Taser International (Nasdaq: TASR) is arguing that a $10 million wrongful-death award should be thrown out because the jury never heard that a teenager who died after being shocked with a Taser stun gun had three baggies of marijuana in his sock.

Darryl Turner

Darryl Turner, 17, was tasered by a police officer in March 2008 during a confrontation at a Charlotte, N.C., grocery store. An autopsy showed he died of a fatal disturbance in his heart rhythm.

The award of compensatory damages to Turner's parents — the largest ever against Taser — penalized the company for failing to adequately warn customers that its X26 stun gun, when applied to the chest near the heart, can disturb heart rhythm and cause cardiac arrest.

The officer who tasered Turner testified he followed his firearms training and aimed for “center of body mass.”

“Hopefully, this verdict will sound the alarm to police officers around the world that firing these weapons into the chests of people should be avoided,” said John C. Burton, lead attorney for Devoid Turner and Tammy Lou Fontenot.

But in a press release about the verdict, Taser said the jury's compassion for Turner's family “overwhelmed the scientific evidence presented in this case” and faulted the trial judge for excluding evidence that “Mr. Turner had three baggies of marijuana in his sock during the incident.”

According to Taser, a Harvard pathologist who examined autopsy samples diagnosed Turner as having a preexisting heart condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and “Marijuana is known to exacerbate the risk of cardiac arrhythmias in people with HCM.”

Taser has been able to defeat numerous wrongful-death lawsuits where there was evidence of drug usage by the victim. But the drug card does not look like a winning one in Turner's case — in part because the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy did not screen for the active ingredient in marijuana and found no other drugs in Turner's system.

“[N]ot a single expert, on either side of this case, has ever opined that any use of marijuana by Mr. Turner (assuming it could be proven) in any way caused or contributed to his death,” the plaintiffs said in their motion to exclude the marijuana possession evidence.

The case is only the second to reach a verdict in which Taser was sued for wrongful death. “[A] jury could conclude that the [stun gun] used in this case did constitute a proximate cause of Turner’s death,” U.S. District Judge Robert J. Conrad ruled in allowing the case to go to trial.

Turner was a cashier at a Food Lion store in Charlotte. On March 20, 2008, he admitted to stealing some food items from the store and, after he returned to work from his lunch break, he was fired for refusing to obey instructions from the customer service manager.

“[H]is attitude and demeanor had changed dramatically,” the manager, Mary Blackert, said in a court declaration. She had “never seen Darryl act so confrontational and defiant.”

By the time Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Officer Jerry Dawson arrived at the scene, Turner had knocked over a display and thrown an umbrella at the store manager. When he moved toward Dawson, the officer fired his X26 Taser, letting go of the trigger only when Turner fell to the floor. Paramedics were unable to revive him and he was pronounced dead at the hospital.

The medical examiner found Turner's heart was disease-free and attributed the death to “agitated state, stress and use of conducted energy device (Taser).”

Taser argued that the marijuana baggies and Turner's agitation suggested he had used drugs during his lunch break. “Plaintiff should not be permitted to paint Turner as an innocent bystander who contributed nothing to his ultimate demise,” it said in a brief.

But unless marijuana is laced with more potent drugs, it is not associated with violent behavior. And with the autopsy showing no drugs in Turner's system, his parents were clearly correct in arguing that the baggies in his sock had “no relevancy to any issue in this case.”

In the only other Taser verdict, a California jury in 2008 awarded $6 million to the family of a man who died after police repeatedly shocked him with Tasers. But the victim was found 85 percent liable for his death, offsetting the award of $1 million in compensatory damages, and the judge later threw out the award of $5 million in punitive damages.

By Matthew Heller
7/23/11