An officer fired a stun gun at Kevin Piskura. He died after going into cardiac arrest. A consultant wrote.
The case was settled out of court.
The officers in Phoenix held him. A doctor testifying as an expert witness for the city was asked about the dangers of this type of restraint.
The jury found in favor of the officers.
Kevin Niedzialek was shocked with a stun gun and pushed into the ground. The doctor was hired by the county.
The case is still going on.
When lawyers were about to defend against a lawsuit over a death in police custody, they knew who to call.
Over the past two decades, Dr. Gary Vilke has become a leading expert witness by asserting that police techniques such as facedown restraints, stun gun shocks and some neck holds did not kill people.
When Joseph Perez was taken into custody by officers in Fresno, he was handcuffed and put on the ground, with an ambulance on his back, as he begged for help. The officer was strapped to the board. His death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner.
Dr. Vilke was hired by the ambulance provider to provide a different determination and he charged $500 an hour. He wrote in a report that Mr. Perez died from methamphetamine use, heart disease and the exertion of his struggle against the restrain.
A review of hundreds of research papers shows that Dr. Vilke is part of a small but influential group of scientists, lawyers, physicians and other police experts who use their research and testimony to exonerate officers of blame for deaths.
They are accused of slanting science, ignoring inconvenient facts, and emboldening police officers to act aggressively, by many prosecutors, lawyers, medical experts, and relatives of the dead. One of the researchers thinks police officers are unfairly blamed for the deaths of babies who die of sudden infant death syndrome.
The experts intersect with companies that train police officers, write police policies, and lend authority to studies refuting concerns about police use of force.
They form a cottage industry of exoneration. The dozen or so individuals and companies have collected millions of dollars over the past decade, most of it in fees that are largely funded by taxpayers, who cover the costs of police training and policies and the legal bills of accused officers.
The Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a commercial undertaking that is among the police-friendly entities, has ties to the company that makes the stun gun, and many of the experts have ties to it.
Over the past 15 years, experts in the network have been hired to defend the police in more than 100 instances of in-custody deaths or life threatening injuries. The cases were mostly civil, as the officers were rarely charged with crimes. Of the 28 cases decided by judges or juries, 16 had outcomes that favored the police. There are a few pending cases.
Thousands of police officers and medical examiners have received instruction from individuals and businesses, whose cause-of-death rulings can help determine legal culpability. Lexipol, a Texas-based business that has included experts from the network in its publications, claims to have helped write policy manuals for 6,300 police departments, sometimes suggesting standards for officers' conduct that reduce legal liability. A company spokeswoman said it did not rely on the researchers to make policies.
Research and testimony have been used to defend.
buys training, policy and equipment.
Companies.
They are organizations.
That often pays.
Or promote something.
Research and testimony have been used to defend.
buys training, policy and equipment.
Companies.
They are organizations.
That pays, funds or promotes.
It is difficult to get an impartial accounting of deaths in police custody, particularly in cases involving a struggle, where the cause of death is not immediately clear. The Times reported earlier this year that medical examiners sometimes tie deaths to a biological trait that would not have been fatal in other circumstances, and that outside criminal investigations of such cases can be plagued with biases that favor the police.
Some researchers and doctors in this environment who responded to questions from The Times said they did not assist law enforcement but provided unbiased results of scientific research and opinions based on the facts of each case. Police struggles have an exceedingly low risk of death according to research. Drug use, Obesity, psychological disturbances, and genetic defects are all health issues that could cause deaths in such circumstances.
Some criticized the research and medical opinions that found that police techniques might cause or contribute to deaths. Other academic papers have been written by people who testify against law enforcement.
Mark Kroll, a biomedical engineer who has backed the idea of an arrest related death syndrome as an explanation of the problem, said that sensationalism adds no benefit, and merely increases the tensions between law enforcement and the society at large.
The network, including Dr. Vilke, said it was wrong to describe their work as favoring the police. When The Times shared its findings with him, Dr. Vilke disagreed. Black males and people who exert themselves are more likely to have sudden cardiac death according to Dr. Steven Karch.
Lawyers for Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted in the murder of George Floyd, drew upon the same network of researchers and experts. They turned to the defense of prone restraint, a technique in which officers subdue subjects facedown, as happened to Mr. Floyd. The Chauvin defense cited the work of Dr. Kroll, who has no medical degree, as proof that putting body weight on someone facedown does not cause asphyxia.
The experts have been called on to defend a wide range of police techniques. Medical examiners and investigators rely on the research.
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Omaha officers used a stun gun on a dozen people. The stun gun could not have contributed to the man's death.
Omaha police officers used a stun gun on a man 12 times when they arrested him. The criminal trial of Mr. Bear Heels, a 28-year-old with mental illness, heard that the stun gun could not have contributed to his death. He wrote a report in the civil case.
The officers in Phoenix used a stun gun and held him in a neck hold. In a civil case, Dr. Vilke mentioned the safety of neck holds that cut off blood flow to the head, and another researcher mentioned excited delirium, a condition that some doctors say can suddenly kill drug users or the mentally ill.
David Silva was handcuffed in Kern County, Calif., and put into the ground after being bloodied with batons and tied up behind his back. Dr. Karch and Dr. Chan both agreed with the coroner's finding.
Dr. Chan is an expert witness in the lawsuit over the death of Mr. Perez. He stated that there was no evidence that the weight on a person's back could cause them to die.
According to court documents, Mr. Perez had recently taken methamphetamines. At one point they put a towel under him to keep him from hurting his face, as they tried to calm him.
The officers of the fresno police department put a spine board on Joseph Perez as he cried out.
An officer sat on a backboard after an ambulance arrived. The officer said in a deposition that he had been trained to not do it. A captain from the department said that the training was based on an article.
The lawyer for the family of Mr. Perez said that when officers are sued in these cases, they start to believe that no one can die this way.
The video of Mr. Perez's death was frightening and she didn't understand why officers would push him facedown and sit on him.
She said she kept thinking, "Get off of him!" There could have been a different tactic.
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Gary Vilke testified in the case. Taylor and Ring.
Experiments conducted on volunteers are often cited by physicians, scientists and researchers as proof that law enforcement officers are doing their job. They can shock them with tasers, use pepper spray or restrain them.
Their published findings are usually the same, that there is no evidence that the actions cause death.
An analysis of more than 230 scientific papers in the National Library of Medicine database shows that the conclusions of some studies are different from those of others.
The majority of the studies that included at least one author in the network supported the idea that restraint techniques were safe and that the deaths of people who had been restrained were caused by health problems. Only about a quarter of the studies did not involve anyone from the network. Some studies said that some restraint techniques increased the risk of death.
There were few studies that looked at deaths in which tasers caused people to fall and hit their heads.
The first report on police restraint was funded by a grant from San Diego County during a lawsuit over the death of Daniel Price. A woman reported seeing strange behavior from Mr. Price, who had taken methamphetamines and was restrained by officers.
They hogtied healthy volunteers as part of their research. They found that the measurement of their lung functions decreased by up to 23 percent, which they concluded was not clinically significant because similar levels of diminished lung capacity could still be considered normal. The judge in the Price case cited research when dismissing the lawsuit.
The study and others have been challenged by some scholars and physicians because they are based on controlled conditions that are unlike real life, according to a social epidemiologist at Harvard University.
He said there was a fundamental problem with study design. People with more severe mental and physical disabilities are not being used. They are not doing it with people who have taken drugs. They aren't using tasers as often when they're testing them.
The network of experts acknowledged that their work had limitations when it appeared in peer-reviewed publications. Some of them used more expansive language, did not mention conflicting work, or said they had fully refuted scholars who disagreed when discussing the research in court.
In the lawsuit, Dr. Chan wrote that a former medical examiner in King County,Wash., had concluded that hogtying did not produce any serious or life-threatening respiratory effects. Other physicians in the network left off the phrase when they said it, but Dr. Reay maintained that it could be fatal in some instances.
Dr. Chan didn't reply to the question.
Some restraint positions are generally safe while others can cause significant changes in breathing, according to papers by researchers outside the network. A recent paper used new technology to measure lung function and found that it was affected during restraint.
Some scientists in the network dismissed the papers when they were asked about them. They said papers that found statistically significant effects were not adequate because the changes were not clinically significant enough to be considered health problems in the participants. Some scientists said that choosing test subjects who would be more likely to face distress would not be ethical. Some experiments with tasers on animals could not be used to make conclusions about humans. Some people suggested that some of the papers should be scrutinized because they were written by doctors who testified against the police.
The science has completely discredited the claim that pushing someone facedown could contribute to asphyxiation. He suggested in the session that the deaths were outside of the control of the officers.
At one point in the training session, he said that he hoped to have something like sudden infant death syndrome in the future.
A spokeswoman for Lexipol said that an upcoming webinars would discuss recent court rulings that found extended prone restraint to be excessive force in some circumstances.
Shannon Pieper said in an email that they are not in the business of determining whether prone restraint is dangerous.
The scientists are fierce defenders of their approach and challenge anyone who suggests an alternative finding. They submit letters to the editors of medical journals that publish the opposing research, and they dismiss it as junk science in public forums.
In an interview, Dr. Peyman Azadani said that he was intimidated by the pushback. In a paper he wrote in 2011, he found that the authors who wrote about the device were more likely to conclude that it was safe than other authors.
Two people who identified themselves as affiliated with the company approached the doctor about the research.
He said that they told him he was destroying his future.
He said that he removed his name from papers and changed research subjects because he was concerned about making waves.
In a statement, the company said it had no information about the incident. The company said it promoted research into its devices out of a concern for safety, and Dr. Kroll, who makes more than $300,000 a year as a member of the corporate board, pointed to a more recent study that found no correlation between the two.
Dr. Wetli, a former medical examiner who died last year, was one of the first to publish research that launched what has become an industry of defending police officers. He wrote about men who died after taking cocaine and being subdued by the police. He said the deaths were caused by excited delirium, when someone becomes aggressive from a mental illness or drugs.
In 1994, two former law enforcement officers wrote about custody death syndrome. They wrote that the condition had no obvious cause but could be associated with excited delirium or other vague diagnoses.
They focused on potential liability in describing the death of a hypothetical suspect, and they wrote that they immediately cringed at the thought of critical scrutiny.
The Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths and Americans for Effective Law Enforcement are two groups that provide legal resources for officers. Mr. Brave became a lawyer for the company.
As tasers became more widely used, studies about them became more common. The work was pioneered by a group of researchers. They shocked volunteers for five seconds and found that the heart health measurements did not change.
Dr. Ho has worked in emergency medicine, as a sheriff's deputy and as the medical director for Axon.
The Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths was founded in 2005 by Mr. Peters, and was founded by the company that makes stun guns.
Mr. Peters said that he started the business because of the number of deaths that were blamed on the use of stun guns. The institute conducts research and training that often rebuts the criticism and is one of several commercial forums that draw like-minded researchers about law enforcement behavior.
He said that when they first started teaching it, it was all pepper spray deaths. The science showed that only two people may have been associated with pepper spray. The issue went away. Then there was a rise in the level of positional asphyxia. We did some work in that area and it quieted down.
Mr. Brave joined the legal department at the same time as Mr. Peters, who was one of the initial funders of the institute.
He was put on the board the first year so that he would have a connection to information at the company.
The institute worked with Deborah C. Mash, a neuroscientist who has written about excited delirium. Mr. Peters and the representatives of the stun guns company recommended that medical examiners send brain tissue samples from people who had died in police custody to her lab for testing. The Times found a number of instances in which medical examiners used the test results to rule out excited delirium in one case and in a number of other instances, they relied on the test results to determine if someone had died of excited delirium.
Dr. Mash left the university. In an email to The Times, she said that she tells officers that excited delirium is a medical emergency and that the proper response is to immediately request emergency medical help.
The Force Science Institute, a private company that supports the police, has promoted research and commentary by Dr. Kroll, including a paper he wrote with Mr. Brave and Dr. Karch. The results did not support the theory that this could cause asphyxia.
The business of supporting law enforcement can make a lot of money. Experts associated with the network typically make between $500 and $1,000 an hour for testimony and depositions when they testify in court. Lexipol charges thousands of dollars to review and write policies for police departments. The Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths charges for its training programs and promotes its business partners.
The Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths held a conference in Las Vegas last month where experts from the network presented.
Law enforcement officers, lawyers and physicians attended presentations at the institute's annual conference in Las Vegas on topics such as ways to subdue or restrain a suspect, and how to manage publicity when someone is injured or dies in custody. The price of admission is $775.
The network members side with the police when they weigh in on a case in court.
Some of them have acknowledged their one-sided track record.
Tom Neuman, a retired emergency medicine physician in San Diego, was asked if relatives of people who had died in police custody would ever hire him as an expert.
It had been 20 years since Dr. Vilke testified that an officer was likely to have contributed to a death. He said in an email to The Times that he would disagree with his work over the past 20 years that law enforcement was not to blame.
The training institute was founded by Mr. Peters. He has testified on behalf of people harmed in police encounters, but his testimony has been limited to whether police procedures were followed. Mr. Peters said that putting a knee on someone's neck should not be allowed under any use-of-force policy.
It is a complex and inexact process to make determinations on death-in-custody cases. The people being held in the instances reviewed by The Times were often on drugs or in psychological distress, and some had severe medical conditions.
The actions of law enforcement officers fell well outside the controlled conditions of the research the experts cited to exonerate them. In some cases, the experts used the same language to argue against the allegations. Common ailments like heart disease and excited delirium were emphasized.
In Palm Desert, Calif., officers responded to a call and found Robert Appel delusional. The officers pinned him down. He was dead when they turned him over. Dr. Vilke blamed the cardiac arrest on undetected kidney failure.
In January 2015, Mathew hit his girlfriend while he was having a manic episode. He was beaten, handcuffed, put in a chair with a mask over his face, and shocked with a stun gun.
The man was beaten, restrained and shocked with a stun gun. Two experts from the network offered different causes of death.
The actions that were taken did not lead to Mr. Ajibade's death. Dr. Wetli said that he exhibited signs of excited delirium because he carries one of the two genes that cause the disease.
It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of the opinions exonerating the police.
Several cases reviewed by The Times suggest that the research has had far-reaching effects, including giving officers assurance that their methods are safe and influencing investigator decisions in death inquests. Some of the experts have prepared legal statements and educational materials for police that are outdated or conservative.
In a deposition in April, the sheriff in the county cited studies to explain why he held people face down after handcuffing them. The position was described as the absolute safest place by the sheriff.
Two years ago, Kevin Niedzialek was bleeding from a head wound and behaving strangely after taking methamphetamines. They shocked him with a stun gun and held him down.
Mr. Niedzialek was unresponsive when they rolled him onto his back. He died the next day.
It was produced by Eden Weingart.
