Police taser video 'worse than Dziekanski' says chief
These images were borrowed from a Facebook site set up by Clay Willey's family in his honour - see the Facebook Group "PLEASE HELP THE WILLEY FAMILY PUT A STOP TO TAZER DEATHS IN OUR COUNTRY".
November 16, 2009
By Colleen Kimmett, The Tyee
Aboriginal and civil rights groups are demanding RCMP release a video of man who died after being tasered in a police holding cell in 2003.
The video reportedly shows Clay Willey, an aboriginal man, being tasered while hog-tied on the floor of the cell at a Prince George RCMP detachment. The officers involved in the incident have not been identified.
At a press conference this morning, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs said the four-minute long clip was "sickening" and "very, very difficult to watch."
"Clearly, they were trying to shut him up by using a taser."
David Eby, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association said he hopes media attention will pressure RCMP to release the video. "We believe it will cause an outcry," Eby said.
Writer Leonard Cler-Cunningham, who uncovered the video during the course of a five-year investigation on aboriginal deaths in custody, brought it to the attention of Eby and Phillip about six months ago. He thanked the RCMP for making the video available to him, but said police refuse to release to the public in order to protect Willey's privacy.
"They're using the right to privacy to protect themselves," he said.
A coroner's inquest into Willey’s death conducted in October of 2004 determined that he died of a cocaine overdose. According to the report, Willey had been acting erratically in the parking lot of a Prince George mall when police picked him up. He was handcuffed and taken to the local detachment, where police said they "touch stunned" him with a Taser after he continued to struggle and kick. Less than 45 minutes passed between the time he was picked up at the mall and the time an ambulance arrived at the detachment. Willey died en route to the hospital.
Dr. John C. Butt, a specialist in forensic pathology, noted that touch stun is a less debilitating mode on the Taser gun and said it wasn't clear how many times it was deployed. He questioned why police would taser a man who was already tied up and face down, and called it a "cruel and unnecessary act."
A media relations officer for the Prince George RCMP detachment said he was not aware of any internal investigation into the officers' actions.
2 comments:
Here is my humble opinion:
The taser is not a stun gun, as it is currently soft sell marketed. Saying that it is a stun gun, when mortality statistics indicate otherwise, is nothing more that many making fraudulent-false and misleading statements.
I looked at the wikipedia site, that talks about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair.
Execution by electrocution (usually referred to as the electric chair or simply the chair after its method of implementation) is an execution method originating in the United States in which the person being put to death is strapped to a specially built wooden chair and electrocuted through electrodes placed on the body. This execution method has been used only in the United States and, for a period of several decades,[1] in the Philippines (its first use there in 1924, last in 1976). The electric chair has become a symbol of the death penalty; however, its use is in decline.
Historically, once the person was attached to the chair, various cycles (differing in voltage and duration) of alternating current would be passed through the condemned's body, in order to fatally damage the internal organs (including the brain). The first jolt of electrical current was designed to cause immediate unconsciousness and brain death; the second one was designed to cause fatal damage to the vital organs. Death was frequently caused by electrical overstimulation of the heart.
After reading this, it became clear to me that the Taser is a modernized version of the unpopular electric chair, marketed by Americans. With the first Taser death, this was established.
Now Amnesty International states:
16 December 2008
Media Release
USA: Safety of Tasers questioned as death toll hits 334-mark
http://www.amnesty.ca/resource_centre/news/view.php?load=arcview&article=4543&c=Resource+Centre+News
This portable modified electric chair is undermining rule of law, due process of law, and instilling terror on all.
It takes longer to complete an esthetics course than it does to become an RCMP. I am told that RCMP cadets receive approximately five months of training. They get guns, whereas in some countries guns are not issued, and reason prevails.
With a portable electric chair, there is no need for charges, prosecutors, lawyers, judiciary, jail and prison guards, all support staff, etc., and this ought to be a concern to everyone. All of the above have been usurped. The police have bypassed the entire justice system and become a law unto themselves; accuser, prosecutor, Judge, jury, and Executioners.
With the Taser, have the Americans duped-pulled a fast one on the RCMP, and they knowingly bought it with taxpayers dollars? This brings blood-guilt upon all. Has the death-penalty has been resurrected in Canada, by a special interest group, without legislation?
Birth condemns no one to heed the will of evil, and I wonder where this societal insanity will end, when I view www.taser.com . They are now offering even more abominations.
Tasers never were exemplary of any sanity. They are sadistic. All the people who have advocated use of them are insane. They disrespect human rights, and the Golden Rule, and every law and Commandment of God. And Canada is a country that doesn't merely profess to "trust" in God on our money. Our country is founded on principles of justice that recognize the Supremacy of God, far beyond any gold or money anywhere, and the rule of law - regardless of any atheists who are elected or appointed to any office anywhere in this country or anywhere else by whatever virtue they contend they possess themselves by mere affirmation, disregarding God as their witness.
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