LULAC Joined by Southern Christian Leadership Conference Calling for Federal Ban on Tasers
Last week, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was courageously joined by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its call to ban the use of the Taser device nationwide. On September 8, 2009, the SCLC, whose first President was Martin Luther King, Jr., joined the Latino organization’s call to stop this brutal and inhumane practice by police officers. LULAC started to build momentum for this push to end the use of tasers in Albuquerque, New Mexico on August 15, 2009, holding a national press conference on the steps of City Hall. SCLC will be putting major pressure on the Obama administration (pressing Congress in the coming months) to outlaw a practice already classified as “torture” by the United Nations.
The push came after 14-year-old Kailee Martinez of Tucumcari, New Mexico was brutally struck in the head by a Taser dart. She now has 18 staples and 6 stitches on her head, thankful that she did not lose her life, compared with New Mexico’s 4 other lethal cases.
According to Truth Not Tasers, there have been 443 individuals killed by tasers in North America, as of July 1, 2009. Amnesty International placed the fatality number at 330 since 2001, while excluding cases resulting in severe brain damage, acoma, or a vegatative state.
Other recent cases of police brutality include a 14-year-old middle schooler with autism from Indianapolis, IA, who was tasered twice for “acting out” in school. Instead of following the IEP and individual discipline plan for the autistic child, school authorities resorted to police intervention. Robert Smith of Indianapolis despicably labeled the incident as simply “enabling” the child, only encouraging him to “cross the line” further and disrespect police authority in the future. One wonders what would have occurred to Rosa Parks had tasers been in use in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955.
Several lawsuits have unsuccessfully challenged TASER International, Inc.’s claims that use of the device is a “non-lethal” alternative to older-fashioned methods of police brutality, challenging the device on products liability grounds. These lawsuits have met with limited success, however, and have yet to thoroughly penetrate America’s political consciousness. An incomplete list includes: Powers v. Taser Intern., Inc., 2007 WL 5446674; Williams v. Taser Intern., Inc., 2007 WL 1630875 (N.D.Ga. 2007); Neal-Lomax v. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept. 2006 WL 2668190; and other big cases.
Over the summer, in a huge victory against TASER International, a California jury awarded $6.2 million to a man wrongfully and excessively tased. The victory is the first ever against Taser International in a product-liability claim. TASER is appealing the award.
In Merced, California, an unarmed black man in a wheelchair, Gregory Williams, was excessively tased for no justifiable reason. Gregory had no legs at the time of incident (and therefore fleeing was not a possibility), as shown in this video. Mr. Williams lost his legs to gangrene previously, along with his job as a truck driver. No resolution from the incident is known at this time.
In Michigan, a 15-year old was tasered to death after bailing out of his Dodge Stratus, having done nothing more than drive on an expired license plate. After being shocked a single time by police, he paid the death penalty for driving on expired tags. A second Michigan case was that of 15-year-old Brett Elder, who was executed by taser after wanting to fight the police bare-handed. In all of the cases, the juveniles were completely unarmed.
“50,000 volts of shock can damage your nerves, can cause cardiac arrest and death. Your nervous system is a series of delicate cords,” said Ralph Arellanes of Albuquerque, New Mexico, LULAC’s District 1 Director and Chairman of the Hispano Roundtable of New Mexico. “We have medical professionals that say it hasn’t been tested enough by science, and there is no statistical evidence that Tasers actually save lives. If anything, lethal encounters between officers and civilians have actually increased.”
Arellanes attributes this to the fact that Albuquerque’s police training manuals falsely list a Taser as equal in force to that of mace or pepper spray, another assertion without any credible evidence. He believes there is a high percentage of police officers abusing tasers and too many innocent people are getting tased and dying at the hands of these police officers as a result of this abuse.
“Even good officers lose their temper from time to time ... Some love to watch people squirm and scream,” Arellanes observed, noting that it is often fun for officers to deploy the devices. “The abuse of these devices by police departments is widespread. Some of them enjoy watching people electrocuted,” while others he characterizes as simply numb or insensitive to the damage being caused.
In Tucumcari, Police Chief Roger Hatcher is back on the job six weeks after using a Taser stun gun to deliver 50,000 volts to apprehend a 14-year-old girl, all to stop her from running away from her mom and sending text messages to her friends. Perhaps because of misleading information provided in training or various other issues, this young girl suffered unnecessary damage by the Taser. All in a day’s work and simply business as usual, without a second thought to the damage, both physically, psychologically, and to the community at large.
-Derek Garcia for The Kennedy Law Firm
