Mentally disabled girl tasered, lawsuit says
February 3, 2009
The Canadian Press
The father of a 14-year-old girl from Northwestern Ontario is suing the Ontario Provincial Police after his daughter was shocked with a taser. A statement of claim alleges two officers used the device on the girl after she was told to stop scratching at the paint inside a jail cell in Sioux Lookout, Ont. The lawsuit, filed Jan. 23 in Ontario Superior Court in Kenora, says that the officers entered the cell without warning, "violently" pulled the girl to the ground and applied the taser. None of the allegations have been proven in court.
The girl, identified in the lawsuit as having "mental disabilities," cannot be identified because she is a minor.
Her family is seeking $500,000 in damages.
1 comment:
You are omitting some important facts. This girl wasn't just scratching at some paint, she was compulsivly scraping at the wall to the point of self injury and when the officers entered the cell to prevent her from hurting herself she went ballistic to the point of seriously injuring one of the officers. She was tasered to prevent further injury to herself or law enforcement, which is by the way what the police are. Law Enforcement. Not law polite suggestion or law beseechment. If you are in a jail cell it has pretty much been determined you are not behaving within the paramiters of civilized society so if you are givin instruction on how to behave when in custody they are not open to debate. Saying she was mentally disabled is a stretch here too. She was drunk and had learning disabilities as a result of fetal alcohol symdrom, a cycle she was repeating. Lets try and consider what the options were to tasering her before we condem the solution.
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