On June 4th, a headline in The Buffalo News announced "Ruling allowing Taser use to get DNA may be nation’s first." Tasers became commonplace in the police arsenal on the explicit understanding that they were an alternative weapon to be used in situations that otherwise called for lethal force; for example, if a knife-wielding suspect threatened an officer's life, the cop could bring him down with a taser jolt rather than shot him with a gun. The police use of tasers has gone far, far beyond what is required in self-defense but a patina of that justification has continued to cling. Police routinely justify tasering defenseless people -- including children throwing temper tantrums -- by claiming they were resisting arrest or they made a sudden movement. That patina has been scraped off.

Niagara County (N.Y.) Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza has ruled that New York police can use tasers as instruments of torture to compell compliance by non-violent people. I don't know what other conclusion to reach from the item in The Buffalo News. Here are facts....

Ryan S. Smith -- a black man -- was "handcuffed and sitting on the floor of Niagara Falls Police Headquarters when he was zapped with the 50,000- volt electronic stun gun after he insisted he would not give a DNA sample." Smith had given a sample the month before but the police had sent it to the wrong lab and needed a second one. Smith said "no" even though a second court order for the DNA had been issued. At that point, the police tasered him. Smith then "consented to the sample, and he was arrested on a contempt of court charge."

Smith's defense lawyer Patrick M. Balkin stated, “They have now given the Niagara Falls police discretion to Taser anybody anytime they think it’s reasonable. Her [the judge'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.”

The legal door has been opened for tasers to be used pure and simply to compel obedience. This is state-sanctioned and state-administered torture..