California Bans ‘Excited Delirium’ As A Cause Of Death
from the death-by-cop-misadventure dept
Excited delirium is a very unique medical condition. It almost always kills its victims. The victims of this apparent sudden cause of death are almost always in the presence of police officers when they die. And the victims are almost always of a certain… type.
A 2021 data analysis found that at least 56% of deaths in police custody between 2010 and 2020 attributed to excited delirium involved Black and Latinx victims.
That’s from The Guardian’s report on the passage of legislation banning this term from being listed as a cause of death in California.
If all of this — minorities, police presence, death — seems coincidental, it’s actually not. Axon (formerly Taser) was a huge proponent of this particularly law enforcement-involved cause of death. It was CYA as medical opinion. Cops with a lack of training (or empathy)[or both] were basically electrocuting people to death using the company’s stun guns. To keep from being listed in a ton of wrongful death suits, Axon/Taser pressured cops to utilize this term to explain the deaths of people in custody, many of them still with Taser prongs attached.
The theory is that sufferers of this condition (that only seems to crop up when people are being assaulted by law enforcement officers) are both “excited” and “delirious.” In some cases, that means their heart rates are increased. In other cases, they may say incoherent things like “I can’t breathe.” In almost every case, the only cure is subduing the person to death, thus ridding them of their excited delirium by eliminating its root cause: being alive while being arrested.
The controversy has always existed. But it has been ignored by cops and cop apologists, even as it has maintained a “steady roar” noise level for years. Some oversight groups have finally gotten around to suggesting it might be time to ditch training that does nothing more than train cops to deliver exonerative medical mumbo jumbo during arrest report composition or press conferences.
And it is indeed nothing more than that: pseudo-medical bullshit that does nothing but place the blame for someone’s death on something other than the people that caused it.
California has gone one better than simply recommending junking “excited delirium” training.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Sunday prohibiting the term from being recognized as valid diagnosis or cause of death. The bill comes as a national emergency physicians’ group is also considering disavowing the term.
The legislation was prompted by the 2020 death of Angelo Quinto, who lost consciousness while two Antioch officers knelt on his neck and back, with the death certificate citing “excited delirium syndrome”. Quinto was suffering a mental health crisis in his mother’s home.
At this point, there’s only one holdout in the medical community: the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). Here’s how it’s going with the rest of the medical community:
The American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Emergency Medicine, National Association of Medical Examiners, and American College of Medical Toxicology have all disavowed the term.
ACEP will likely join this list soon. It’s due to vote on disavowal of its 2009 position paper on excited delirium sometime this month. Given that it’s the only major medical association that’s still taking this bullshit at face value, it’s unlikely to extend that streak now that it’s more than painfully apparent the so-called condition is just a convenient way for police officers to separate themselves from the deaths they cause.
The problem is that this law likely won’t change anything. Cops and coroners have plenty of other options when it comes to blaming people for their own deaths at the hands of law enforcement. The most important thing is never how quickly a cause of death can be determined. It’s how fast law enforcement officials can get a toxicology report into the hands of journalists. The sooner you can make it appear literally anything other than the beatings/chokings/tasings/hog-tyings caused the death in custody, the sooner you can go back to inflicting violence without fear of serious repercussion.
Filed Under: california, excited delirium, police, police custody
Comments on “California Bans ‘Excited Delirium’ As A Cause Of Death”
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Such new facts warrant a public retraction and apology for your false and misleading article about Streamscale. Admit you were wrong and move on.
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… what?
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Oh hey, is this a spambot trying people to google a term for marketing purposes? Sure looks like one.
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Please explain what’s false or misleading about the following paragraph:
Via James Bessen, we learn of how a patent trolling operation by StreamScale has resulted in an open source project completely shutting down, despite the fact that the patent in question (US Patent 8,683,296 for an “Accelerated erasure coding system and method”) is almost certainly ineligible for patent protection as an abstract idea, following the Supreme Court’s Alice ruling and plenty of prior art.
Source: Techdirt’s only (2014) article to mention Scalestream.
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I meant Streamscale, but am dyslexic.
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How about a jury verdict that found that patent valid and infringed? Is that evidence enough?
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Sonos got an Award against Google….look how that’s turning out for them. Look at how well that worked out long term for them. Also, numerous defendants were dropped from the trial. Finally, it’s a Texas Jury and we’ve all seen what’s coming out of that state recently.
Also, Michael Anderson, you might as well create and account…we all know it’s you. Ain’t nobody on the internet besides you that would post on a random story on a tech News site about an (almost) 10 years old story.
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I could be his son, or daughter, or friend, or girlfriend, or admirer (like Shiva). At least I have the integrity to tell the truth, and admit when I was wrong. Sad, the nameless losers and liars that lurk here. I was wrong to try to help you understand the fallacy of your foolish ways. Keep blabbing your bullshit to each other. You obviously know nothing at all about patents or patent law.
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Hamilton, you would not know a fallacy if it bought over a social media platform and rebranded it just to make it worse.
Your hero tried to destroy Techdirt, and not only did he fail at that, he couldn’t even get a judge to agree that he invented modern email.
This idea that Streamscale is going to mount any sort of meaningful effort to wipe Masnick off the face of the Internet for something that was posted almost 10 years ago is sad, even for you.
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What’s wrong with it? It’s way the fuck off topic, that’s what. GTFOH
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Let’s see: (a) there were no patents asserted by StreamScale prior to 2021, so they could not have been a patent trolling operation in 2014 and (b) those patents have been reviewed by attorneys, judges and juries and found to be valid and infringed. So your description of StreamScale is false, and you know it to be false. There’s lots more falsity in the article, thanks for reposting this, though. Reposting it restarts the legal clock for liability.
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Nothing was republished you dipshit, someone else just quoted it. It has fuckall to do with a ‘legal clock’.
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The general rule is that a person who repeats or republishes a defamatory statement is subject to the same liability as if he/she had originally published the statement. Republication liability does not require the publisher to be the author or creator of the original defamatory statement and a person cannot generally avoid liability for defamation merely because they repeated someone else’s words.
Each time a (new) person publishes or communicates the original defamatory statement, this will constitute a republication.
To prove defamation liability for republication, a plaintiff must meet the same requirements as a traditional defamation claim. This requires that a plaintiff prove the following elements:
The existence of a false statement “of and concerning” the plaintiff;
The statement was unprivileged and communicated to a third party;
The publisher acted with at least negligence, or actual malice/reckless disregard when publishing the statement; and
The plaintiff suffered reputational and/or economic damages as a result of the statement.
Republication by a defendant, after they have been notified of the potentially defamatory nature of the statements, may be treated as evidence of reckless disregard to establish fault.
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Someone REALLY wants to derail discussion of the topic of the article, huh?
How much are Taser International paying you?
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And Shiva Ayyadurai didn’t prove any of those elements, did he? No wonder his attempt to sink Techdirt got blown right out of the water.
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What did James Bessen provide? I don’t see anything anywhere. How can you rely on non-existent materials and crazy uninformed legal theories and then go on to ignore a publicly filed legal conclusion of validity and infringement? Why would you again republish something that is so obviously false and misleading? What will it take to deter more such falsity about StreamScale? You can’t just make stuff up out of thin air and then not correct it when you are proven wrong. It’s morally wrong, at least. Just correct your story. It was wrong then, it was wrong when you just republished it, just correct your error, that’s a fair request.
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…hallucinated nobody ,entally competent, ever.
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Shiva lives forever. 🙂
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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You have committed a non sequitur. What new facts? What does Streamscale have to do with excited delirium?
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No, the first AC committed a non-sequitur. I only responded to it. Don’t collect the wrong baby from hospital just because all infants of the same ethnicity look very similar to each other.
This is so boring I could just die.
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Well, what about journalistic ethics? Do you support those?
Excited delirium: gateway excuse to qualified immunity.
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Excited delirium: gateway excuse for immunity from accountability. Should there be any accountability for journals who got it wrong? Asking for a friend.
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what the blue blazing fuck are you talking about
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Well, it looks like throwing mud in the air (when there is no wall in throwing range) and threatening that some may stick. Or not.
It’s the “where there’s smokescreen, there must be fire” adage we get to admire in the Hunter Biden impeachment enquirement saga.
We’ve been spared a House Speaker with that skill as his main qualification just now. Maybe he is venting here?
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Any papers on it should probably be retracted by the journals which published them, but we saw how long that took even long after Wakefield was discredited and stripped of the legal right to call himself a doctor, so it may take some time for them to catch up on this subject. There probably ought to be some accountability for those who crafted junk “research” to support this nonexistent diagnosis of course.
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Actually, Andrew Jeremy Snakefield wasn’t stripped of the legal right to call himself a doctor, he was stripped of the ability to practice as a doctor in the UK and never bothered to seek a licence to practice in the US, which led to Thoughtful House (now the Betty Johnson Center) kicking him out when they realised that fact. The rest of your comment is on point, though.
Sure, this “Excited Delirium” sounds like a berserk mode in any video game, and I could totally understand that a under-staffed police patrol could fear a single person with a very violent behavior. (The popularity of the “Cops” TV show has certainly helped this legend of superhuman under constraint.)
So tasing would be a natural response to this fear, but not to the problem.
And now they’ve banned the expression (mostly because there no scientific ground), what remains to explain hundreds of quick deaths associated to this term ? It could be drugs (injected during the intervention, or as an habit), genetic disposition, brutally of the arrest, etc. so it only makes these losses even more complex to explain, and it doesn’t seem there any other hypothesis on it.
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That’s like saying that if “unexplained sudden lead poisoning” was discredited as a diagnosis after it was listed as the cause of death in a huge percentage of police-involved fatalities, we wouldn’t have any other hypothesis for how all these people suddenly stopped breathing and keeled over with all these bullets manifesting inside them.
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They can always fall back on ‘they deserved it’. Always seems to get pigs off the hook for the murders they commit.
'They died and all we were doing was kneeling on their neck...'
Excited delirium: The ‘scientific’ sounding way of explaining the disturbingly high rate of people dropping dead when interacting with cops via blaming the corpses.
“…the passage of legislation banning this term from being listed as a cause of death in California.”
smiles Now let’s hope other states swiftly follow suit.
Damn, davec is spilling a lot of his hurt fee-fees…
In the few cases I have seen video of this so called Excited Delirium medical condition, it is always the cops who are acting all excited and delirious, jumping around yelling Show Me Your Hands while another cop yells Dont Move.
Do you show your hands or do you not move ..
What you call it doesn't matter
If the DA doesn’t charge the officers with a crime, it really doesn’t matter what the official cause of death is.
It might make a civil suit easier, but that is paid by tax payers not the police department.
Epidemiology points to the cops being the organism that causes excited delirium, so something should be done to keep them away from people.
The fact that any physician or group of physicians had ever accepted the term is a blazing mark of shame.
Is that Excited Delirium I am detecting in some of these comments?
ACEP's solution
ACEP will likely join this list soon. It’s due to vote on disavowal of its 2009 position paper on excited delirium sometime this month.
It already did. Voted on by the council and affirmed by the board of directors:
Sounds good right?
Of course, if you actually read into their current white paper, you’ll find that what they actually did was merely “rename” the condition. Their argument is that the current name is too politically charged, so everyone should stop using it and start using something else:
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Bloody hell what a bunch of bootlicking cowards… ‘The public is strangely angry at the term to describe people dropping dead when interacting with police for reasons which have nothing whatsoever to do with what the police might be doing at the time of the death, so to solve that issue we’ll just call it something else.’
Nobody is this much of a craven fanboy. Not even Musk nerds.
AKA Positional Asphyxia / Not doing your job properly
A lot of “excited delirium” cases are actually death by positional asphyxia. Once someone has been handcuffed, especially behind their back, they need to get into a position where their lungs can operate and blood flow can get going. Generally this is sat down, knees up and head free to move.
But officers who themselves suffer from excited delirium tend to forget about the welfare of their ‘customers’ and end up killing them instead.
Recall that publication requires a person to publish a defamatory communication in an intentional, negligent, or reckless manner. If a reasonable person concludes that the defamer should have known the statement(s) they are communicating could be published to a third party, then the defamer is likely to be held liable for defamation. But if a reasonable person concludes that the defamer could not have reasonably anticipated that a third party would “receive” the defamatory statement, then there probably is no defamation liability.
The next step involves proving that the publisher knew, or should have known, that the information they published was defamatory.
Finally, a publisher could be held liable for defamation republication if they have the control to remove the defamatory content, but choose not to or ignore the request. This does not require the publisher to take extreme measures to remove the defamatory statement. But if the offending information can be easily taken down, then the publisher may have a legal duty to do so.
“The general rule is that a person who repeats or republishes a defamatory statement is subject to the same liability as if he/she had originally published the statement.”
Ahahaha, no the fuck they don’t for a quote you stupid shit. Jesus fuck, you’re ignorant and vocal about it. No wonder you’re arguing about a decade old article in the wrong fucking thread. You’re desperate for the attention, and your complete incompetence isn’t going to slow you down.