Ideker said.

In addition, while Taser claims that its Missouri study proves that the gun is safe for people who have used cocaine, it never tested animals dosed with cocaine. Because cocaine substantially increases heart attack risk, and Tasers are used on people who have taken cocaine, that omission is a serious flaw, said Dr. Wikswo of Vanderbilt.

The company should also examine risks other than fibrillation, some scientists say.

Dr. Terrence Allen, a former medical examiner in Los Angeles who examined cases in the late 1980's when people died after being shocked with earlier-model Tasers, said he was sure the weapons could be lethal. Taser is misrepresenting the medical evidence, said Dr. Allen, who has consulted for people who have sued the company.

Dr. Mark W. Kroll, a Taser director and the chief technology officer of St. Jude Medical, one of the largest pacemaker manufacturers, said Taser had adequately tested its weapons and they were safe. External pacemakers deliver much larger charges and do not cause fibrillation, he said.

Dr. Ideker countered that pacemakers and Tasers could not be easily compared, because the Taser's shock is very short and powerful, while a pacemaker delivers its charge over a much longer period.

Although Taser has performed only rudimentary studies of the M26, it has more closely studied the X26, the gun it introduced last year. In a 2003 study at the University of Missouri, Taser found that a shock roughly 20 times that of the X26 caused a healthy, anesthetized 85-pound pig to fibrillate.

Mr. Smith cites the 2003 Missouri study as proof that all Tasers have a safety margin of 20-to-1 or more. But the new gun puts out a charge only one-fourth as large as the older model, a fact Taser does not generally advertise.

The study said nothing about the M26, or about hearts stressed by disease, drugs or physical activity. "I think another test is warranted," Dr. Ideker said.

Taser did not test the older gun, which is associated with nearly all the deaths, because "we believed that the M26's safety record and prior testing speaks for itself," Mr. Smith said. "Could it be done? Absolutely. There's time and expense involved."

The X26 has become Taser's biggest seller, based mainly on the company's claims that it is even stronger than the M26 despite its small size and lower power. The company says the new gun enables electrical current to enter the body more efficiently.

No independent agency has tested the guns side by side, and in Taser's patent on the M26, Mr. Smith himself argued that weaker guns were often ineffective because they do not deliver enough current to incapacitate suspects. But neither deaths nor concerns about effectiveness have dampened police support and investor enthusiasm for Taser International. Stock analysts predict Taser will have $15 million in profits on sales of $60 million in 2004. Investors have bid up the company's shares 60-fold since last February, giving Taser a value of $1.2 billion.

The Smith brothers and their father, Phillips, have sold $46 million in Taser shares since November, according to federal filings. They still own $130 million worth of shares. Other Taser executives and directors have sold $14 million in stock. Mr. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner and a director, has sold $900,000 in stock. Mr. Kroll of St. Jude Medical has sold $1.7 million.

"It's been great," Patrick Smith said of the company's recent success. But making money is not his main goal, he said. "If we could get a Taser on every officer's belt,'' he said, " it would save hundreds of lives or thousands of lives a year."

Deaths and Questions

Meanwhile, the number of Taser-associated deaths is rising. In June alone, at least six people died, the most ever in one month: Eric B. Christmas, James A. Cobb, Jacob J. Lair, Anthony C. Oliver, Jerry W. Pickens and Mr. Lieberman.

The circumstances of the deaths vary widely. Among the six, Mr. Pickens was the only one hit with the X26.

Mr. Cobb fought for several minutes after being shocked, which suggests that fibrillation could not have caused his death. Some of the other men collapsed immediately, according to news reports and witnesses. Some of the men were fighting with the police when officers shot them. Others simply refused to obey orders.

Mr. Pickens was one. On June 4, in Bridge City, La., the police were summoned to help calm him after an argument with his 18-year-old son, Taylor Pickens. Jerry Pickens confronted the police in the family's front yard.

"My dad, he had been drinking, and he was kind of hostile toward the police,'' Taylor said. "He kept trying to go back inside the house, and they said, 'If you're going to go back into the house we're going to Taser you.' " Mr. Pickens who was unarmed, began to walk inside, Taylor said.

"They counted down three, and then they shot him in the back," Taylor said. "My dad stiffened up, and fell back." Mr. Pickens hit his head on a cement walkway and began foaming at the mouth, Taylor said.

Sharon Landis, Taylor's mother and Mr. Pickens's wife, said officers did not need to shock her husband. "They could have pepper-sprayed him, they could have grabbed him," she said. "He's 55 years old, and these are big burly cops."

Mr. Pickens was pronounced brain-dead that day and removed from life support three days later, Ms. Landis said.

Toxicologic tests on Mr. Pickens are being conducted, said Gayle Day of the Jefferson Parish coroner's office. A spokesman for the sheriff's office said he could not comment on a continuing investigation. Mr. Smith said he could not comment on Mr. Pickens's death.

Three weeks later, Kris Lieberman died in Pennsylvania. The officers who shocked him were the only witnesses to his death, which the Pennsylvania State Police are investigating. But Mr. Lieberman's parents said the state police told them that their son was shocked twice and collapsed afterward. [Stan Coopersmith, chief of the Bushkill Township Police, whose officers responded to the call, said he could not comment on the incident until the state police finish their investigation.] But Taser said that the police chief had told the company that Mr. Lieberman fought briefly after the shocks and that an automatic defibrillator used by the officers indicated Mr. Lieberman was not fibrillating when he collapsed.

"I would suspect the autopsy will find a cause of death that does not include the Taser," Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Lieberman's parents say that he was troubled but that he did not use drugs. Police officers searched Mr. Lieberman's home after the shooting and did not find drugs, his parents say. Toxicologic tests are pending, the Northampton County Coroner said.

Mr. Lieberman's father, Richard, a plain-spoken farmer, said he had not decided whether to hire a lawyer. He simply wants to know if the gun caused his son's death. "If he was the problem, we have to accept it," Mr. Lieberman said. "If they were the problem, they have to accept it."

Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York for this article.

Shock Value - U.S. stun devices pose human-rights risk

September 1997
Shock Value
By Anne-Marie Cusac
September 1997

Amnesty International lists the United States in the same class as Algeria and China in a March 1997 report. All three countries appear under a section titled, “Recent Cases of the Use of Electroshock Weapons for Torture or Ill-Treatment.”

A decade ago, the United States did not often show up as a culprit in Amnesty reports. But lately, the United States has become a leading manufacturer and exporter of pushbutton electricshock devices, which Amnesty claims are unsafe and are ending up in the hands of torturers. Of the 100 companies listed in the report, forty-two are U.S.-based. According to Amnesty, countries that have received stun weapons exported from the United States in the last decade include Yemen, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Argentina, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, Ecuador, Cyprus, and Thailand.

One company the report cites is ArianneInternational of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, which makes the “Myotron”--a compact version of the stun gun “available in pearl, black, or white,” a salesperson tells me over the telephone. The company advertises the device as “small enough to carry on a big key ring and flat enough to carry in a shirt pocket. It’s five times more powerful than the best police stun gun.” A related device, the “Myotron-TM Venu,” is marketed especially to women.

Other prominent U.S.-based manufacturers of stun weaponry include Stun Tech of Cleveland, Ohio, known for its stun guns, stun shields, and especially its stun belts; Nova Products, Inc., of Cookeville, Tennessee, maker of tasers, along with other electronic devices; and Safe Defense Co., of Greenville, North Carolina, which, according to the company’s president, markets its stun guns to the general public through variety stores, “gun shops, pawn shops, uniform stores, and flea markets.”

Another company that makes an appearance in the Amnesty report is B-West Imports, Inc., of Tucson, Arizona, which in 1995 joined a South African company called Paralyzer Protection. B-West brings in Paralyzer shock batons and shields that deliver a charge of between 80,000 and 120,000 volts.

A B-West advertising brochure claims, “The Paralyzer stun baton is the result of a unique process developed by German scientists and doctors. The extensive testing done by the Department of Medicine at the University of Dusseldorf resulted in the correlation of volts, amps, and frequency to render a would-be assailant helpless without any damage to skin, eyes, or internal organs.”

Amnesty takes issue with that account. “The professor has since told Amnesty International that he was not specifically involved in developing the ‘Paralyzer’ range of stun guns and batons, but simply tested a particular stun device for another company in March 1985, the results of which cannot be applied directly to other stun devices,” the report states.

The report also devotes considerable attention to Tasertron, of Corona, California, the first company to manufacture the taser--a weapon that shoots two wires attached to darts with metal hooks from as far away as thirty feet. When the hooks catch in a victim’s skin or clothing, the device delivers a debilitating shock. Los Angeles police officers used the device against Rodney King in 1991.

A version of the weapon, the Air Taser, launches “two small probes attached to fifteen feet of TASER wire” through the air, according to the manufacturer, Air Taser, Inc., of Scottsdale, Arizona. Because the device uses air instead of gunpowder to power the shot, it is not regulated by the gun-control laws that apply to other tasers, which are banned for sale to consumers. The company has multiple Internet sites, complete with visuals. One image shows a small woman in high heels and a short skirt shocking a much larger man in a black knit cap. A jagged charge travels from her hand to his chest, where it creates a small explosion. “The AIR TASER sends powerful T-Waves™ through the wires (and up to two cumulative inches of clothing) into the body of the assailant, jamming his nervous system and incapacitating him,” proclaims the ad.

Air Taser also markets a new product it calls the Auto Taser. “Imagine an automotive defense system that fights back,” the company says. “Any attempt to touch the AUTO TASER zaps the thief with an unforgettable, yet non-lethal 5,900 milliwatt electron pulse. A thief can’t steal what he can’t touch.” The accompanying photograph shows a dark parking lot. A man reaches through a car window and lightning runs up his arm to his shoulder. He is grimacing and is falling backwards.

Air Taser claims its corporate mission is “to raise mankind above violent behavior by developing products which enable people to protect themselves without causing injury or death to another human being.”

But these devices also prove quite handy for people who want to commit crimes. In Britain, a country that prohibits handguns, stun weapons became a favorite tool of muggers until the government banned them.

Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union both claim the devices are unsafe and may actually encourage sadistic acts by police officers and prison guards. “Stun belts offer enormous possibilities for abuse and the infliction of gratuitous pain,” says Jenni Gainsborough of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. She adds that because use of the belt leaves little physical evidence, this increases “the likelihood of sadistic, but hard-to-prove, misuse of weapons.”

“It’s possible to use anything for torture, but it’s a little easier to use our devices,” admits John McDermit, head of Nova Products.

In 1991, Terence Allen, a specialist in forensic pathology who served as deputy medical examiner for both the Los Angeles and San Francisco coroner’s offices, linked the taser to fatalities. “The taser contributed to at least these nine deaths,” Allen wrote in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. “It seems only logical that a device capable of depolarizing skeletal muscle can also depolarize heart muscle and cause fibrillation under certain circumstances.”

With electrical current, Allen tells me, “the chance of death increases with each use. This may have been a factor in Los Angeles. Some of the people who died there had been shocked as many as seven times.”

Warns Allen: “I think what you’re going to see is more deaths” from stun weapons.

As a result of his own work in forensic pathology, Allen is convinced that stun devices are already being abused in U.S. police stations and prisons. Some authorities, he says, can’t resist exploiting the power they have over people in their custody to “force them to lose control of their muscles.”

Allen describes a seventeen-year-old boy in Los Angeles who was accused of stealing. “They used a stun gun to extract a confession from him,” he says. “He had burns that exactly fit the probes.”

Allen is referring to the case of Jaime Ramirez. Before dawn on November 30, 1986, officers William Lustig and Robert Rodriguez stopped Ramirez, who was carrying a sack full of stereo parts, according to the Los Angeles Times. The two officers shocked the boy repeatedly with a stun gun in an attempt to force him to confess to stealing the equipment.

Ramirez sued the city. He testified that Lustig “told me that if I didn’t tell the truth, he was going to burn me,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Both officers then used the stun gun on Ramirez. “I felt like I was being burned,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Ramirez as saying. “I could not keep my legs still. . . . I was feeling the pressure in my heart. I could not breathe freely.” The two officers lost their jobs. Both were convicted and served time behind bars. The city of Los Angeles settled with Ramirez for $300,000.

Los Angeles is not the only American city where police officers abuse people with electroshock weapons. Phoenix, Arizona, is home to Sheriff Joe Arpaio, author of America’s Toughest Sheriff: How We Can Win the War Against Crime. But, under Arpaio’s charge, the Maricopa County Jails have come under some harsh criticism. In March 1996, the Department of Justice’s civil-rights division filed a report on the jails that strongly condemns “the fact that all jail guards carry stun guns. The easy availability of these weapons,” the Department of Justice examiner concluded, “has contributed to the excessive use of force.”

Guards at the Maricopa County Jails have been known to use the stun gun against an inmate “simply to see its effect,” the report states. It also cites “use of a stun device on a prisoner’s testicles while in a restraint chair.”

The Maricopa County Jail disputes nearly every charge in the Department of Justice report. They are “allegations by prisoners, unsubstantiated remarks,” says Lisa Allen, coordinator of communications for the sheriff’s office. The county complains that the Department of Justice report does not provide inmate names, dates, or times of the alleged incidents. But in fact, the report draws on videotapes and jail documents in addition to prisoner testimony.

“I’ve seen the photos. I’ve talked with inmates. I’ve seen the letters. I have dates. I have times,” says Nick Hentoff, a criminal and civil-rights attorney in Phoenix who says he has represented clients in “about a dozen suits ” against the Maricopa County Jails involving stun weapons. He says the county jails “have countless videos that show it.” Hentoff’s client, Bart David, currently has a lawsuit pending against the county. He claims that guards at one of the jails shocked him in the testicles.

In 1996, the Phoenix New Times, a newsweekly, reported the death of jail inmate Scott Norberg at the Maricopa County Jails. Norberg died while fighting with officers who were attempting to confine him in a restraining chair while strapping a towel around his mouth “to keep him from spitting.”

During the struggle, jailers shocked Norberg multiple times with stun guns. Inmates who witnessed Norberg’s death estimated that he had been shocked between eight and twenty times. Guards estimated the number of shocks at between two and six. “An examination of Norberg’s corpse commissioned by Norberg’s family puts the number at twenty-one,” wrote New Times reporter Tony Ortega.

Although the medical examiner ruled the death an accident, “at least one detention officer . . . contradicts the scenario that Norberg suddenly went limp,” wrote Ortega. “In fact, she claims she tried to tell the guards that they were suffocating Norberg, who had literally turned purple. She says an officer snapped back at her, ‘Who gives a fuck?’”

“Their policy is stun first, ask questions later,” says Hentoff. He claims to have seen “dozens of pictures” of jail inmates with stun burns. “You’ll see two little marks close together like vampire bites on their bodies,” says Hentoff. “Those are the stun-gun marks.”

In a letter released on August 3, 1997, Amnesty International detailed several more recent incidents of mistreatment at the Maricopa County Jails, including an inmate who “allegedly sustained broken teeth and spine and knee injuries after being kicked and beaten and stunned repeatedly with a stun gun.” After the beating, the prisoner alleges, he was confined for five hours in a restraining chair.

A second inmate fell asleep during processing in a central-intake room. “A stun gun was allegedly used to wake him up,” says Amnesty. The prisoner claims he was then thrown against a wall.

Ortega talked to a nurse in July who spilled the beans on her co-workers at the Maricopa County Jails. She told him many guards “seem to delight in treating inmates badly.” One time, “she saw a detention officer bring a man suffering from abdominal pain into a clinic,” Ortega reported. “The man refused to say what was wrong with him, so the detention officer zapped the patient with a stun gun to make him talk. ‘None of us could believe it,’ she says.”

Amnesty International claims the Commerce Department is not limiting sales of electronic devices overseas. “The United States will say it opposes torture, and it’s a party to the convention against torture,” says Brian Wood of Amnesty International. “However, as each month goes by, more and more of these electric-shock weapons are exported, and information is withheld about where, exactly, they’re sent to. This is unacceptable, especially since Amnesty first raised this issue with the U.S. government over a decade ago.”

Although Amnesty has asked the United States to guarantee that it will not knowingly export electroshock devices to torturing states, the Clinton Administration has yet to agree to slow the brisk U.S. trade in stun devices. In response to Amnesty’s campaign, over the past few months governments in Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom have announced that they will tighten prohibitions on the trade in stun weapons.

Though electric torture is on the rise worldwide, the U.S. Commerce Department does not group electroshock weapons with torture items, whose export it restricts. Instead, it classifies such devices as police equipment, which makes them easily exportable. The stun belt is considered offensive (as opposed to defensive) police equipment, so it still must receive a license before export to most countries. But, as Michael Lelyveld reported last year in The Journal of Commerce, manufacturers in NATO countries import stun devices as general merchandise and the U.S. Commerce Department does not track them.

“The lack of official data raises the possibility that this country may be the world’s biggest source of such products,” wrote Lelyveld. “But without tighter regulation, it is impossible to know.”

One NATO country that uses electronic weapons for torture is Turkey. Amnesty’s report cites the case of Mediha Curabaz, a twenty-five-year-old nurse. Police detained her on the street in 1991 and took her to the political branch of the Adana police headquarters. “They were making baseless accusations about people I work with and about people from the Adana Nurse’s Association, on whose committee I serve,” the Amnesty report quotes Curabaz as saying. “They asked me to support their allegations. . . . When I refused, they beat me furiously all over, took me in the room used for hanging people up by their arms or legs, and gave me electric shocks through my fingers, sexual organs, and nipples, saying degrading things about my body. They said, ‘You will certainly do what we say if we give you the electric truncheon.’ They thrust the electric truncheon violently into my sexual organs, and I felt a pain as if I was being drilled there with an electric drill.”

NATO countries can also provide an easy route for manufacturers intent on shipping their devices to other torturing states. “It begs the question, should the United States export them at all?” says Lelyveld.

Would the United States, under any circumstances, ever allow the export of the stun belt, for instance, to a torturing state? “I would not feel comfortable saying ‘never under any circumstances,’” says a Commerce Department spokesperson.

The U.S. Government itself is a big user of stun devices, especially stun guns, electroshock batons, and electric shields. In June 1996, Amnesty International asked the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to suspend use of the electroshock belt--citing the possibility of physical danger to inmates and the potential for misuse. The agency has not complied.

Amnesty International has come down particularly hard on the state of Wisconsin--which has a place of prominence in the March report for its plan to use the stun belt on chain gangs. That plan has now gone into effect. Wisconsin’s new chain gang started work at Fox Lake prison on June 2. The state has conducted no studies on the use of the belt on chain-gang members, even though physical work and summer heat could contribute to a dangerous level of stress on an inmate’s heart if he were shocked.

The first inmate to wear the belt on the Wisconsin chain gang was seventeen-year-old Clark Krueger. Though Krueger is a minor, he is doing time as an adult. But he is still subject to anti-smoking laws that apply to minors. And Krueger likes to smoke. He has been caught with cigarettes five times, enough to earn him 180 days in the segregation unit or a stint on the chain gang, according to Mary Neuman, the administrative captain at Fox Lake in charge of supervising the new work crews. Clark opted for the chain gang.

The state’s use of the belt on a minor is of special concern to Amnesty. Brian Wood calls it a “violation of the international convention on the rights of the child.”

When Fox Lake guards objected to the state’s plan to dress all members of the crew in stun belts, the Department of Corrections asked the prison to place the belt on at least one inmate at a time. Now the guards in charge of the gang are “moving it from one inmate to another from one day to the next,” says Gerald Berge, the warden at Fox Lake.

When I visit the prison, Berge tells me the prisoners are at work off prison grounds, at a cemetery in the city of Fox Lake. I follow Berge’s car down several miles of rural roads. It is a bright, windy July day--the first cool afternoon in a week. The graveyard lies next to a marsh and a curving river. Some of the headstones in the graveyard are more than 100 years old.

We watch as an inmate shifts a gravestone forward. A second worker dumps gravel behind the marker to prop it up. The inmates wear standard-issue green clothing and bright yellow vests. Each has twenty-five-inch leg restraints with padded cuffs around the ankles. They are chained to themselves, not each other. It is impossible to tell which inmate wears the stun belt under his clothes. Mary Neuman says that, for security reasons, she can’t let me know who has it on.

Two guards advise the work crew. A third stands back and watches, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

I am surprised. Wasn’t the stun belt supposed to make supervision with guns unnecessary?
Even if the entire work crew were to wear the stun belt, a guard with a gun would watch over them, says Berge. “The statute says one of the guards will be armed.”

When it comes to the stun belt, Berge is no cheerleader. “I would not feel comfortable having inmates out here all in stun belts without restraints,” he says.

“I think, frankly, the stun belt is more appropriate for transport,” Berge goes on. “We don’t have experience with inmates in stun belts working. It’s hard to endorse that.”

I ask Berge if he would feel comfortable if the crew were wearing only individual leg chains, and no belt. “Yes,” he says. Is he concerned about possible injury? “Not really,” he says. Then he qualifies the point. “If we had an inmate who had a cardiac condition that we were not aware of, that’s where the danger would be.”

After a few minutes of conversation, Neuman brings over inmate Earl Simington, who has agreed to talk with me about his experience on the chain gang. Simington is typical of the inmates assigned to the crew--someone let out on parole, who, as Neuman puts it, “didn’t get the message” and has landed back in prison. He is currently serving a thirty-month sentence.

“I have three misdemeanors and one felony on my record, and I’ll be twenty-seven at the end of July,” says Simington. He tells me his felony conviction was for possession of fifteen grams of marijuana.

Simington volunteered for the new chain gang because he was bored. “It’s not for the pay,” he tells me (inmates on the chain gang make between twenty and thirty cents per hour, according to Berge). “It makes my time go faster.”

Before he started work on the chain gang, the prison required Simington to sign a form giving officers permission to make him wear the belt and to shock him with it if he misbehaves.

He then practiced working outside cutting grass while wearing the belt. Simington is most concerned about the belt’s weight, and the discomfort from wearing it in the heat. The belt has a good heft, he tells me. He says if it were mandatory daily wear, he wouldn’t volunteer for the chain gang. “No one will want to be out there” if they have to wear it, he says.

Simington can’t remember seeing any medical information on the form he signed. “I was never told, except, ‘you may lose your bodily functions,’” he says. “I don’t know if there are any long-term effects or damage or anything like that. I would want to find out if there are bad sideeffects. I don’t know how long it’s been studied on people.”

Simington believes he has signed away his rights when it comes to the device. “When I signed that waiver form, that was saying, hey, you volunteered,” he says. “If you get hurt you can’t bring repercussions if it’s because of your behavior.”

Simington says the stun belt is too much. “We’re already doing time. We’re already chained. What more?”

Manufacturers of electroshock weapons continue to wave aside allegations that use of their devices is dangerous and may constitute a gross violation of human rights. And they are making innovations on some old favorites. A new stun weapon that may soon arrive at a police department near you: electroshock razor wire, specially designed for surrounding demonstrators who get out of hand.

Project Censored: United States Companies are World Leaders in the Manufacture of Torture Devices for Internal Use and Export

Source: THE PROGRESSIVE
Title: "Shock Value: U.S. Stun Devices Pose Human-Rights Risk"
Date: September 1997
Author: Anne-Marie Cusac

Mainstream Media Coverage:
Chicago Tribune, 3/4/97, page 5, Zone N
Washington Times, 3/4/97, page 16A

Project Censored's
Top Ten Censored Stories of 1997

#FIVE: In its March 1997 report entitled "Recent Cases of the Use of Electroshock Weapons for Torture or Ill-Treatment," Amnesty International lists 100 companies worldwide that produce and sell instruments of torture. Forty-two of these firms are in the United States. This places the U.S. as the leader in the manufacture of stun guns, stun belts, cattle probe-like devices, and other equipment which can cause devastating pain in the hands of torturers.

According to the Amnesty International report, the following are some of the American companies currently engaged in the production and sale of such weapons: Arianne International of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; B-west Imports Inc., of Tucson, Arizona; and Taserton, of Corona, California. Arianne International makes the "Myotron," a compact version of the stun gun. B-West joined with Paralyzer Protection, a South African company, to produce shock batons that deliver a charge of between 80,000 and 120,000 volts. Taserton was the first company to manufacture the taser, a product which shoots two wires attached to darts with metal hooks. When these hooks catch a victim's skin or clothing, the device delivers a debilitating shock. Los Angeles police officers used the device against Rodney King in 1991.

These weapons are currently in use in the U.S. and are being exported to countries all over the world. The U.S. government is a large purchaser of stun devices, especially stun guns, electroshock batons, and electric shields. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Amnesty both claim the devices are unsafe and may encourage sadistic acts by police officers and prison guards, both here and abroad. "Stun belts offer enormous possibilities for abuse and the infliction of gratuitous pain," says Jenni Gainsbourough of the ACLU's National Prison Project. She adds that because use of the belt leaves little physical evidence, this increases the likelihood of sadistic, but hard-to-prove, misuse of these weapons. In June 1996, Amnesty International asked the Bureau of Prisons to suspend the use of electroshock belt, citing the possibility of physical danger to inmates and the potential for misuse.

Terence Allen, a specialist in forensic pathology who served as deputy medical examiner for both Los Angeles and San Francisco coroner's offices, in 1991 linked the taser to fatalities. With electrical current, Allen says, the chance of death increases with each use. Allen warns, "I think what you are going to see is more deaths from stun weapons."

Manufacturers of electroshock weapons continue to denounce allegations that use of their devices is dangerous and may constitute a gross violation of human rights. Instead, they are making more advanced innovations. A new stun weapon may soon be added to police arsenals, the electroshock razor wire, specially designed for surrounding demonstrators who get out of hand.

Student Researchers: Carolyn Williams, Susan Allen
Faculty Evaluator: Dan Haytin, Ph.D.

Arming the torturers - electro-shock torture and the spread of stun technology

March 1997
Amnesty International


Arming Torturers: Electro-Shock Torture and Spread of Stun Technology -