Stun guns galore

This must be stun gun season.

In her story posted today about pressures that police officers face on- and off duty, Melody Simmons mentions a New York lieutenant who killed himself to avoid possible prosecution after giving the order to shoot a mentally ill man with a stun gun. The man fell from a building and died. The officer’s wife sued the police department last month.

As reported by the (Hagerstown) Herald-Mail, a deputy used a stun gun to subdue a handcuffed and shackled inmate who resisted when being taken from a hospital back to the Washington County jail. The man had been treated at the hospital for a head injury suffered when he jumped off the sink in his cell.
The Associated Press has these recent reports:

In Pueblo, Colo., sheriff’s deputies shocked an “out of control” 10-year-old child with a Taser this month and arrested him on suspicion of menacing with a deadly weapon. The boy reportedly had been destroying property at his foster home. The deputies say the boy threatened them with a pipe and a stick, and threw a piece of wood at them.

A 67-year-old man in Casco, Maine, is suing in federal court a sheriff’s deputy who shocked him with a stun gun two years ago on his front porch while he was holding a steak knife. The man says he’s partially deaf and didn’t hear orders to drop the knife, which he says he was using for a late-night meal. According to police, they’d gone to his home after a call from a neighbor. The report says he was loud and intoxicated, and that the deputy believed that a domestic assault had occurred.

A Cottonport, La., woman who accused police of using a stun gun 14 times on her daughter has herself been convicted of resisting an officer in the incident. The judge, who said it was clear that she interfered with officers who did what was necessary to arrest her daughter, suspended a 90-day jail term and gave her 10 days to pay a $250 fine and nearly $175 in court costs. The woman testified that she had feared for her daughter’s life. Three sheriff’s deputies testified that when the daughter refused to cooperate and then struggled with them, they used the stun gun twice.

And in Ozark, Ark., a police officer who used a stun gun on an unruly 10-year-old girl has been fired for violating department policy — not for using the Taser itself, but for failing to use the camera attached to it, according to the mayor. The girl’s mother has said she called police after the girl refused to take a shower. The officer said the girl became violent and “verbally combative” and her mother suggested using the stun gun.

Aside from the first incident, in which the stunned man in New York was killed by the fall, and days later the officer who gave the order shot himself, no one was seriously injured by a stun gun.