Drugs Shadow Taser Cases

[Tom Aveni]

Drugs Shadow Taser Cases

By Antigone Barton
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Sunday, August 14, 2005

When Michael Crutchfield died in West Palm Beach last month after three 50,000-volt shocks from a police Taser, the questions raised by his death had been asked at least 132 times.

That's how many people had died following Taser shocks in the previous five years nationwide. Crutchfield's death was the 27th in Florida, which leads the nation in Taser-associated fatalities. That weekend, at least seven other people across the country died following encounters with police Tasers.

Like many of the others, Crutchfield appeared to have been high on drugs or psychotic the night he died. West Palm Beach police have said that an autopsy would answer the question of what caused his death.

One of the most pressing questions the deaths raised, however, has been whether the next person to die after a Taser shock will be ahyperactive child, an elderly person with dementia or someone with a heart, breathing or neurological ailment that might go unrecognized in an encounter with police. Although the effects of multiple Taser shocks on people with mental illness or using street drugs remain in question, autopsy and police reports of 27 Florida deaths examined by The Palm Beach Post showed:

•At least 20 had drugs in their systems, including amphetamines and cocaine, which damage the heart.

•At least 14 showed signs of excited delirium, a condition that even the maker of Taser weapons acknowledges puts people at "potentially fatal health risks" from impaired breathing.

•At least 12 had heart ailments.

•At least 17 were shocked multiple times, including one shocked 14 times, one shocked eight times, one shocked six or more times and Timothy Bolander, who had a variety of drugs in his system and ruptured bags of cocaine in his stomach when Delray Beach police shocked him four times.

The only human testing to date has been on healthy police officers undergoing single, voluntary shocks under controlled conditions.

The maker of the weapon, an acronym for a 1911 children's book Tom A. Swift's Electric Rifle, says company-sponsored research has shown that the weapon doesn't affect the heart. The company has insisted that, if a Taser shock caused a death, the death would be immediate. And company-issued medical reports have said that the skin acts as a barrier that keeps Taser shocks from harming vital organs. For these reasons, the manufacturer claims the weapon is "generally safe."

Tasers fire twin barbs that can pierce skin or up to 2 inches of clothing to deliver a 50,000-volt shock that causes involuntary muscle contractions and temporary paralysis. Taser officials emphasize that the current is low: 0.0038 amperes. Florida's electric chair killed with a power of only 2,000 volts, but with an amperage of 14.

Even as company officials continue to issue assurances on the weapon, company President Tom Smith has said more testing is being conducted. Critics have said that is not enough and have called for independent testing to determine the effects of shocks from the weapon on people with heart conditions, on drugs or who have mental illness.

Researchers, including some whose work the company touts, have cautioned about changes in blood chemistry as well as the weapon's effects on vulnerable people and pointed out that sweat compromises the skin's ability to act as a barrier to electric shocks.

And as police chiefs, including Palm Beach County's Law Enforcement Planning Council, have scrambled to establish guidelines for safe Taser use, critics point to studies showing the company had information raising questions about the weapon's safety even as it marketed Tasers as a "generally safe" alternative to lethal force.

Then, in February, forensic engineer James Ruggieri presented research saying Tasers could cause fatal heart rhythms and damage and that the effects would not necessarily be apparent immediately.

Taser dismissed his arguments, questioned his credentials and repeated its assertion that the weapon has never been ruled the direct cause of a death.

Last month, a Chicago medical examiner became the nation's first expert to cite shocks from a Taser as the primary cause of a death. The medical examiner said he will recommend that police not use the weapons on people who — like the paranoid, violent Crutchfield — seem to be psychotic or affected by drugs. Other medical examiners across the country have cited the weapon as a contributing cause to deaths, including at least three in Florida. In addition, one said a cause of death couldn't be determined because not enough is known about the effects of Tasers.

Similar concerns have led the Department of Homeland Security's two largest law enforcement divisions to reject buying the weapons for about 20,000 agents. And, as critics call for moratoriums on the weapon's use, the Securities and Exchange Commission is probing whether Taser International has overstated the weapon's safety.

Indiscriminate use worries critics

Taser officials have referred to controversy surrounding the deaths as a "perfect storm," pointing out that skirmishes between cops and violent suspects are fraught with deadly risks. And, they have said, some of those who died had lethal levels of drugs in their systems.

"The rooster crowing in the morning doesn't make the sun come up," said Smith, Taser's president.

He adds that his company's dart-firing stun gun has lessened the danger of such encounters, reduced officer injuries and saved lives by stopping dangerous people without lethal force.

Critics of Tasers agree that the weapon can be valuable. None has called for a ban.

Instead, they have asked for policies to keep the weapon from being used indiscriminately and on people at greater risk of harm.

Some police officers have responded that, if those on cocaine or other stimulants are at heightened risk, the decision to take drugs was theirs, as was the decision to commit acts that prompted the use of a Taser.

"When you use cocaine and you commit a crime, the result is not going to be good," said Boca Raton Police Chief Andrew Scott, head of a committee that crafted countywide guidelines for Taser use. "When is the greater good of the public going to be the issue?"

A Palm Beach Post study of nearly four years of Taser use by local police agencies, though, showed at least one in four of more than 1,000 uses was on someone who posed no apparent threat. Six people older than 65 were shocked. The 87 women of childbearing age who have been shocked include three who said they were pregnant.

More than a quarter of those shocked were zapped multiple times, with at least 31 shocked four or more times and one man shocked nine times by Boca Raton police, the first agency in the region to get the stun guns. In some reports, officers and deputies simply reported firing "until compliance was gained." In at least three incidents, two officers fired simultaneously at the same person, and in one three deputies each shocked the same suspect.

Two months after The Post's report, Scott's task force recommended that local police departments include detailed considerations in their Taser policies. The guidelines were prompted in part by the paper's findings, as well as on medical cautions about multiple or lengthy shocks that Taser International had long been aware of but had made widely public only a week earlier. Among the recommendations:

•Tasers should not be used in cases of passive resistance on those who pose no threat.

•Officers should assess compliance level and breathing before repeating Taser shocks.

•Several officers should not use Tasers on one person unless justified by circumstances.

The group stopped short, however, of establishing "absolute prohibitions" on the elderly and children but suggested guidelines limiting use on those people. The group did not address use of the weapon on people who appear to be high on drugs.

Gordon Randall Jones

In July 2002, an Orange County deputy shocked Gordon Randall Jones with a Taser 14 times in four minutes on the day the 37-year-old Orlando man died. Jones had taken cocaine that day and was acting strangely when deputies came to remove him from a hotel where he was a paid guest. But Jones had not been violent and was not being arrested for a crime when the Taser darts hit him in the back, crumbling him to the floor.

A lobby surveillance tape shows Jones lying, sometimes still, sometimes writhing, while a circle of deputies stands near him, some with arms folded, waiting for him to follow orders to put his hands behind his back.

Eventually, deputies discussed another plan to gain control over Jones, who had bloody drool frothing from his mouth. By then, observers in the lobby had begged deputies to stop shocking him. One woman had fled from the smell of burning flesh.

According to depositions, deputies didn't tell paramedics about the repeated Taser shocks as they loaded Jones facedown into an ambulance.

He died on the way to a hospital.

The Orange County deputy chief medical examiner found Jones suffocated, with Taser shocks and cocaine intoxication contributing.

The Taser shocks, Dr. William Anderson said, interfered with the muscles Jones needed to breathe, making him already short of breath when he was eventually handcuffed lying on his chest.

As a result, Anderson said, Jones' blood was starved of oxygen.

Orange County officials hired Pennsylvania-based pathologist Cyril Wecht to take another look. Wecht found Jones' death resulted primarily from cocaine intoxication, with being restrained facedown reduced to a contributing cause. The multiple Taser shocks did not contribute to his death, Wecht said.

"Which doesn't make sense, when you think about it," Anderson said. If being placed in a position that makes breathing difficult contributed to Jones' death, he said, the Taser shocks that interrupted his breathing would have contributed as well.

Taser later hired Wecht as a paid consultant to "independently review" deaths following the weapon's use, according to a letter the company sent to medical examiners.

Jones' family sued the sheriff's office and settled the case for an undisclosed amount. Attorney Bill King of the West Palm Beach law firm of Searcy, Denney, Scarola, Barnhart and Shipley helped represent the family.

"The complex medical issue in the case is not simply whether the electricity stops the heart. It's whether there are a cascading, catastrophic series of physiological events of cocaine-excited delirium interacting with the Taser shocks," King said.

"The issues involved in our case are threefold," King said. "Whether or not there was active or passive resistance on the part of Mr. Jones, is the use of the Taser justified in response to passive resistance, and when do you stop using it?"

Martha Toler, the mother of Jones' son, said she believed deputies used "extreme excessive force" when they repeatedly shocked the disoriented Jones.

"Randy was a small man," she said. "They even said he was acting goofy, not confrontational."

Two more men died in the next two years after Taser encounters with Orange County deputies. In the autopsy of the second man, Associate Medical Examiner Sara Irrgang found that "a contributing significant condition is that he was subdued by police with a struggle and tazed."

This year, the Orange County Sheriff's Department changed its policy, saying Tasers should be used only on suspects who actively resist, not on those who merely fail to follow commands.

Lawsuits cite unheralded risks

At the end of June, Taser International also posted a training bulletin on the company Web site, issuing cautions that previously had been written only in a private training manual for instructors.

The warnings included that repeated and prolonged shocks could impair breathing, "particularly when the probes are placed across the chest and diaphragm." The bulletin also cautioned that Taser use should be minimized in encounters with people showing signs of excited delirium, adding, "These subjects are at significant and potentially fatal health risks from further prolonged exertion and/or impaired breathing."

The company also amended claims on financial reports that its product is involved in confrontations "that may result in serious, permanent bodily injury" to add "or death." Both the earlier and later statements were followed by the concession that "our products may cause or be associated with these injuries."

"I don't need to tell you how contrary this is to their marketing," said Earl Johnson, a Jacksonville attorney who represents the families of two men, Milton Woolfolk and Michael Anthony Edwards, who died this year after Taser shocks.

Although Johnson has filed a lawsuit against Columbia County and its sheriff's department, he stresses, "We're going after Taser."

In a separate lawsuit against the Arizona-based company, Johnson wrote that Taser advertised its products "as, at least, harmless and, at best a safe alternative," and called that "an intentional misrepresentation."

In addition to compensation for Woolfolk's family, Johnson asks that the company pay for a public education campaign on health issues surrounding electric shock weapons and asks that Taser be stopped from marketing its productsin Florida.

"What we feel for the large part is that they've left law enforcement out to dry," Johnson said. "We've seen law enforcement rushing to put together policies because Taser told them they didn't need any, leaving them open to lawsuits."

In the week that Crutchfield died, a Boca Raton attorney petitioned for class-action status for a lawsuit against the company on behalf of an Illinois police department, saying Taser has sold its weapon to law enforcement agencies with bogus claims about the weapon's safety.

In the meantime, forensic engineer Ruggieri had presented his research concluding that shocks from Tasers could cause fatal heart rhythms and heart damage and that the effects could be delayed.

"This means that the Taser device may have been improperly ruled out as a cause of death, or contributory cause of death in many of the Taser-related fatalities," he said.

Taser has countered Ruggieri's and other criticisms with testimonials and studies that critics have noted were completed with the aid of Taser shareholders and staff members with data supplied by Taser.

Among these is a study by the Department of Defense that, in addition, did not back the company's safety claims. The study concluded that the weapon was unlikely to cause fatal heart rhythm in most people but that data were insufficient to "evaluate probabilities for susceptible populations or for alternative patterns of exposure."

Critics also have said that Taser has misrepresented conclusions of independent studies, including the research from Underwriters Laboratory, which has asked Taser to stop citing their work.

To those criticisms, Orange County pathologist Anderson adds that the effects on breathing of repeated shocks, as were administered to Gordon Randall Jones, have not been researched.

"They've never done a study to find in a compromised person how it drops your oxygen level," Anderson said.

Anderson said he supports the use of Tasers.

"If someone's attacking me, I'd want the police to Taser them," he said. But, he adds, "They're only going to have one fourth-grader die after being shocked and that will be the end."