'Excited delirium' cited in Taser case

On June 12th, I wrote about the sad case of Milisha Thompson, who died in May after being tasered in Oklahoma City. Already on the ground and in handcuffs, she was tasered as many as 20 times according to her husband - but only twice according to the police. The cause of Ms. Thompson's death was delayed pending results of toxicology tests. (Where have I heard that before?!) Well, folks, the results are in - and the taser had nothing to do with this woman's death!

The cause of death? Excited delirium, of course. Unrecognized by any credible medical association, but sold to medical examiners by Taser International, the police and other proponents of the taser, excited delirium is the subject of intense debate. Taser International has acknowledged that each year, they send hundreds of pamphlets to medical examiners explaining how to detect excited delirium. I assume the Oklahoma City medical examiner had received his copy, and maybe even a personal call from the manufacturer to help him with his diagnosis. (In 2004, Taser International claimed that no medical examiner had ever implicated a taser. As more autopsy reports began listing tasers as a primary or contributing cause of death, however, the manufacturer argued that coroners were not qualified to assess whether Tasers played a causal role.)

"Excited delirium is not a diagnosis used in psychiatry,'' says Dr. Roumen Milev of the Mood Disorders Clinic at the Providence Continuing Care Centre in Kingston, Ontario. "It does not exist as such either in the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic and statistical manual, or in the World Health Organization's international classification of diseases.''

Many, like me, believe that excited delirium is a blame-shifting diagnosis, created to shift the blame from the person exerting the force to the person that dies.

I agree with Cameron Ward, who says: If "excited delirium", a controversial phenomenon that attributes cardiac arrest to over-excitement resulting from the arrest and restraint process, caused these deaths, one would expect deaths to occur with similar frequency in the cases of people arrested by police using more conventional methods.

Ms. Thompson's family plans to have her body exhumed and have an independent autopsy performed. That's very smart. We would have liked to have had that option.

The two officers involved remain on administrative leave.