Today's TASER Travesty

The beginning of the end has arrived:

Niagara County, New York Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza, in her infinite wisdom, has decreed that TASING an uncooperative suspect in order to obtain a DNA sample (and without notifying the suspect's already-retained legal counsel of the subpoena, to boot) is a perfectly legal and rational way of doing things, and that the resulting evidence may indeed be admitted into a criminal trial.

We now, for the very first time, have official judicial sanctioning of the TASER as a police compliance tool, rather than the "less than lethal" self-defense device it was originally designed to be.

(By the way, there is videotape evidence of the suspect's alleged commision of this crime, so the DNA seems to not be a critical factor in convicting him.)

"It is legally permissible for police to zap a suspect with a Taser to obtain a DNA sample, as long as it’s not done 'maliciously, or to an excessive extent, or with resulting injury,' a county judge has ruled"

And just who gets to decide whether it's "malicious" or "excessive"? You just know the ones applying the juice are never going to admit that either ever happens (They most certainly do. Just do a search on this blog for "TASER", and you'll find many examples). Heck, the officers involved here can't even agree on how long the TASERing actually lasted in this incident:

"McDonell testified that he used the Taser for one to two seconds. Another officer testified that the data readout on the Taser showed it was on for as long as four seconds."

It's kind of hard to judge if something's "excessive" or not with this kind of creative data reporting, which is kind of the point, really, once one realizes that the cops have a large personal stake in not letting the larger numbers indicative of a little "payback time" getting out to the public.

The suspect's lawyer correctly sees the frightening slippery-slope implications of this type of policy coming to pass:

"'They have now given the Niagara Falls police discretion to Taser anybody anytime they think it’s reasonable, [attorney Patrick M. Balkin] asserted. 'Her decision says you can enforce a court order by force. If you extrapolate that, we no longer have to have child support hearings; you can just Taser the parent.'"

But we don't torture people in this country. Keep telling yourself that.