Sick Transit

In yet another instance of overzealous taser-toting cops in the Seattle area, a deaf man was tasered four times in a confrontation with police:

Officer Yvonne Tovar saw a man pushing the front door, apparently trying to get in. She noted in her report that the man “attempted to hide behind a large planter.”
…
The officer drew her gun and ordered Ross away from the door. He ignored her.

When he did come out from behind the plants, Ross was carrying wooden dowels for use in making pots.

Tovar ordered Ross to drop the sticks, but he did not respond.

She radioed for backup just as Ross “began to raise the sticks and come toward me in a quick pace,” according to her report.

Tovar holstered her gun and drew her Taser, firing when Ross continued to approach her.

The two Taser darts, attached to wires that deliver a 50,000-volt shock, struck Ross in the chest and abdomen, but he yanked them out and ran.

Tovar gave chase, loaded a fresh cartridge in her Taser, and fired again, this time hitting him in the chest and thigh. Again, Ross pulled out the darts and continued to run.

The officer loaded another cartridge, fired again and hit Ross in the front.

Just then, Officer Donald Leslie arrived. He also shot his Taser, and this time Ross went down.

As with the previous instance, the issue here is not just that the police failed to realize that the man was disabled; their actions were, IMNSHO, inappropriate even if Ross had been able to hear the police’s instructions.

The first use of the taser was entirely justifiable: the subject was approaching the officer and potentially presented a physical threat. After he began to flee, however, I don’t see any justification for using the taser–especially multiple shots–to subdue him. He was not a threat to the officers or anyone else, nor was there probable cause to believe he had committed a crime.*

When it comes down to it, using 50,000 volt electric shocks as a means of compelling cooperation (rather than to prevent direct harm or the escape of a felon) is torture. I can’t believe our city accepts it as routine practice.

* Legal technicalities: IANAL, but pushing on the door and hiding seems basis for reasonable suspicion, enough for a Terry stop but not an arrest. An arrest for failing to respond to the initial stop, while perhaps legally allowed, certainly would not ethically justify the deliberate infliction of injury.

It’s sad when boilerplate statements of the obvious are news. Still, it’s refreshing to have a Secretary of the Treasury who’s on speaking terms with reality.

Speaking of Mr Paulson, Sasha Volokh has an interesting theory on why the Secretary was willing to join the government at this politically inauspicious time.

I think it’s unfortunate that the ACLU and Society of Professional Journalists are supporting this guy:

A freelance journalist and blogger was jailed on Tuesday after refusing to turn over video he took at an anticapitalist protest here last summer and after refusing to testify before a grand jury looking into accusations that crimes were committed at the protest.
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Wolf, who posted some of the edited video on his Web site, www.joshwolf.net, and sold some of it to local television stations, met with investigators, who wanted to see the raw video. … But Wolf refused to hand over the tapes, arguing that he had the right as a journalist to shield his sources.

The whole point of journalists’ privilege is that it protects confidential sources, who speak with the reporter under a pledge of secrecy, and who might not otherwise share publicly valuable information.

In this case, the journalist taped a public protest. There is no indication that there was any agreement of confidentiality. The claim being made here is of an incredibly broad privilege that covers, essentially, all information that journalists acquire in the process of their work. That’s even broader than attorney-client privilege, which (at least in Federal law) only protects client communication.

In a nutshell, a witness to a crime does not gain immunity from testifying merely by the fact of being a journalist.

Religion was an excuse for a lawsuit against the expansion of O’Hare airport:

The approved plan involved relocating the remains of those buried in a nearby cemetery. Members of a church that owned the cemetery and descendents of those buried in it argued that moving the remains would substantially burden their religious exercise because of their belief in the physical resurrection of the bodies of Christian believers.

So God can’t bring back the bodies if they’re moved a few miles? He must really have a hard time with people whose bodies were lost at sea, or crushed, or otherwise destroyed.

Undoubtedly, the real source of this claim is concern about property ownership, not religion. But the notional focus on burial arrangements as a way of securing the afterlife seems more suited to ancient Egypt than to 21st-century America.