Teen who died in jail after being tasered in groin – and other cases involving the infamous stun gun

RT

A US federal judge has ruled that a family can proceed with their lawsuit against a police officer who tasered their teenage son in the groin on the night that he died in police custody after being arrested while high on LSD. 

 

The Texas teenager, Graham Dyer, was arrested on the night of August 13, 2013 during a trip on the hallucinogenic LSD drug. In the back of the police cruiser, the teen repeatedly banged his head against the metal supports in the vehicle.

Video footage — which the police refused to turn over to the family until years after the incident — showed one officer reaching into the back seat and repeatedly shocking Dyer while another officer held him down by his hair. The teenager was later found unresponsive in his cell and was taken to hospital where he died. The medical examiner concluded that he died due to the self-inflicted head injuries. 

The new ruling is only a partial victory for the family, however. While the judge agreed that the case against the police officers could continue, she ruled that the family could pursue only limited damages as they were unable to prove that the officer’s use of the taser had caused him to slam his head against the metal in the car.

The incident is far from the first time US police have come under fire for their use of tasers.

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“I’m Dead, I’m Dead” Unnerving Video Shows Cops Taser Handcuffed Man Until He Dies

Comment: Yet, more police state abuse by psychopaths on the job. See more archived examples at Police State USA.

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Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project

Coweta County, GA — American police have once against demonstrated that their agenda is not to protect and serve, but to dominate and control by any means necessary. On November 20th, sheriff deputies in Coweta County, Georgia were summoned to help subdue a man having a psychotic breakdown and ended up tasing him to death. 

After months of keeping the video from the body cameras on the police officers under wraps, it was finally released on Friday to the NY Times.

Thirty-two-year-old Chase Sherman, together with his fiancée, Patti Galloway and his parents, Kevin and Mary Ann Sherman, were returning from a vacation. During a layover at the Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, Chase started having hallucinations and acting agitated. According to his father, he “got nervous … about planes crashing, and he just didn’t feel comfortable on a plane. … He thought nobody recognized him. I said, ‘Chase, we’re fine. We’re going to get a car and drive home.’ He didn’t know where he was at.” So they rented a car to drive the rest of the way to their home in Florida.

Chase’s fiancée told his parents that he may have smoked “Spice”—also known as “synthetic marijuana”—before they had left on the five-day trip, which may have been the cause of the episode.

Chase’s father described what happened next:

“We got him in the car and we took off on I-85. Chase’s fiancée was driving and Chase was lying in the back with me. He had his head on my lap. He acted like he didn’t know where we were going. And then he jumped up and started a disturbance in the car.”

They pulled over, and Chase’s mother dialed 9-1-1, but the father told her to hang up, thinking things were under control. After driving again for a few more minutes, Chase “got more violent,” and they pulled over again and his mother again called 9-1-1.

“We were fighting, screaming, trying to calm him down. It was pretty horrendous in the car,” his father said.  “His fiancée jumped back to try to calm him down and she actually got bit. My wife told me just to hit him or something to try to get her arm loose. He let loose of the arm and the officers showed up.”

When the three deputies arrived, “they reached across me trying to get the handcuffs on him. I got out of the car and they told me to go back by the ambulance.” Deputies then instructed everyone else to exit the vehicle. During the ensuing struggle, Chase was tased repeatedly. “More officers kept coming and we think they kept tasing him,” Chase’s father said. “They were treating him like a rabid dog.”

The newly released body camera footage proves all the parents’ allegations to be entirely true.

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The Police State in Review, 2013

Comment: I re-published this post on the round up of 2013 news from Police State USA  I'm doing this again due to some mainstream journalist colleagues who still trot out the "conspiracy theory" smirk when one has the temerity to raise the subject of a soft dictatorship currently emerging in America. It really is about time people woke up to this issue which is way beyond the pantomime of left-right politics and post modern critique. it is happening and rapidly.

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Police State USA

While some “journalists” would have you believe the biggest stories of 2013 were about twerking celebrities and over-hyped real-life courtroom sagas, much bigger events were happening with far more lasting national significance.  The foundation of an American police state is already laid and making its existence known, while most of the country remains blissfully focused on sports, reality shows, establishment pseudo-news, and other distractions.

It would require an encyclopedia to cover all of the injustices, scandals, and brutality that took place in 2013.  This list is designed to illustrate certain trends and significant stories from the past year.  If Americans don’t fix their apathy and disengagement toward causes that matter, we can expect these trends to continue toward their logical conclusions: an increasingly repressive police state dominating the lives people inside these borders and beyond.
 
Checkpoints, Warrantless Searches Become a Way of Life

(Source: AP/The Sacramento Bee, Randall Benton)

The state of the 4th amendment is in truly bad shape, given the prevalence of warrantless checkpoints and warrantless bag searches being used all around the country for various reasons. No longer restricted to airport terminals, the unconstitutional tactics are now being used in subways, bus stations, on bridges, at parades, and anywhere else the government can get away with them. This is facilitated by the palpable fear of terrorism and with financial incentives from the federal government.

In what was dubbed “Operation Independence,” the federal government along with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department staged a high-visibility terror drill in the LA subway this July. Deputies dressed in paramilitary garb teamed up with agents from the TSA and DHS to require travelers to open up their bags and prove their innocence before being allowed to commute. These tactics have sadly become commonplace in many major cities.

Security measures at major events have gotten increasingly invasive. At the annual ‘Mackinac Bridge Walk’ in St. Ignace, Michigan, up to 40,000 walkers were subjected to warrantless bag searches in the interest of event security. In Chicago, warrantless bag searches were performed on public sidewalks during a celebratory parade for the Blackhawks’ hockey championship, and were again performed along the 26-mile track of the Chicago Marathon. A famous parade in Pasadena, California, is used as an excuse to search the interiors of hundreds of vehicles who wish to park on public streets.

The “stop and frisk” phenomenon was alive and well in 2013. The appalling practice involves police stopping pedestrians, usually pushing them up against a wall and then patting them down, searching their pockets, and opening up their purses and bags. The practice has been notorious in New York City, which not only has aggressive enforcement on the streets but also allows cops to roam around inside private apartment buildings and search tenants. Stop and frisk is also work in Philadelphia, Detroit, northwest Indiana, and other areas.

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Police 'killed deaf cyclist with stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop'

Unbelievable. 

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Daily Mail

A police officer killed an elderly, deaf and mentally disabled man riding his bicycle by shooting him with a Taser stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop.

Roger Anthony, 61, was killed as he made his way home in Scotland Neck, South Carolina, after officers responded to a 911 call about a man who had fallen off his bicycle in a car park.

The caller told dispatchers that the man appeared drunk and that it looked like he had hurt himself.

Officers said they repeatedly told Mr Anthony to get off his bike, but when he didn't respond, they shocked him.

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Tasers: 'If officers have a new toy, they like using it'

 

 

A man fires a Taser: their use is becoming more commonplace in Britain,

but are they always safe? Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Guardian

It was an ordinary November morning when Howard Swarray went to his local gym in Whalley Range, Manchester. During his regular workout, he started to feel light-headed and suffered an epileptic seizure. Paramedics were called but, as the 41-year-old father of three writhed in agony, so were Greater Manchester police. As a disorientated Swarray struggled with those restraining him, an officer racing to the scene was recorded on police radio saying: "If he's getting aggressive I am sure 50,000 volts will stand him up."

Swarray has no memory of what it felt like to be shot with an electric stun gun but his medical notes recorded that a Taser was used against him five times. Swarray was so heavily sedated with ketamine by an attending doctor in order to transport him to hospital that he spent eight days in a coma. He was subsequently diagnosed with kidney failure.

This was only one of nearly 9,000 incidents in which UK police deployed Tasers in the six years after they were first trialled in 2003. The frequency with which the American-built electronic stun gun is pointed by police – the only people alongside the military who are permitted to use them in this country – is rising steadily. Tasers were last month deployed in the eviction of Travellers from Dale Farm in Essex and against a mentally ill 72-year-old in Cornwall. Last year one was accidentally fired into a 14-year-old girl. They have been fired by police in every corner of the country; and in situations ranging from the Raoul Moat siege to stunning an Alzheimer's sufferer and subduing a man in a fracas at Frome football club.

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Taser Death Lawsuit Results in $10M Award

aboutlawsuits.com

A North Carolina jury has awarded $10 million in a wrongful death lawsuit against Taser International, Inc., which was filed by the family of a teen who died after being shocked with a Taser stun gun.  

The complaint was brought by Devoid Turner and Tammy Lou Fontenot, the parents of Darryl Turner, who was 17 when he died in a supermarket in Charlotte after being shot in the chest by a Taser Model X26 electronic control device on March 20, 2008. 

According to the Taser death lawsuit, the manufacturer was negligent in failing to warn law enforcement that shooting their stun gun weapons into the chest of a subject could cause cardiac arrest.

Following trial in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, a federal jury awarded $10 million in damages. [...]