If Cops Can't Taze a Pregnant Woman, The Terrorists Will Win

Two survivors of police abuse: Malaika Brooks and her daughter.

Thanks to a misbegotten ruling from a divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, police in nine states have been left at an insurmountable disadvantage when dealing with criminal suspects. At least, that’s what we’re told in a legal brief submitted to the Supreme Court by a coalition of police unions. 

“It won’t be long before the word spreads through society’s criminal underworld that the Ninth Circuit hasn’t simply given them a `get out of jail free’ card, but a `never have to go to jail in the first place’ card,” warns the amicus brief. Rather than subduing criminals, “police officers will now be forced to walk away from people they have arrested.”

The ruling that is fraught with such awful implications, Brooks v. City of Seattle, involved a patently unnecessary Taser attack upon a woman who was seven months pregnant. The unarmed woman, who was not suspected of a violent crime, posed no threat to the three – yes, three – valiant officers who assaulted her. She was uncooperative, but did not offer any violent resistance. 

Her sole “offense” was to refuse a demand that she sign a traffic ticket that was eventually dismissed. 

In March 2010, the Ninth Circuit Court found that Seattle Police Officers Steven Daman, Juan Ornelas, and Donald Jones used excessive force when they committed their attack on Brooks and her unborn child – but that they were entitled to “qualified immunity” because the legal precedents dealing with the use of electro-shock torture on a pregnant woman were ambiguous in 2004.  

The assailants were thus left in the clear -- but unsatisfied with their victory. With the support of organizations representing tens of thousands of police officers (including some 30,000 SWAT operators), the officers are appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court, claiming that any limitation on the discretionary use of tasers against non-violent “suspects” constitutes an unacceptable restraint on police discretion and a dire threat to that holiest of social considerations, “officer safety.”

An unarmed fourteen-year-old girl is tasered in Philadelphia.

  In its brief on behalf of the officers, the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Association (LACPCA) and the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA) insist that refusing to allow police to use electro-shock torture against a pregnant woman would fatally undermine the principle of “pain compliance” on which social order – as they pretend to understand it – depends.

On November 23, 2004, Malaika Brooks was taking her son to school when she was stopped by Officer Ornelas, who claimed – wrongly, as it turned out – that she had been speeding. When he presented Brooks with a traffic ticket, she refused to sign it out of the concern that doing so would constitute an admission of guilt. She had done the same during a 1996 traffic stop in which the officer, who possessed some residual decency, simply handed her the little extortion note and walked away. 

Ornelas, unfortunately, chose to escalate the encounter by calling for “backup.” A few minutes later, Officer Jones and Sgt. Daman arrived on the scene and began to threaten and berate Brooks. None of this was necessary: The officers were engaging in a tribal display of primate dominance, rather than carrying out a function related in any way to protection of person and property. When they threatened to kidnap – or, as they called it, “arrest” – Brooks, the woman informed them that she was “less than 60 days from having my baby.”

After huddling briefly, the three officers attacked Brooks. Ornelas seized her right arm and -- in the course of less than a minute – inflicted three “drive stun” charges to Brooks’s neck, shoulder, and thigh, an assault that left her with permanent scars. The three officers then dragged Brooks – who had been desperately clinging to the steering wheel, honking the horn, and screaming for help – from the car, threw her face-down and pinned her to the ground. She was handcuffed and then booked on charges of “Refusing to sign” a traffic citation – a misdemeanor – and resisting arrest. 

A jury eventually found Brooks guilty of the first “offense,” and acquitted her of the second. The speeding citation was thrown out before Brooks went to court. Brooks filed suit against the officers for assault and violating her civil rights. The officers responded by invoking the well-established – and utterly specious – doctrine of “qualified immunity,” seeking a summary dismissal. The District Court dismissed the assault charge but found that the officers had committed a civil rights violation that nullified their claim to qualified immunity. 

 The Ninth Circuit reversed that holding as it applied to the defendants, ruling that the officers were protected by qualified immunity and could not be sued by Brooks. However, the Court offered notice that in the future similar taser attacks on non-cooperative but non-violent subjects would constitute excessive force.

In his dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski maintained that Brooks “had shown herself deaf to reason, and moderate physical force had only led to further entrenchment…. Brooks was tying up two line officers, a sergeant and three police vehicles – resources diverted from other community functions – to deal with one lousy traffic ticket.”

Who was responsible for this “diversion” – Mrs. Brooks, who was merely being uncooperative, or Officer Ornelas and his comrades, who needlessly escalated a disagreement over “one lousy traffic ticket” to the point where potentially deadly force was used against someone accused of a trivial traffic offense, rather than an actual crime?

“The officers couldn’t just walk away,” complains Kozinski. “Brooks was under arrest.” 

There was no substantive reason why the police couldn’t walk away – if they had been acting as peace officers, that is, rather than as armed enforcers of the revenue-consuming class. 

If a police officer has the option of deploying a reliably deadly weapon in a situation of this kind, he also has the option of backing down and letting the court deal with the merits of the citation. But the position claimed by the officers – and accepted, in a qualified sense, by the Ninth Circuit Court – is that anything other than immediate and unqualified submission by a Mundane justifies the infliction of summary punishment by a police officer.

The amicus brief by the LACPCA and NTOA lament that the Ninth Circuit Court, while upholding the unqualified “authority” of police to arrest people at their discretion, “has deprived officers of any lawful way of enforcing that authority, at least when the suspect is not engaged in violence directed towards the officers” and has “unnecessarily limited the amount of force that can be used against a suspect who refrains from using violence against the police” (emphasis added). 

For more on this fatal Taser attack, go here.

What the police unions who filed that brief are demanding is an open-ended grant of unlimited “authority” to use “pain compliance” against people who passively resist abduction by police. The question of using violent means to subdue a violent criminal suspect is not implicated in any way by this case.

In their petition for certiorari, the officers – whose actions, remember, were upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court – complain that the ruling could “prohibit the use of any low-level physical force against an actually resisting suspect who does not present an imminent threat of harm to the officers, a result that could strip law enforcement of any reasonable and practical means of enforcing the law.” 

To which a person whose mind is not hostage to totalitarian assumptions would reply: “And the problem with this is…?”

In a reasonably free society, police (actually, peace officers) would not presume to "enforce" the law; they would track down and arrest people plausibly suspected of committing crimes against person and property. They would not be permitted to violate the unconditional law of non-aggression by initiating force, or issue what they assume to be “lawful orders” to people who are not suspected of actual crimes. They certainly would not be permitted to employ “pain compliance” in any situation that didn’t involve legitimate defense against an actual aggressor.

Remarkably, in their amicus brief the officers who committed what should be prosecuted as a felonious assault on Brooks asserted that “it is well established that police officers need not use the least amount of force in effecting an arrest.” 

Once again, we’re invited to believe that there would be apocalyptic consequences if police were inhibited in the use of disproportionate force to compel non-violent “suspects” to submit to their supposed authority.

Under the standard prescribed in the amicus briefs filed on behalf of the officers who assaulted Brooks, it’s difficult to find fault with the actions of Beaumont, California Police Officer Enoch Clark.

 On February 21, Clark stopped a woman named Monique Hernandez on suspicion of DUI. When Clark tried to handcuff her, Hernandez resisted. Clark’s preferred method of “pain compliance” was a JPX device — a weapon that employs a gunpowder charge to fire a stream of pepper spray at roughly 400 miles an hour.

The JPX weapon is designed for use against armed assailants at a distance of 6 to 15 feet. Its payload of weaponized OC spray is propelled over that distance at less than three one-hundredths of a second, making it (in the words of the company’s promotional literature) “too fast to avoid…. The effect is immediate; there is no chance to resist.”

Clark – a veteran officer and chairman of the local police officers union -- fired his JPX gun into Hernandez’s right temple at a distance of roughly ten inches. The impact shattered the woman’s right eye and inflicted irreparable damage to her left eye as well. 

The officer has been indicted on four felony charges. His attorney insists that the officer’s attack was justified in order “to gain compliance and in defense of his person.” If the claims made by and on behalf of the officers who assaulted Mailaka Brooks are sound – if police officers are not legally required to use minimal force when dealing with non-violent “suspects” – it’s difficult to see how Clark’s actions were improper, even though they resulted in Monique Rodriguez being permanently blinded.

“It was Brooks’s recalcitrance and resistance that prompted her treatment,” sniffs the officers’ petition for certiorari. “Under both state and federal law she did not have a right to resist her arrest,” which purportedly means that the officers were permitted – nay, required – to employ “pain compliance” techniques against her until she submitted.

Wouldn’t the same principle apply to the actions of Enoch Clark in dealing with the equally recalcitrant Monique Hernandez? His police union attorney certainly thinks so. And let us not forget that any effort to inhibit the police in their sacred mission to impose order would constitute an existential threat to our society. 

Deny an intrepid hero in body armor the option of tasing a pregnant woman – or kicking her in the stomach hard enough to cause the near-term infant to defecate in the womb – a reign of terror will ensue, with the “criminal underworld” arising to devour us all.  

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Youngest Victim of Police Abuse

Survivor of prenatal police abuse Levii Dozier.

Levii Dozier is only four months old, but he’s already been assaulted by the police. 

Roughly five months ago, Levii’s mother Raven Dozier was present when her brother got embroiled in a child custody dispute with a girlfriend. After the police arrived, Raven did what she could to calm her brother down. Eventually one of the officers shot the agitated man with a Taser. A thugscrum quickly coalesced as several officers inflicted gratuitous punishment on the prone and helpless man while his sister – who had been assisting the police – looked on in horror. 

“He’s on the ground!” shrieked Dozier, who was in tears. “You don’t need to do that!”

“Shut the f**k up!” replied one of the gallant officers. When Dozier failed to act on that thoughtful suggestion, Officer Jarad Wheeler strode up to her and kicked her in the stomach with sufficient force to open a door. 

At the time, Raven Dozier was nine months pregnant. 

For about fifteen minutes, the DeKalb County officers conferred with a supervisor outside the house -- within earshot of Raven’s brother, who was sitting, handcuffed, in the back of a police car.

“He kicked a pregnant woman,” one of the officers reported. 

“You’ve got to charge her with something,” another replied, pointing out that doing so would magically transmute aggravated assault into a “justified” use of force.

Following the discussion outside, several officers re-entered the home, where Dozier was on a couch trying to regain her composure. 

In a voice suppurating feigned concern, one of them asked if they could take a picture of the traumatized mother; in the same affected tone, he asked her if she could trouble herself to put on a pair of shoes and step outside the house for a moment to talk with the supervisor.

As soon as Raven had crossed the threshold of her home, she was placed under arrest for “obstruction.” 

To their credit, officials at DeKalb County Jail refused to book Dozier. Instead they sent her to a nearby hospital, where she passed a small amount of blood and amniotic fluid. . A photograph of Raven taken after Wheeler’s assault displayed a huge bruise across Dozier’s abdomen. Two weeks later she gave birth to Levii by way of an emergency C-section.

Atlanta attorney Mark Bullman, who is representing Raven Dozier in a lawsuit, recalled to Pro Libertate that the doctors who treated Raven and delivered Levii “found that the kick was severe enough that it caused the baby to defecate in the womb.”

What this means is that Levii literally had the sh*t kicked out of him by a bullying cop before he was born.

 In his official report of the incident, Wheeler did what police in such circumstances always do: He lied, claiming that he was dealing with an “aggressive” woman and that he used “a front push kick to the abdomen, as [I] was taught to do at the academy.” It was only after he arrested this “aggressive” woman that he supposedly noticed her condition. 

“Her condition was obvious to everyone,” Bullman – himself a retired police officer – explains. “She had gained seventy pounds in this pregnancy. The incident took place in a well-lit area, and she had spent a great deal of time standing alongside the police officers, attempting to calm her brother down and resolve the situation.” Furthermore, as the comments overheard by Dozier’s brother demonstrate, every officer on the scene was aware of the expectant mother’s condition – and all of them instinctively collaborated in covering up the crime committed against her. 

That cover-up continued “all the way up the chain of command,” Bullman observes. “There was no ambiguity about the facts, but this didn’t matter.” The department exonerated Wheeler, ruling that his felonious assault on Raven and her unborn child was “within policy.” 

This was at least the third time the DeKalb County Police Department has validated criminal acts committed by Officer Jarad Wheeler. On an earlier occasion, he attacked a 53-year-old grandmother who was trying to help her grandchildren following an automobile accident, slamming her face-first into the hood of his car. Earlier this year, Wheeler – who had responded to the wrong address – shot and killed a dog that was chained up inside its owner’s garage. 

Wheeler, who fancies himself a mixed martial artist of sorts, has an undistinguished record when dealing with competitors who can fight back – but he’s 3-0 when his opponent is a weeping pregnant woman, a terrified grandmother, or a chained, harmless dog. 

Not since Cosmo Kramer dominated his dojo have we witnessed such a display of unalloyed martial fierceness.

According to Mark Bullman, who was a police officer in Georgia before beginning his legal career, Wheeler is not at all atypical of the DeKalb Police Force. 

Another of Bullman’s clients is Brian J. Peterson, who wasbeaten and arrested on spurious felony charges in October 2010 by Officer T.J.Crumpton. At the time, Crumpton was working as a part-time security guard at a bar. An eyewitness saw Crumpton assault the handcuffed man, slamming his head into a black SUV, a police car, and the sidewalk. 

As was the case with Wheeler’s abuse of Raven Dozier, Crumpton devised multiple “cover charges” to justify the assault. Perjuring himself in an official report by claiming that Peterson had kicked his squad car, Crumpton charged him with public drunkenness, felony interference with government property, giving a false name, and obstruction.

Peterson spent five days in jail and lost his job as an insurance broker because of the felony charges. After the charges were dismissed, and an internal affairs investigation concluded that Crumpton had committed perjury and false arrest, the officer was “punished” with a ten-hour suspension – what Bullman correctly calls “a day off without pay.” 

Crumpton still has his job. Peterson, his victim, remains unemployed. This outcome is representative of police affairs in DeKalb County, which Bullman describes as “the most corrupt government I’ve ever seen.” That opinion is shared by at least a handful of embattled decent people employed by the DeKalb PD.

“A few hours after the story [about Raven Dozier] was broadcast, I received an e-mail from someone who was a police officer in DeKalb,” Bullman told me. “It was a two-page, single-spaced document, replete with names, dates, and details, describing dozens of incidents of abuse and examples of official corruption.”

DeKalb County is an unincorporated urban area that includes part of Atlanta. It is afflicted with both a large police department and a sheriff’s office. A suitable snapshot of DeKalb’s culture of immersive corruption was offered four years ago, when DeKalb Police Detective Anthony Robinson, an undercover vice officer, was caught on camera stealing cash and lottery tickets from a convenience store where he was running a gambling sting. 

 

Casual theft and whimsical sexual misconduct are commonplace in DeKalb County law enforcement – and the criminal corruption grows in crescendo the further one travels up the institutional pyramid. 

 Ten years ago, Sidney Dorsey, then the outgoing sheriff of DeKalb County, was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring with two deputies to murder of Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown just days before the victim was to replace him. More recently, three members of DeKalb County Sheriff Tom Brown’s staff were indicted for embezzling $350,000.

In 2006, DeKalb Police Chief Louis Graham resigned a day after learning that a special prosecutor had been appointed to investigate his department. His successor was Terrell Bolton, a “gypsy cop” – or rather, “gypsy chief” – who had been fired by the Dallas PD three years earlier. 

An account compiled by dissident officers in the DeKalb PD recalls that after Bolton had settled in, he spent “millions of dollars on unneeded recreational vehicles, forc[ed] into retirement or demot[ed] the command staff, [and brought] in his friends and friends of friends as a regime.”

After Bolton was fired by DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis in 2009, the former chief demanded that the police in neighboring Decatur arrest Ellis, Sheriff Brown, and County COO for false imprisonment, theft, and criminal trespass. He claimed that those officials had held him for several hours against his will the county courthouse pressuring him to resign. 

Worried about violent retaliation by the ex-chief – remember, this is a county in which the sheriff once murdered his elected successor – Ellis requested, and received, a special 24-hour security detail from the DeKalb police.

According to Bullman the corruption in DeKalb County is so pervasive that it would be possible “to indict a different police officer every week” for the foreseeable future. The existing conditions provide a perfect environment in which to cultivate violent sociopaths.

The progress of police corruption in DeKalb County is akin “to the development of serial killers,” Bullman opines. “They don’t start out by killing or even abusing other human beings; they might begin by pulling the wings off insects, or torturing small animals. In time they commit isolated acts of cruelty, pushing a little bit further each time they get away with it. Eventually they start beating or abusing women, or children, and then emerge as fully realized sociopathic killers.”

In DeKalb, this process has advanced to the point where “decent and honorable police officers are leaving, often in fear of the off-the-chain crazy people who are allowed free rein.” 

“The only people who hate bad cops more than the general public are good cops,” insists Bullman.  Unfortunately, people in that profession who try to maintain their ethical integrity “just keep their heads down and their mouths shut in the hope of making it to retirement – and a lot of them around here are simply quitting in disgust, choosing unemployment even in this economy rather than being party to what they see happening around them. Eventually the good people are gone or silenced – and we can see what we’re left with.”

Bullman describes the pandemic of lawless police abuse as a symptom of imperial cultural decay: “We’re heading to hell in a handbasket, just like every empire before us – Greek, Roman, British, all of them. Our institutions reflect the fact that we’ve become fat, arrogant, and lazy – and we’re willing to tolerate violence and lawlessness in our public institutions as long as it happens to someone else. Of course, when it happens to someone we care about, we don’t really have any legitimate reason to complain.”

Blackshirts from Atlanta PD's  now-defunct RED DOG unit.

Two years ago, Bullman suspended his business law practice to focus exclusively on combating police abuse and corruption. He played a role in disbanding Atlanta’s deranged RED DOG (Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia) task force, which he describes as a “black-shirted gestapo who were both autonomous and obtuse.” 

A lawsuit filed by Bullman on behalf of five Atlanta residents describes numerous instances in which RED DOG operators picked out vulnerable people – invariably black males – who were handcuffed and then subjected to public strip-searches – including body cavity searches. This was done, Bullman says, as a way of “instilling the appropriate level of terror in the community.” 

RED DOG’s most notable accomplishment was the November 2006 home invasion that killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson, in which the elderly woman was gunned down in a no-knock raid staged on the basis of a bogus tip from an informant. After breaking into Johnson’s home, the police handcuffed her and let her bleed to death while they searched for drugs or cash. Finding none, they planted several small bags of marijuana on the scene. Three officers were eventually convicted of criminal charges and sent to prison, and the city paid a tax victim-subsidized civil settlement of nearly five million dollars to Johnson’s family.

This wasn’t a victory; an innocent grandmother was dead, her family was traumatized, and the self-sustaining culture of police corruption endured. Bullman describes his vocation as an effort “to stop as many people from being abused as possible” – or at least exact some measure of justice for those who have been abused.

Mark Bullman insists that, in principle, he remains “very supportive of law enforcement in general.” It’s doubtful that Levii Dozier – who was nearly killed by an abusive cop before he took his first breath – will share that opinion. 

Thanks again for the generous help so many of you have provided. I've sent out several batches of Liberty in Eclipse to those who have given donations, and more are on the way; all of them should be in the appropriate hands by the end of the month. I appreciate not only your generosity, but also your patience, since I am simultaneously packing and house-hunting (we have to vacate our present home by the second week of June).

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Everyday Evil of America's Torture State

After Daniel Chong was arrested in a federal drug raid, he wasn’t taken to Gitmo. Instead, the Feds thoughtfully arranged to bring Gitmo to him, nearly torturing him to death in the process.

Chong, a senior at the University of California-San Diego, was one of nine people swept up in an April 21 narcotics raid by the Drug Enforcement Administration. After his arrest he spent four hours handcuffed in a cell before being questioned. One of the agents who questioned Chong described him as someone who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” 

After being interrogated, the student was told that he would be released and provided with paperwork to sign. He was then handcuffed and put into a five-by-ten-foot detention cell, where he was held for five days in conditions that qualify as torture under any rational reading of either domestic or international law. 

The DEA’s story was that Chong was simply “forgotten.” A likelier explanation is that he was ignored, or even singled out for deliberate abuse. Chong shouted and screamed for help, kicking against the heavy door of his cell. Although his hands were cuffed, he managed to tear a small fragment from his jacket, which he shoved under the door in an effort to get the attention of his jailers.

Since Chong had no difficulty hearing conversations and other sounds outside his cell, there’s no reason to doubt that his pleas were heard, and simply disregarded.

For at least two days and nights, Chong was left alone, handcuffed, in complete darkness, and began to hallucinate. Fearing that he might die in captivity, Chong shattered his eyeglasses and used broken shards to carve the words “Sorry, mother” into his arm.

Although Chong has admitted he had gone to a friend’s house to commemorate “4/20,” an unofficial observance celebrating recreational marijuana use, he was not charged with a narcotics offense. Through its prohibition enforcement action, DEA managed to create conditions in which Chong ingested substances much worse for him than marijuana. Left for several days without food or water to sustain him, Chong made a futile attempt to trigger an overhead fire sprinkler, and then eventually drank his own urine. Tormented by the insistent protests of an empty stomach, he consumed a small amount of a white, powdery substance that was found to be methamphetamine. 

By the time two agents “discovered” him, Chong was literally pleading for his captors to kill him. After being released, he was hospitalized for severe dehydration, renal failure, a perforated esophagus, and cramps. He had shed 15 pounds. He has never received an apology. 

If a dog had been subjected to treatment similar to the abuse inflicted on Daniel Chong, those responsible would face felony charges. Thanks to the spurious principle of “supremacy clause immunity,” there is no measurable likelihood that the people who nearly tortured Chong to death will face criminal charges. It’s quite likely they will never be identified. 

It’s not just the Feds employed by the DEA – an agency best described as the CIA’s slow-witted sibling – who enjoy this privilege. 

 No criminal charges have been filed against the Lee County, Florida Sheriff’s Deputies responsible for the torture death of Cleveland resident Nick Christie. The emotionally disturbed 62-year-old man was detained for several days in March 2009 after his frantic wife Joyce made the fatal mistake of calling the police for “help.”

Mr. Christie, who had recently been prescribed a potent anti-depressant called Lexapro, suddenly left his home in Cleveland to visit family in Ft. Myers. When he arrived at his brother’s house, Christie’s behavior became dangerously erratic. 

Acting on the common and entirely misplaced assumption that police intervention is a good idea in situations of this kind, Joyce called the Lee County Sheriff’s Department to ask them to find Nick and get him to a hospital. After deputies found the retired boilermaker, they arrested him on trespassing charges. 

Over the next 43 hours, Christie was repeatedly shackled in a restraint chair, hooded, and attacked with military-grade pepper spray. The chemical assault was so intense that it left other inmates gagging on the fumes. Christie, who suffered from respiratory and heart disease, pleaded with deputies to remove the spit mask because he couldn’t breathe. One inmate described how Nick turned “purple and almost blue” as he suffocated.

 


When medical personnel arrived to check on Nick, they were overwhelmed by the pepper spray residue. The victim died of heart failure two days after his arrest. The death was ruled a homicide – but the State Attorney’s office insisted that there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of the deputies who tortured Nick Christie to death.

The same blanket immunity from prosecution shields the members of the thugscrum –at least ten and as many as fifteen officers – from Fresno, California, who beat, pepper-sprayed, and repeatedly tasered a man named Raul Rosas. 

The police had arrived at Rosas’s residence on June 6 of last year in response to an unspecified “domestic disturbance.” When the police arrived, Rosas took refuge in the bathroom. One of the officers kicked open the front door and dragged out the unarmed man, who was immediately hit with a dose of pepper spray. The chemical weapon attack was a prelude to a full-scale onslaught: Witnesses reported hearing the sounds of a taser being used for at least eight to ten minutes. 

After hog-tying Rosas, the assailants earned extra points for creative sadism by using a garden hose to drown him as he pleaded for water – a crude but effective simulacrum of waterboarding. This atrocity was witnessed by Rosas’s horrified children and several neighbors, who repeatedly warned that the victim was suffocating. “After some time had passed, [Rosas] had clear spit bubbles coming out of his mouth,” recounts a lawsuit filed by the victim’s family. “Witnesses observed [his] lips turn purple.” 

When one of the witnesses told the cops they were killing Rosas, one of them sneeringly insisted that the victim was “faking it.” Eventually one of the officers felt for a pulse and found nothing. None of the officers involved in this torture-murder has ever been publicly identified, much less subjected to prosecution or administrative punishment. 

Given the foregoing cases, it could be said that Pennsylvania resident Derena Marie Madison was comparatively fortunate: Although she was physically abused and humiliated, she wasn’t killed or severely injured. 

At about 2:30 a.m. on February 3, 2011, Pennsylvania State Troopers Chad Weaver and Michael Zampogna pulled over a vehicle driven by Jamie Cornell, who was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. After Cornell was taken into custody, the troopers threatened to have the vehicle towed. This prompted Madison, who was a passenger, to exit the car in protest. This gave the troopers an excuse to arrest her for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct.

Shackled at the wrists and ankles, Madison was taken to a nearby State Police barracks, where she was chained to a bench with her hands cuffed behind her back. Without provocation, Weaver hit Madison with two blasts of pepper spray to her face. None of the other officers intervened. 

Still trussed with handcuffs and leg shackles, Madison was unable to wipe the pepper spray residue from her face. In response to her pleas for help, several troopers – whom she couldn’t identify, because she was blinded from the pepper spray -- carried her downstairs and outside the barracks. After being thrown to the snowy ground and doused with a large quantity of water, Madison blacked out. When she regained consciousness, she quickly realized that one or more of the assailants had urinated on her head, face, and neck.
Taken back to inside the barracks, Madison was chained to the bench again and briefly held before being released without receiving medical attention. Eleven days later, she was formally charged with public drunkness and disorderly conduct, and eventually found guilty on both charges.

Responding to Miss Madison’s lawsuit, the State Troopers didn’t contest her account; instead, they claimed that their actions were taken pursuant to their duties, and therefore they were protected by “sovereign immunity,” maintaining that “subduing persons is one of the acts law enforcement officers are employed to perform [and that] officers are also permitted to use force, if necessary, in the commission of their duties.”

Although the Troopers described Madison as an “out-of-control person,” there is no evidence that she did anything other than express her displeasure over the prospect of being abandoned once Cornell’s vehicle had been towed away.  

Displaying an honesty uncommon among those in his profession, U.S. District Judge Gary L. Lancaster rejected the “sovereign immunity” claim. Repeatedly assaulting a handcuffed woman with pepper spray and urinating on her serves “no legitimate law enforcement purpose,” but indicates a “personal motivation, rather than intent to serve the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” This raises the troubling possibility that behavior of this kind could be considered appropriate if it were “authorized” as a matter of official policy. 

A similar possibility was raised by a ruling in the case of Niagara, New York resident Ryan S. Smith, who was tortured into providing a DNA sample to police. 

Smith, a repeat offender, was suspected of involvement in a July 2006 home invasion and kidnapping. When three of the suspects took one of the hostages to another home, Smith allegedly remained behind to guard two small children, who had been bound and gagged. While there, the suspect helped himself to a soda, apparently unaware that by doing so he would leave behind potentially incriminating DNA evidence.

The DNA residue from the soda can was eventually matched by the FBI's Combined DNA System (CODIS) with a sample previously taken from Smith. In August 2008, Niagara County Court Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza issued an order requiring Smith to provide a DNA sample via a painless swab of his inner cheek. Smith didn't object, and the sample was taken without difficulty.

At this point, the story becomes complicated by professional incompetence. The Niagara Falls Police sent the sample to the wrong lab, where it was opened and contaminated.

The investigators went back to Judge Sperrazza for a second order, which -- unlike the first one – was granted ex parte. This means that Smith's defense counsel was not informed or consulted. Smith refused to provide a second DNA sample. 

This prompted the police to consult with the County District Attorney's office to learn how much force they could employ to compel Smith to provide potentially self-incriminating evidence – a question that should be foreclosed by the Fifth Amendment. 

As Detective Lt. William Thomson would later testify, Assistant Niagara County D.A. Doreen M. Hoffmann, who is presiding over the prosecution of Ryan Smith, instructed the police that "we could use the minimum force that was necessary" to force the suspect to submit to a DNA test.

That formulation is a tautology, since it authorizes the use of any amount of force needed to extract the sample. As long as the police were reasonably careful in calibrating the duress the applied, they could continue escalating the level of force until it broke the suspect; wherever they end up would obviously be the "minimum" necessary to accomplish their objectives.

Smith was brought in handcuffs to the police station and informed that the investigators had been authorized to use physical force. Although nobody intended to harm him, Smith was told, the sample was going to be surrendered; it was just a question of how much he wanted to endure before it was. Smith still refused to comply. 

At this point, the police were implicitly authorized to use any method of “pain compliance” they considered appropriate. They could have waterboarded Smith, subjected him to “stress positions,” locked him in a small cell with an insect – in short, they could have employed any of the methods recently extolled by CIA torture supervisor Jose Rodriguez in his recent 60 Minutes interview.

The police elected to use a taser in “drive stun” mode in order to force Smith to cough up the DNA sample. On the basis of that evidence – which was extracted through torture, albeit of a comparatively mild variety, Smith was hit with a 24-count criminal indictment. He was also charged with "criminal contempt of court" for forcing his interrogators to torture him.

When Smith's defense counsel filed a motion to suppress the evidence based on Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections, the same Judge who issued the ex parte orders produced a ruling validating the use of taser torture as means of forcing compliance, as long as it's not done "maliciously" or to "excess."

Judge Sperrazza is "the first judge in western civilization to say you can use a Taser to enforce a court order," complained Patrick Balkin, Smith's defense counsel. He also pointed out that the precedent could inspire other practical applications of electro-shock "pain compliance": “They have now given the Niagara Falls police discretion to Taser anybody anytime they think it’s reasonable. [Sperrazza's] decision says you can enforce a court order by force. If you extrapolate that, we no longer have to have child support hearings; you can just Taser the parent.”

In a lawsuit filed against the City of Niagara Falls, Smith alleged that he was "tortured into unconsciousness" by repeated Taser charges. The police investigators insist that they were much gentler in the application of electro-shock trauma, but their testimony regarding the number and duration of shocks is mutually self-contradictory (as well as inconsistent with the record kept by the Taser unit itself).

Smith was eventually convicted of nearly two dozen offenses. Last March, the New York State Supreme Court overturned Smith’s conviction and ordered a new trial, ruling that the use of a taser to compel the prisoner to surrender a DNA sample was “excessive force.” At the time, Smith “posed no immediate threat to the safety of himself or officers, nor did he attempt to evade the officers by flight,” recounts the decision. Smith “was handcuffed, seated on the floor, and surrounded by three patrol officers and two detectives…. [He] did not threaten, fight with, or physically resist the officers at any time; rather, he simply refused to open his mouth to allow the officers to obtain a buccal swab.”

This is not to say that the ruling foreclosed the future use of taser torture as a police interrogation method. The court suggested that the police could have arrested Smith for “criminal contempt,” and then obtained “judicial approval to use physical force if necessary to extract the DNA sample.” 

On this construction, torture is acceptable as long as it’s committed pursuant to a court order. This would be something akin to a “torture warrant” of the kind suggested by Alan Dershowitz. 

 That proposal was offered by Dershowtiz a decade ago as a way of addressing a “ticking bomb” scenario involving a hidden nuclear weapon; the New York Supreme Court’s standard would authorize the use of judicially sanctioned torture as an instrument of prosecutorial convenience.

"Criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred," warned Edmund Burke, a maxim abundantly vindicated by the quiet normalization -- and the resulting near-ubiquity -- of torture as a law enforcement tactic in contemporary America. 

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