An Ohio judge has given medical examiners around the country a shock by ordering a coroner to remove any reference to Tasers in her autopsy reports on three men who died after police officers shot them with the stun guns.

Amnesty International estimates that since June 2001, more than 150 people have died in the U.S. following Taser shocks, but the gun's manufacturer has been suing medical examiners who have cited its products in autopsy reports.

That aggressive strategy paid off big time after a four-day bench trial of Taser International's (Nasdaq: TASR) case against Dr. Lisa Kohler, the chief medical examiner of Summit County, Ohio. She had identified the physiological stress of being incapacitated by a 50,000-volt Taser as a contributory cause of the deaths of Dennis Hyde, 30, Richard Holcomb, 18, and Mark McCullaugh, 28.

“There is simply no medical, scientific, or electrical evidence to support the conclusion that the Taser X26 had anything to do with the death[s],” Court of Common Pleas Judge Ted Schneiderman said in a May 2 decision.

Under Ohio law, a judge can direct a coroner “to change his decision as to [the] cause and manner and mode of death.” Schneiderman ordered the county to delete any reference to a “contributing factor of electrical pulse incapacitation” in the Hyde and Holcomb autopsy reports and similar language in the McCullaugh report.

Taser's experts, he ruled, had provided evidence that Hyde and Holcomb

probably died as a result of a fatal cardiac arrhythmia due to illicit drug intoxication creating crazed states consistent with “Excited Delirium Syndrome,” also known as “Agitated Delirium.”

Kohler will appeal the decision -– and she has the support of other medical examiners. “Judges should not be practicing medicine, and that is clearly what the judge is trying to do in this case,” Dr. Bruce Levy, the chief medical examiner for the state of Tennessee, told the Akron Beacon Journal.

The county's attorney argued during the trial that Schneiderman should not overturn the "thought-out, carefully deliberated" findings of its pathologists. “'We are not saying this is the sole or direct cause,'' John F. Manley said. “'We are saying it contributed in some way. How much, we may never know.”

The appeals court should certainly take a close look at how the judge could have found Taser's experts so credible, particularly since “excited delirium” is not recognized as a diagnosis in official medical manuals.

“There are plenty of medical examiners who are very skeptical of excited delirium,” an ACLU lawyer told the Arizona Republic. “"But that is not what Taser is promoting ... They attribute almost all of the deaths following a Taser strike to excited delirium.”

The city of Akron, whose officers were involved in Hyde's death, joined Taser in its complaint "to correct erroneous cause of death determinations." Kohler's office ruled all three deaths homicides, but Schneiderman said the deaths of Hyde and Holcomb should be ruled “accidental” and the manner of McCullaugh's death should be ruled “undetermined.”