Tasers: Defense Mechanism or Lethal Weapon?
Taser gun/Star Tribune/AP/File
A former police officer in Louisiana has been indicted on charges of manslaughter in connection with the Taser death of a man he was arresting. The Christian Science Monitor had a full account of the case earlier this week:
After Winnfield Parish police took Mr. Pikes, who is black, into custody one January morning, a white police officer fired a Taser, jolting Pikes nine times in the span of 14 minutes. Pikes never woke up.
Police said the 21-year-old Pikes was on drugs and uncooperative, but coroner Randolph Williams took a different view. In a report last month, he said he found no signs of a physical struggle, of drugs, or of any medical condition that could have exacerbated the jolts’ effect.
According to Amnesty International, taser guns have played a role in close to 300 deaths in the US and Canada since their introduction in 1998. But so far, no US jury has ever convicted a police officer in connection with a death related to use of the weapon.
Stun guns got some negative press last year when a University of Florida student was tasered and arrested at a John Kerry event, and lately more people seem to be turning against them — seven states have banned their use. Yet for many law enforcement officers, they remain a vital tool for keeping dangerous situations under control.
The future of electic shock weapons is unclear, making this case one to watch.
-- Filed by Caitlin Kenney
August 15th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Well, we know electric shocks have adverse effects on the human body (e.g. the electric chair, old electric shock treatments). I think this is a more lethal weapon than police officers are admitting. Besides death, I wonder what other effects this weapon will have on the human body- does it effect brain function at all?
August 15th, 2008 at 10:40 am
There was an interesting article in the IEEE Spectrum last year about Tasers - how they work and whether they are safe or not: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/dec07/5731
I think it’s fair to say that they are less lethal than, say, a handgun, however, the flip side is that the perceived relative safety of the weapon may give the person using it a false sense of safety, so it may be used more often than handguns are used.
My sense is that there’s much about Tasers that is not known or studied yet about their lethality. Like any other weapon, it’s not a harmless device. It can certainly be abused, but I also think that it’s not an unreasonable weapon to use in some situations where a conventional firearm would be excessive.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
The problem with the taser is that the resulting current sent through the suspect’s body varies by body type, and it takes but a tenth of microamp to stop a human heart. Couple that with the inductive quality of blood, keeping a current going even after the taser has stopped, you can see that multiple taser blasts have a strong likelihood of causing death.
I prefer the ray gun which blasts with microwave pulse. The suspect doesn’t get shocked, but they get uncomfortably warm really fast. So far, there hasn’t been any long-term side effects.