Inventor Had Warned Taser Unsafe for Cardiac Patients : Weapons: Coroners in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties say the stun gun contributed to or caused three deaths. Two of the victims had heart disease.

Distributors of the Taser stun gun used by hundreds of police agencies, including the Ventura Police Department, for years have marketed the weapon as a non-lethal alternative to nightsticks and firearms that is safe for use on cardiac patients.

However, a document filed 15 years ago with a federal agency by the weapon’s inventor says that the 50,000-volt Taser poses a special threat to people with heart ailments.

And, according to coroners in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties, the weapon has either caused or contributed to the deaths of three people, two of whom had heart disease.

The question of whether Taser guns should be used on people with heart problems was raised last month when a cardiac patient at Ventura County Medical Center died after being shocked by Ventura police with Taser and Nova stun guns.

Police say they responded when 24-year-old Duane Johnson, who had a history of psychiatric problems, began throwing himself into windows and walls after being told that he would be transferred to a nearby mental health facility.

Police acknowledge jolting Johnson four times--once with the Nova gun during the initial struggle--and three times later, with the Taser, to stop him from grabbing at people and to force him to submit to handcuffing.

Two mental-health workers who witnessed the incident have told county investigators that Johnson, a muscular former athlete, was shocked seven to 11 times, including several times after he was subdued and posed no threat to others, according to a coroner’s report.

Coroner F. Warren Lovell has not yet determined the cause of Johnson’s death, but the circumstances surrounding the Feb. 13 incident have prompted Lovell to say that police training is an issue in the case.

“I’d say these weapons aren’t safe,” Lovell said. Police officers should “use them to protect life and to reduce injury, but be careful. I think these officers read the manual that’s given out, and they think these things are entirely safe.”

Randall Feltman, county mental health director, said in an interview that the use of stun guns on Johnson raises “a question about the instruction police officers get in relation to these weapons. If they think there’s no risk, they will use them more liberally.”

A Ventura police spokesman said that Taser and Nova training manuals given to the Ventura Police Department contain no warning about the weapons’ use on heart patients or on anyone else. The only admonition is not to apply them to the face, head or genitals, Lt. Michael Tracy said.

Department policy allows officers to use the weapons to control people who pose a threat to officers or to the public, Tracy said. They also can be used to force people to comply with officers’ instructions, such as in the Johnson case, he said.

But warnings may not have made a difference for Johnson anyway, since Tracy said officers were not aware that he had a heart problem, despite his presence in a ward occupied mostly by cardiac patients.

The Taser--a flashlight-size device that shoots darts and trailing electrical wires up to 14 feet or can shock with two long antenna pressed to the skin--is used by Ventura police about once a month, Tracy estimated. The same is true of the smaller Nova weapon, whose two tiny exposed points are applied to the skin, he said.

None of the other law enforcement agencies in Ventura County use the Taser, though Oxnard and Port Hueneme have supplied Nova guns to their police. A spokesman for the Taser’s manufacturer said 267 police agencies nationwide use the weapon. Nova Technologies Inc. of Austin, Tex., supplies about 450 police departments in this country and 800 worldwide, spokesmen said.

The Nova can also be purchased for less than $100 over the counter at gun shops. A number of other stun guns similar to the Nova are also available to the public. But the Taser, which costs about $300, is sold only to police.

Taser and Nova weapons have similar power and circuitry, and the manufacturers of both weapons are licensed by inventor Jack Cover, whose patented technology they use, Cover said. The weapons, he said, produce about three watts of power, enough to light a Christmas tree bulb.

It was Cover, manufacturer of the Taser for more than a decade, whose summary of the weapon was submitted to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1975. Cover stated in that report that years of studies and tests had shown that the Taser “is non-lethal . . . to normally healthy people.”

“However, it must be emphasized that neither this feature nor the noninjury or no-harmful-after-effect aspect can ever be guaranteed,” Cover wrote. “There is no weapon, technique or procedure for subduing, constraining or dispersing that does not involve some risk of injury to healthy persons or of death, especially if the individual has a heart ailment.”

Based partly on this analysis by Cover, the product safety commission’s deputy medical director, Dr. Leo T. Duffy, declared the Taser non-lethal when “used as directed on the average, healthy adult.” He described the gun as a “dangerous weapon,” but said it had only a fraction of the power necessary to shock the heart into losing its rhythm and causing death.

“This safety margin would be diminished in a person who has existing cardiovascular disease,” Duffy noted. And it would be decreased even more, he said, if the Taser were applied to a person for a prolonged period. Children and the elderly, along with heart patients, would be especially susceptible to the adverse effects of the Taser, Duffy said.

Cover, in an interview last week, said his summary of his product’s potential negative effects “were wise words.” He said, however, that he was very cautious in his analysis for legal reasons and that he still believes that electrical shocks from a Taser present no more threat to cardiac patients than the shock they would get if someone said “boo” to them.

He said he emphasized the weapon’s safety, even with heart patients, while training officers at the Los Angeles Police Department, which in 1981 became the first major police agency in the country to use of the weapon.

The current primary distributor of the Taser, Adamson Uniform and Equipment of Costa Mesa, has been similarly aggressive in stressing the safety of the stun gun.

The second page of a promotional packet Adamson has sent to potential customers says the weapon is “medically safe, even for individuals with heart disease or those using pacemakers.” The 15th page of the same packet includes a summary of Duffy’s findings for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which incorporates Cover’s warning about special risks to heart patients.

Adamson, which has sold about 90% of the 1,000 Tasers built since 1987 by the current manufacturer, EID Laboratory of Temple City, has trained representatives of numerous law enforcement agencies that have purchased the weapon, said Jim Fraser, the distributor’s general manager.

Adamson’s 37-page training manual makes no mention of cardiac patients. It states that there is no evidence of “adverse physiological or neurological effects stemming purely from the electric current charge of a Taser. . . “ Spokesmen for the manufacturers of the Taser and the Nova weapons said in interviews that no deaths or serious injuries have been caused by their weapons, and that they are safe for police officers to use on anyone.

In situations where coroners have found that the Taser has caused or contributed to death, the medical examiners have not had the technical expertise required to make an accurate analysis, said James McNulty, president and owner of EID Laboratory.

Those who have died after being shocked with Tasers “have overexerted themselves battling with police or have taken enough PCP to cause them to die,” McNulty said.

The drugs and exertion are “a thousand times more likely” to have caused the deaths than the Taser, he said. He cited university studies that have found that the small amount of electricity produced by stun guns has little effect on the heart, even when directly applied to it.

McNulty also said that Tasers manufactured by his firm are slightly less powerful than their predecessors, and that none has been used in a fatal incident.

County medical examiners in Los Angeles have concluded that two men died in 1985 and 1986 either as a direct result of being shot with Taser darts, or in part because of them. A coroner in San Jose also found last summer that a 37-year-old jail inmate with a mild heart problem died when his heart failed because of Taser shocks he received during a struggle with officers.

In addition, use of Nova stun guns has been declared a contributing factor in the deaths of two people, including a Port Hueneme man who died of heart failure while intoxicated with cocaine in 1987.

Seventeen people in Los Angeles County have died since 1983 after being shocked with Tasers, according to the coroner’s office, including the two cases in which the weapons at least contributed to death.

Cornelius Garland Smith, who was shot twice with Taser darts in 1985, is one of 10 people who died in instances where Los Angeles Police Department officers used the weapon during the 1980s, according to Cmdr. William Booth.

Smith, 35, was shocked after officers found him writhing and screaming on the ground in South-Central Los Angeles. He died from a combination of the Taser, PCP and a congenital heart problem for which he was taking medicine, the coroner found.

Tasers were the cause of the death of Anthony M. Williams III, a 35-year-old Upland man, who died after being subdued by Pomona police in May, 1986, the coroner reported. The cause of death was reported as heart failure “due to multiple Taser use.” Williams was also under the influence of cocaine, the coroner reported.

“Because the individual developed cardiac arrest immediately following shooting with the electrode rifle, and in the absence of other significant injuries . . . , it is assumed that death was caused” by the Taser, a deputy coroner found. At least one other Los Angeles County death has involved the Taser and a victim with a heart problem. The coroner ruled that Raul Guevara Jr., 30, of San Fernando died in January, 1984, of a heart problem aggravated by the effort Guevara exerted during a struggle with a jailer.

In response, Taser and Nova spokesmen cite studies that they say show their weapons cannot cause a death.

They cited the studies of Dr. Theodore Bernstein, whom the product safety commission selected to analyze the Taser in 1975. He found in a 1985 study that the heart rhythm of healthy volunteers who were shocked with the Nova stun gun did not change significantly.

Also in 1985, Dr. Robert A. Stratbucker of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, concluded that the Nova weapon, when used on animals, had no effect on heart rhythm or pumping and only a mild effect on blood pressure, even when it was applied directly to the heart. When Stratbucker simulated heart disease in animals, the shocks caused no irregularities.

In the first large-scale medical review of the effects of the Taser on crime suspects, doctors at Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center in Los Angeles found that during 1980-85, all but three of the 218 people treated there after Taser shocks survived.

Doctors reported that those three had high drug or alcohol levels that alone could have caused their deaths. By comparison, 11 of 22 people shot by police over a two-year period died, the doctors noted.

Dr. Eric Koscove, an emergency physician at L.A. County-USC Medical Center, who has written extensively on the Taser, said that it may be impossible to say for sure that the weapon is safe for use on heart patients because tests on people with such problems probably never will be conducted.

“I think generally speaking, the Taser is a relatively safe weapon for what it’s supposed to do,” Koscove said. “As a physician, I would prefer they use the Taser than just beat people down with the baton or choke them down. If my brother or sister were involved, I’d rather see them Tasered. We see a lot more deaths from chokeholds and batons than from the Taser.”

Even critics who cite cases where police officers have tortured crime suspects with stun guns--including one settled for more than $300,000 by the city of Huntington Park in 1988--say the weapons should be used more frequently instead of lethal weapons such as firearms.

Ventura County Coroner Lovell said he supports the cautious use of stun guns. The problem is not the weapon, he said. “The problem is that police really believe these things are completely safe.”