Today's TASER Travesty

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, despite their reputation as one of the most-overruled appellate bodies in the nation, has nonetheless gotten one right, shockingly enough (pun intended), and has ruled that police officers must indeed have a valid defensive reason to deploy a TASER on a person, and that merely enforcing compliance with the cops' barked orders (whether valid or not) doesn't quite fit that criteria:

"'The objective facts must indicate that the suspect poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public,' Judge Kim Wardlaw said in the 3-0 ruling."

Yep, that's pretty much what we've been shouting around here for quite some time.

"Bryan [Carl Bryan, a Coronado, California resident whose arrest precipitated the lawsuit in question] was clearly unarmed and did not challenge [Coronado police officer Brian] McPherson verbally or make any menacing gestures, Wardlaw said. She said McPherson's claim that Bryan had ignored an order to stay in the car - an order that Bryan denied hearing - would not justify a Taser shooting, nor would the officer's concern that Bryan might be mentally disturbed."

One would think that this concept would be fairly obvious and that it shouldn't take a federal court ruling to codify it, yet we unfortunately still regularly note cases such as the one involving LaGrange Park, Illinois Police Officer Darren Pedota, who saw fit to TASER a person in a diabetic coma 11 times, totaling one minute of shock, solely because the patient, who was inconveniently in the middle of having his seizure, unintentionally made contact with one of the responding officers.

(Pedota apparently saw fit to choose this execrable course of action despite the fact that the victim's roommate specifically reported his medical condition when calling 911 for assistance.)

Officers Pedota and McPherson are both now being sued personally for their poor decision-making. Maybe seeing a bunch of moolah being taken directly from the pockets of a few of their brethren will finally convince police officers as a group that the TASER is indeed a "less-than-lethal" defensive weapon, and that it isn't merely provided to them to be routinely used as a compliance tool in order to make their jobs easier.