By Hiram Lee

25 July 2008

A Louisiana coroner has ruled the January 2008 death of 21-year-old
Baron Pikes at the hands of police was a homicide. Pikes, a sawmill
worker from Winnfield, Louisiana, was killed while in police custody
on January 17 after being shot nine times with a Taser gun.

Wanted on charges of drug possession, Pikes was approached
by police, including Officer Scott Nugent, near a Winnfield grocery
store on January 17. Police claim Pikes did not stop for them
and a brief chase on foot ensued. Phillip Terry, an attorney representing
Officer Nugent, has said his client caught up with Pikes and fought
with him on the ground without help from his partner who “had
just come back to the police department from triple bypass surgery
and could not assist Officer Nugent.” Terrell says Nugent
only resorted to firing his Taser when he had already exhausted
“every means possible” to take Pikes into custody.

Dr. Randolph Williams, coroner for Winn Parish, has challenged
the official story saying Pikes was already handcuffed when Nugent
fired the first shot with his Taser. Additionally, Williams’s
findings reveal that Pikes was struck with six 50,000-volt shocks
at the arrest site within a period of three minutes. Following
this rapid succession of electroshocks, Pikes was placed in a
patrol car and driven to the police station. Once there, Pikes
was tased again while seated in the back of the patrol car, taking
the seventh shot directly to his chest.

Dr. Williams told CNN in a recent interview that following
the seventh shock, “[Pikes] was pulled out of the car onto
the concrete. He was electroshocked two more times, which two
officers noted that he had no neuromuscular response to those
last two 50,000-volt electroshocks.” Williams says Pikes
may already have been dead when the last two shots were fired.
Police carried Pikes’ body into the station before calling
an ambulance.

Dr. Williams, who has been extremely vocal in his criticism
of the police, found that the use of Tasers in the incident that
led to Pikes’ death “violated every aspect—every
single aspect—of the department’s policy about its use.”

While no decision has yet been made as to whether Officer Nugent
will face criminal charges for his actions, the officer has been
fired by the City Council since the January incident. While Nugent
apparently had a clean record, it has been revealed that of the
14 times Tasers have been used by Winnfield police since officers
received them last year, 10 involved Nugent. A testament to racial
tensions in the small town, no less than 12 of those 14 incidents
involved black suspects.

The death of Baron Pikes, who was black, at the hands of Officer
Nugent, who is white, has ignited the already tense racial situation
in Winnfield, leading to angry protests. In a strange and tragic
coincidence, Baron Pikes was the first cousin of Mychal Bell,
one of the defendants in the infamous “Jena Six” case,
which saw six black high school students from Jena, Louisiana
fall victim to a racist prosecution for the schoolyard confrontation
with a white classmate. Winnfield is just 40 miles northwest of
Jena.

An earlier victim of Nugent’s tasing was a black teenager
who had snuck out of his house to meet a girl. “I asked the
police to bring him home,” the boy’s father is quoted
as saying in the Chicago Tribune, “and they did, but
in pieces—he was all scraped up and bruised. They told me
the next time he runs, ‘You know we’re going to shoot
him.’”

The immediate context in which Nugent was allowed to work and
ultimately to kill Baron Pikes is one of severe corruption. Officer
Nugent’s own father was Gleason Nugent, the former chief
of police in Winnfield who killed himself in 2005 after charges
of voter fraud were made in connection with his run for election
to that office. Officer Nugent has also been described as a protégé
of the current chief of police, Johnny Ray Carpenter, who was
a convicted drug offender who had the privilege of being pardoned
by former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. Edwards is currently
serving a 10-year prison sentence for racketeering.

A picture emerges of a town with a small, criminal elite resorting
to brutal violence to intimidate an increasingly resentful and
resistant population. It is a sharp expression of broader tensions
throughout the country.

The use of tasers, in particular, has begun to play an important
role in police intimidation. Incidents similar to those that have
taken place in Winnfield, Louisiana have become all too common.
Perhaps gaining the most attention was the September 2007 tasing
of Andrew Meyer, a journalism student at the University of Florida
who was tased after he attempted to ask questions critical of
Democratic Senator John Kerry during a public forum. Senator Kerry
did nothing to stop the assault on the student.

While that incident did not lead to the death of the tasing
victim, there are more than enough examples of the deadliness
of this supposedly non-lethal device. In March 2008, Walter E.
Haake Jr., a 59-year-old worker at a Topeka, Kansas Goodyear plant,
died after being tased by police in the plant’s parking lot
when he refused to leave his car. The police had been called when
fellow Goodyear workers became concerned over Haake’s welfare
due to a fall which may have left him with a head injury causing
him to become disoriented.

Forty-seven-year-old Russell Walker died after being tased
by police in Las Vegas. Arrested for creating a disturbance at
a hotel, Walker was tased first when he struggled with officers
and again after being handcuffed. Placed on a gurney, Walker was
tased a third time, after which he stopped breathing. A grand
jury found the actions of police officers in this case justified.

Patrick Lee of Nashville, Tennessee, under the influence of
marijuana and LSD, was tased 19 times by police after he was thrown
out of a local nightclub. He died two days later. Ronald Hasse,
54, of Chicago, was fighting with police when he was tased two
times. One of the electric shocks is reported to have lasted 57
seconds. He died as a result of the electrocution, according to
medical examiner reports.

The list of taser-related deaths is a long one, containing
more than its share of brutal detail. A 2006 report by Amnesty
International found 152 deaths in all since 2001 involving the
use of tasers. The United Nations has also condemned the use of
tasers, classifying them as “a form of torture that can kill.”
They are used in roughly 7,000 police departments in the United
States.