Niagara Falls police use Taser to obtain DNA

June 5, 10:58 AMLibertarian ExaminerTrevor Bothwell

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Libertarian Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Ryan S. Smith, a shooting and robbery suspect from upstate New York, told Niagara Falls police he'd rather sit in jail instead of consenting to an order to submit a DNA sample.

A police officer said that when Smith was ordered by officers to give his DNA, he adamantly refused.

“I ain’t giving up my DNA again. I already gave it up once. I’ll sit in jail. I ain’t giving it up. You’re going to have to Tase me,” the officer’s report stated.

So tase him they did. And as is usually the case when the state determines the merits of its own behavior, a Niagara County judge has ruled that the electrocution was legally permissible.

Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza decided that the DNA sample obtained Sept. 29 from Ryan S. Smith of Niagara Falls — which ties him to a shooting and a gas station robbery— is legally valid and can be used at his trial.

Smith was handcuffed and sitting on the floor of Niagara Falls Police Headquarters when he was zapped with the 50,000- volt electronic stun gun after he insisted he would not give a DNA sample.

Smith had already given a DNA sample without protest a month earlier. So why did police feel the need to obtain it on a second occasion, you ask? Well, they sent the first sample to the wrong lab, "where it was opened and spoiled." Apparently torture is a reasonable remedy for incompetence.

Smith may very well be guilty of the crimes with which he's been charged, but even the most unsavory of characters are entitled to due process.

Sperrazza even admitted that police should have arrested the disobedient Smith -- you know, in accordance with the law -- and brought him to court where he would have been warned about the penalties for noncompliance with a court order. But instead of adhering to established precedent herself, the judge ruled that it's legally permissible to use a Taser to obtain DNA as long as it's not done "maliciously, or to an excessive extent, or with resulting injury."

Ah, well as long as it's not done "maliciously" or "excessively!" No doubt such ambiguity is comforting to anyone who understands the all-too-lethal nature of the "non-lethal" Taser.

All laws are ambiguous when the state is allowed to interpret them to its liking; that's one of the primary reasons I hate the state. However, for all the abuses such abstract terminology will henceforth legitimize in a legal sense, that's not even the biggest problem with this ruling.

Sperrazza's decision that use of a Taser is legally permissible in order to enforce compliance with a court order is severely misleading and unlawful per se -- she ruled on the means through which state officials are allowed to collect DNA evidence when she should have ruled specifically on the legal propriety of compelling it in the first place.

In other words, even if electrocution were a perfectly acceptable method of coercing the nonviolent -- it's not -- the officer(s) who tased Smith broke the law by collecting the DNA sample prior to allowing the suspect to appear before a judge to be informed of the consequences of failing to comply with a court order.

If one is pulled over and suspected of drunk-driving but refuses a breathalyzer test, standard protocol for an officer is to issue an arrest and haul the suspect to jail, not to administer 50,000 volts of electricity to someone who merely refuses an order. Yet, anyway.

However, with rulings like the one issued by Sperrazza, who herself contorted the laws so she could absolve fellow tax-feeders of their due process violations, our devolution into a full-fledged police state continues apace.