As a recent victim of corporate legal bullying myself I wanted to share this story from CrunchGear which did a bit of investigating into the claims by Taser International (TASR) that its stun guns are completely safe.  What gets me is not so much the claims of safety which are questionable but how they apparently go about silencing researchers and medical examiners through legal bullying to distort the truth. Something has to be done about this kind of litigation!

A portion of the CrunchGear investigation:

"Taser’s lawsuits include cases against medical examiners in Indiana and Ohio who cited Taser-induced electrical shocks as the cause of death. But perhaps most striking is the case of James Ruggieri. In early 2006, Ruggieri published an article in the peer-reviewed Journal of the National Academy of Forensic Engineers. The study, “one of the few scientific studies of Taser’s electric jolt in which the company did not participate,” as The Arizona Republic put it, concluded that Tasers were far more powerful than the company acknowledged and that the devices are capable of causing fatal heart rhythms.

Not taking the criticism lightly, the company sued Ruggieri for defamation, claiming he lacked the expertise to make such judgments, even though his story passed through the rigors of the peer-review screening process. "