CINCINNATI, Ohio – Officer Richard Haas says he never meant for Everette Howard to die. He just wanted to stop him.

A top high-school grad staying on the University of Cincinnati campus for a college prep program, Howard, 18, had broken no laws that hot August night in 2011. It was about 3 a.m., and he was agitated after a run-in with neighborhood kids who’d tried to rob his friends.

Blocks away, university police officer Haas’s radio crackled with reports of an assault. Nearing the scene, he intercepted several people running away and ordered them to the ground. He unholstered his Taser and panned its red sighting beam over them “to get their attention.”

Howard, shirtless, approached from behind with his dorm adviser, Ricky Pleasant, who’d placed the 911 call. Get down, Haas said. “We’re not the ones you’re looking for,” Pleasant replied.

Howard stepped forward. Pleasant thought the teen intended to kneel; Haas thought he intended to fight.

Haas fired his stun gun. One electrified dart hit below Howard’s lower left chest, the other near his waist. The 18-year-old collapsed, unconscious, and was pronounced dead at the hospital; the coroner ruled the cause “unknown.”

“I did not in my wildest dreams expect this kid to die,” Haas, a certified Taser instructor, told Reuters.

Howard’s family sued Haas in his official capacity as a member of the university’s police force, contending he did not heed warnings from the weapon’s manufacturer, Taser International Inc, to avoid chest shots because they can pose cardiac risks. The university settled for $2 million; Taser faced no litigation.

As Tasers have become a common weapon in U.S. policing, so too have legal cases like Everette Howard’s. And as the human toll mounts, the litigation toll is increasingly borne by the public.

At least 442 wrongful death suits have been filed over fatalities that followed the use of a Taser, almost all since the stun guns began gaining widespread popularity with police in the early 2000s, Reuters found in a nationwide review of legal filings. Police departments and the municipalities they represent have faced 435 of these suits. The manufacturer was a defendant in 128 of them.

In all, wrongful death lawsuits were filed in at least 44 percent of the 1,000-plus incidents Reuters identified in which someone died after being stunned with a Taser by police. In nearly 75 percent of the suits, the Taser was one factor alleged in a broader array of force applied, such as punches, baton strikes and pepper spray.

In more than 60 percent of the resolved cases against municipalities, government defendants paid settlements or judgments. While many settlement amounts are unavailable or remain secret under confidentiality agreements, Reuters documented at least $172 million in publicly funded payouts to resolve the litigation.

The claims illustrate the risks and confusion surrounding a weapon embraced by about 90 percent of America’s 18,000 police forces as an alternative to firearms.

Yet one party is increasingly absent from the courtroom: Taser International.

From 2004 through 2009, the company was named as a defendant in more than 40 percent of the wrongful death suits filed against local governments, Reuters found. Typically, those suits alleged the company failed to warn adequately of the risks posed by its weapons.

Late in 2009, as evidence of cardiac risks mounted, Taser made a crucial change: It warned police to avoid firing its stun gun’s electrified darts at a person’s chest. Since then, Taser has been a party to just one in five cases filed, and lawyers who frequently handle Taser-related litigation say the manufacturer’s warnings have made it far more difficult to successfully sue the company. So now, in nearly every case, plaintiffs are suing governments, not the manufacturer.

Wrongful death lawsuits filed against Taser have slowed to a trickle: four in 2014, six in 2015, two in 2016 and, according to the company’s latest corporate filings, none so far in 2017.









Suits against municipalities also have declined, Reuters found, from a peak of at least 44 in 2009 to at least 31 in 2016. Taser says the Reuters figures show the company’s warnings have reduced liability for police. But the municipalities defending those cases are finding themselves alone in court more often.

Behind these legal battles is a troubling truth: Many officers aren’t aware Tasers have the potential to kill.

Some police struggle with what they see as contradictory messages from the company, Reuters found in an examination of thousands of pages of sworn testimony and dozens of interviews: The weapons carry myriad risks, but remain fundamentally safe.

One consequence of that confusion: Some officers still fire their Tasers at the chest. Since the 2009 warning, 44 of the 199 wrongful death lawsuits filed against police, or more than 20 percent, have included allegations that an officer's Taser shot hit that part of the body, Reuters found.

After Everette Howard’s death, Officer Haas, who was cleared of any wrongdoing, expressed disbelief that the teen died following the Taser shot. He says he aimed at Howard’s belt line, not the chest. The Taser “is classified as a ‘non-lethal’ weapon,” Haas said. He was using a term the company employed to describe its signature product until the mid-2000s, when it transitioned to “less-lethal.”

Many more changes followed. In addition to cautioning police about chest shots and cardiac dangers, the company began warning of the risks of using its weapons on people who are old, young, frail, agitated, exhausted or suffering from an array of health conditions. Some officers and police lawyers say the warnings, now totaling some 4,500 words, have become so broad it’s daunting to follow all the do’s and don’ts.

Ed Davis, Boston police chief from 2006 to 2013, said the litany of restrictions helped drive his decision not to issue Tasers. The warnings “made the weapon impractical to use, and it gave a lot of us the impression that we weren’t getting the full story,” he said. “I didn’t want to take the risk. The potential litigation costs absolutely were a factor.”

To safeguard itself, product liability specialists say, a manufacturer must warn customers of foreseeable risks, build a defect-free product and make no misrepresentations about its goods. If Taser meets those standards, it can fight a wrongful death suit by arguing a fatality was due not to its stun gun, but to police failing to use the device properly.

The regulatory climate is favorable. The Tasers police buy are not considered consumer or workplace products, so the company’s safety declarations and warnings are not regulated by agencies such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“There are not a lot of products that escape all safety agency regulation – it really is unusual,” said David Owen, a law professor specializing in product liability at the University of South Carolina School of Law.

Taser, which changed its name to Axon Enterprise Inc this year, says its warnings are designed to protect both the company and its police clients from liability.

“Taser training and product safety warnings are strong and unambiguous,” said Steve Tuttle, the company’s vice president for communications. No officer certified to carry a Taser “can legitimately claim a lack of awareness or knowledge of risks,” he said.

“We do everything we can to ensure that our customers know how to safely operate our products,” Tuttle said. “One purpose of our training and our warnings is to provide agencies with information and smart use guidelines to help them avoid excessive-use-of-force claims.”

Taser’s increasingly restrictive warnings were part of “new risk management strategies” it launched in 2009 “to better protect both the company and its customers from litigation,” the manufacturer said in a 2015 filing to U.S. financial regulators. Those changes, it said, were “highly effective.”

Many lawyers who handle wrongful death cases involving stun-gun incidents don’t go after the manufacturer. “I have had five Taser-associated cases. I have never sued Taser,” said Al Gerhardstein, the attorney for Everette Howard’s family.

Courts have held that police departments, not Taser, are responsible for deciding how and when Tasers are used in the field. But department policies vary widely, Reuters found in a review of the 26 largest departments using stun guns. The differences range from how many times a person can be stunned to which people shouldn’t be targeted at all, such as the pregnant, the elderly and the infirm.

When Tasers are handled properly, deaths are rare. Studies have found the weapons can reduce injuries to suspects and officers alike by giving police a way to control violent suspects without physical confrontations.

The Taser “has a margin of safety as great as or greater than most alternatives” when used appropriately, a 2011 National Institute of Justice report found.

Across the United States, police forces turn to the stun guns as a vital tool in daily policing. Many police chiefs say Tasers’ benefits outweigh their risks.

“Anything that we do that reduces the chance of us having to go to lethal force is useful to us,” said Michael Goldsmith, police chief of Norfolk, Virginia. “It’s just a matter of finding the appropriate place for it.”

THE FINE PRINT

When a Taser-related suit is filed, scrutiny typically falls on police officers like Haas, whose use of the Taser in Everette Howard’s death was deemed justified by the county prosecutor. Now retired, Haas struggles to grasp what went wrong.

“I did everything that was supposed to be done,” he said, in his first interview on the case. “It was a tragedy. He had his life in front of him.”

Haas said he closely studied Taser’s safety warnings, even as they grew increasingly complex. His role as a police instructor required not only that he teach fellow officers how to use the weapon, but that he alert them each time Taser’s warnings evolved, in some cases multiple times a year.

In his 10 years on the University of Cincinnati police force before Howard’s death, those warnings swelled from a handful of paragraphs tucked into Taser’s instructional materials to a stand-alone, eight-page document.

“Each year, there would be another change,” and the warnings “would become more stringent,” said Haas, who had never fired the stun gun in the field before that night. “It seemed like it was getting harder and harder to use the Taser.”

The difficulty of tracking Taser’s messages surfaced in a federal lawsuit settled in December.