Seriously now, this sort of thing should not happen.
But Winnfield police Lt. Chuck Curry said race "isn't an issue at all" in the matter.
"This has come down to a police officer that was trying to apprehend a suspect that they had warrants for," he said. "He done what he thought he was trained to do to bring that subject into custody. At some point, something happened with his body that caused him to go into cardiac arrest or whatever."
Yeah, of course something happened to cause him to go into cardiac arrest, it's called 450,000 volts of electricity flowing through his body over the course of 20 minutes or so. Right, that isn't deadly or harmful at all.
Now apparently the cop is arguing that using the tazer was justified, after all, he was trying to apprehend a guy 100 pounds heavier than himself. So yes, tazing him once is ok, twice questionable, but six times in three minutes? The once more in the back of the cop car and two more times after being pulled out onto the concrete? That is over the top, and shows that Nugent, the cop in question, either has a big stress problem, or an anger management problem, and should not have been out in the streets, especially since Nugent is responsible for 10 of the 14 taserings that have occurred in that city.
At the very least I think the cop should be sentenced to involuntary manslaughter, assuming his lawyer manages to convince the jury that it was an accident. This type of thing should not happen and I hope that the cop is convicted. I would hope those like Nugent are taken out of positions of power that they use to abuse people.
Yeah, just thought I'd put my two cents in about this. That is all.
4 comments:
You make a valid point Nanti, but there is a slight flaw in your logic. It is incorrect to assume that you can sum the total voltage from the nine taser shots. The current from each shot would have dissipated before the following shot. Summing them together is nothing more than an attempt to vilify the officer. I personally agree with the officer. He acted in a matter that he deemed necessary. Why do we make the officer out to be the villain when he was working to protect us? Shouldn't we be thanking he for removing one more bag of slime from our streets?
Ok, that is true, its not fair to sum up all the voltage.
But according to other sites like
http://donttasemeblog.com/2008/07/lousiana-police-electrocute-ha.html
and http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-taser20-2008jul20,0,6572131.story?page=1
the police report said he was hand cuffed to the ground. The officer claims that the "bag of slime" was on drugs and had asthma, contrary to what the autopsy said.
Even if the person killed were high on drugs and resisted a lot, a couple taser shocks would get him down and into the police car.
Also, should we really thank someone for over stepping their bounds and eliminating "trash"? Whether he was a druggie or not, he is still human and his life is still precious. That is why we have the judicial process and prisons, to decide the fate of criminals.
Excessive force should only be used in extreme conditions, from what I have read in the news reports, it did not appear to be an extreme condition. I think the death was unwarranted and that the situation could have been handled differently.
Lets take a moment and put ourselves in the position of the officer. He is trying to do his job. He sees a felon with a warrant for his arrest and does his job as a public servant. The man not only out-weighs him by 100lbs but is high on PCP. When a person is high on PCP they lose the ability to feel fear and pain. It is very probably that "Scooter" didn't feel or respond to the taser. As an officer in that situation I would have done the same thing, kept tasing him until he responded. Now maybe the officer should have called for back-up. Maybe he should have handcuffed him to his squad car. We could all sit back and argue about things that he could have done, but the truth is that we weren't there. We didn't experience the same feelings of fear as the officer, we didn't have the rush of adrenaline as he tried to bring a known felon to justice. I will agree that life is precious but I think that we need to give the officer credit. He did the best that he could in the given circumstance. Sure there are ways that the death could have been avoided. There are always ways that deaths like these can be avoided. I do not think that the officer should be blamed nor punished.
That's true, we don't know the full situation and the officer could have been doing all that was in his power. For all we know, the guy could have not felt the shocks due to PCP that wasn't in his system or other things. And if it were a singular event, I'd say let it go, but since he has used the taser 10 other times in the past year, I think there is something worth looking into.
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