AKRON, Ohio - A medical examiner must change her autopsy findings to delete any reference that stun guns contributed to the deaths of three people involved in confrontations with law enforcement officers, a judge ruled.

Friday’s decision was a victory for Taser International Inc., which had challenged rulings by Summit County Medical Examiner Lisa Kohler, including a case in which five sheriff’s deputies are charged in the death a jail inmate who was restrained by the wrists and ankles and hit with pepper spray and a stun gun.

Kohler ruled that the 2006 death of Mark McCullaugh Jr., 28, was a homicide and that he died from asphyxiation due to the “combined effects of chemical, mechanical and electrical restraint.”

Visiting Judge Ted Schneiderman said in his ruling that there was no expert evidence to indicate that Taser devices impaired McCullaugh’s respiration. “More likely, the death was due to a fatal cardiac arrhythmia brought on by severe heart disease,” the judge wrote.

Schneiderman ordered Kohler to rule McCullaugh’s death undetermined and to delete any references to homicide.

The judge also said references to stun guns contributing to the deaths of two other men must be deleted from autopsy findings. Dennis Hyde, 30, died in 2005 after a confrontation with Akron police, and Richard Holcomb, 18, died the same year after being hit with a stun by a police officer in suburban Springfield Township.

I don’t know why anyone bothers to amass a mountain of student loan debt to work hard and go to medical school and forensics school to become a medical examiner, when all you need is a judge’s robe to know how and why people die in police custody. The guy died of a heart attack; those 50,000 volts coursing through his body had absolutely no effect on a pepper-sprayed fully-restrained young man with coronary disease.Death by taser is far from an uncommon occurence these days.  The so-called “stun gun” was introduced by law enforcement around 1996 with dual benefits: it would reduce the shootings of suspects now that officers have a less-than-lethal force and fewer officers would be killed in the line of duty because they could safely incapacitate a suspect.

Well, officer deaths haven’t changed much.  According to the FBI’s LEOKA (Law Enforcement Officers Killed & Assaulted) stats, officer deaths spiked in 1997 and again in 2001 (not counting 9/11) at 70 nationwide, but otherwise every year for a decade, officer deaths flutter between 50 and 60 per year.  There has been no steady decline of officer deaths as more officers get tasers.

As for officers shooting suspects less often, unfortunately there is no national data collected on this statistic.  Taser International likes to tout the figures provided to them by various local police departments showing less use of firearms on suspects, but they have a profit motive in presenting cherry-picked data.  However, Amnesty International has tracked at least 150 people in the US alone who have been killed by an officer’s taser since 2001, and the Department of Justice’s three-year study on taser deaths showed a tripling of deaths every year from <0.5% of all arrest deaths in 2003 to 3.5% of in-custody deaths in 2005.  If you’re dead in police custody, bullet or electricity doesn’t really matter, does it?

What we find increasingly is that tasers are used on non-compliant, yet non-hostile suspects committing “contempt of cop” violations (not respecting authority, not obeying commands, “mouthing off”, etc.).  From the “don’t taze me, bro” incident at the University of Florida to the numerous cases of outnumbered, unarmed, sometimes small female protestors who are hogtied, pepper sprayed, and repeatedly tasered, we find officers not turning to the taser as a weapon of last resort, but as a device of compliance.

However, this is not surprising.  I’ll bet many police officers have the same mindset as some of the commenters on the original story who believe that a drug addict or a criminal (there is a difference) deserves to be painfully tortured or killed for their poor lifestyle choices.  Given that level of compassion and justice, I suppose I should be happy police aren’t summarily executing “scumbags off the street.”

Even I’ll support the use of tasers by any officers who are facing an armed suspect or even a single officer facing an unarmed suspect.  But when multiple officers face a single unarmed suspect, there is no excuse for the use of a taser other than cowardly cops afraid of a minor injury from using physical hand-to-hand restraint.  Sorry, but a cop’s black eye or sore back isn’t justification for ending the life of a citizen.  Taser supporters posit the false choices of “would you rather these criminals were shot” and “we’re not going to risk the life of an officer”.  But as we’ve seen, tasers haven’t affected officer deaths and suspects (you know they aren’t “criminals” until proven guilty, right?) are still getting shot (up to 50 times, if you’re an unarmed black man in New York).

A person who is on drugs to the point of needing to be tasered is already putting their heart through far more stress than it should handle, a taser at that point is just a coronary crap shoot.  And some suspects may have congenital heart defects that put them at risk of death when electrified.  Have protesters, drug addicts, and criminals somehow become martial arts masters?  Somehow police were able to do their jobs just fine without tasers, even through the anarchy and riots that marked the late 1960s.

I’m not saying taser use should be eliminated.  I just think it should be treated the same as “lethal force”, with the same suspension-with-pay and internal affairs investigations that are launched when an officer uses his firearm.