Two former Georgia police officers have been indicted for the murder of 24-year-old Gregory Towns after the officers used their tasers as cattle prods on the handcuffed and complying man.
Towns, the father of a 7-month-old baby at the time, was tased 13 times in 29 minutes following a brief foot chase with East Point Sergeant Marcus Eberhart and Officer Howard Weems.
At the conclusion of the chase, the police had found Towns sitting down in the woods and out of breath. While he was complying, he also asked officers at least ten times to be allowed to rest before going with them.
This is when the cops decided to use their weapons as a cattle prod to force the weak man to walk, instead of letting him catch his breath. The subsequent autopsy showed that he suffered from heart disease.
In total, Towns was shocked for 47 seconds while handcuffed and unarmed.
Lawyers for the family had previously asserted that the police were trying to cover up how many times they used their tasers- as only six taser shocks were logged on their police reports despite logs from one of the tasers indicating that Sgt. Marcus Eberhart fired his Taser 10 times, and officer Howard Weems fired three times.
The indictment, filed Monday, stated that the former officers are each facing seven charges, which include manslaughter and murder.
According to Amnesty International, between 2001 and 2008, 351 people in the United States died from being shocked by police tasers. Electronic Village has documented another 212 taser-related deaths in the United States from 2009-2014.
A project from the Guardian called The Counted which is logging 2015 deaths at the hands of Law Enforcement has attributed 38 deaths this year to tasers.
That means there have been at least 601 documented taser-related deaths in America since 2001.
