Kentucky prison guards used Taser 7 weapons to deliver thousands of volts to inmates
The weapon used by prison staff on Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex inmates last year was the Taser 7, an electric stun gun produced by Axon, with headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Some facts about the Taser 7:
▪ Introduced in 2018, Axon sells the device as a defensive weapon to law enforcement agencies around the world. There’s also a Taser 7CQ for civilians. More recently, Axon has been offering an upgraded Taser 10.
▪ The Taser 7 has two replaceable cartridges that can shoot two small probes up to 25 feet, delivering a jolt of thousands of volts of electricity when they hit a body. That’s usually enough to knock people down and render them helpless.
▪ Instead of firing the probes, a user can switch the Taser 7 into “drive-stun” mode. An electrical arc will spark across the front of the weapon, which must be forcefully pushed into the person you want to stun.
That’s what the prison guards at Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex did, according to an internal investigation. They used drive-stun mode to shock inmates who flunked their monthly drug test, in exchange for not reporting the test results.
Three guards were fired and convicted of misdemeanor assault or official misconduct. A fourth guard was suspended for 30 days. The warden has announced his retirement.
▪ The Taser 7 has an internal memory that stores data from each time it’s used. An Axon engineer, working with Department of Corrections investigators, used that internal memory to reconstruct the Tasering incidents last year at Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex, which exposed the guards’ false denials, investigators said.
This story was originally published May 16, 2024 at 1:59 PM.
