Still Electrocuting Non-Conformists

Unfortunately, $150,000 is unlikely to put the Fear of Tasering into police departments nationwide.

The city of Louisville paid $150,000 this week to settle claims that two police officers used excessive force when they shocked a naked man with a Taser in September 2006.

The Metro government payment to the estate of Larry Noles on Wednesday settles a lawsuit accusing the officers of depriving Noles of his civil rights when they tried to take him into custody after he was found acting erratically at Seventh Street and Algonquin Parkway.

The suit claimed that Noles, 52, a Marine veteran who suffered from bipolar disorder, posed no threat to the officers or the public.

Noles died after he was Tasered, but the Kentucky medical examiner's office ruled that the cause of death was excited delirium, which affects people with a history of mental illness, alcoholism or drug addiction.

Garry Adams, one of the estate’s lawyers, said he hopes the case “will play some part in the education of the Louisville Metro Police Department as to when it is appropriate to use a Taser, the number of times it should be used and where it should be used on the body, to make fatalities less likely.”

As Digby has proven numerous times, it is almost never appropriate for law enforcement to use tasers, because tasers are lethal forms of torture, period. The issue here is not "appropriate use" but the inexcusable failure of police departments everywhere to properly train officers how to deal with unarmed civilians.

Following an internal department investigation into Noles’ death, Police Chief Robert White ruled in 2007 that the officers — Michael Campbell and Matthew Metzler — followed proper department procedure when they confronted him.

Which is precisely the problem.

Attention residents of and visitors to Louisville, Kentucky: any and all behavior, no matter how benign, that does not conform precisely to the behavioral norms swirling in the stinking gunk that passes for brains among local law enforcement will be punished immediately with torture-by-electroctuion.