(12-12-2014 02:28 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote: My cousin is Downs as well. He can get agitated but even at that he doesn't have the capacity to intentionally harm somebody.
That said, if we as taxpayers are paying for damn tazers and the cops want them so they don't have to wrestle folks why they constantly choose to wrestle them? That alone should form some of the requisite intent in my opinion.
This is clearly tragic...
I hear what you're saying... but you are kinda contradicting yourself. If he doesn't have the capacity to harm someone, why are you okay tazering him? Tazers are not 'harmless' and without risk. If he had suffered a heart attack because of the tazer, it would have been no less tragic.
As to the wrestling, I suspect they didn't expect to have much trouble with him.. but they did. We honestly don't know if what they did was unreasonable... I mean, how do you remove someone who doesn't want to be removed without using SOME force?
We don't really know what kind of distress he was in. Perhaps the agitation was a precursor to the distress, or perhaps as implied, it was being laid on his stomach that caused the distress. Though I'm not aware of why him laying on his stomach with his hands behind him would specifically cause deadly distress.
If the distress was caused by his 'resisting' the handcuffs, what should they have done? I guess in a perfect world, you'd wait for a family member to help escort him out, but one has to assume (it's not said here) that he either was there alone (doubtful, but if he was, he might not tell you who his family was or how to reach them) or that a family member WAS there, but couldn't get him to comply either.
My point being, and completely subject to a clinical professional telling me they 'should have known' something I'm unaware of about people with Downs... or additional information being presented... I don't think the cops should be held responsible for taking what appears to be one of the least 'risky' approaches to the situation, which only extremely rarely causes any issues... even though in THIS case it obviously had tragic consequences.
If they were careless/thoughtless/should have known better, no problem... convict them... and retrain everyone else.
I work in healthcare but not as a practitioner, and that is what happens in medicine when you get an unexpectedly bad result