Black man's $100,000 Judgment Against Orlando Police in Taser Case Overturned

A federal judge has overturned a $100,000 verdict against an Orlando police officer who a jury found had violated the civil rights of a motorist he stopped and shot with a Taser in 2003. U.S. District Judge Anne Conway threw out the award against Officer Jonathan Cute, ruling that it wasn't legally allowed because jurors concluded Cute had a valid reason to stop Dontray Chaney for an allegedly obscured license plate, a non-arrestable traffic offense. After the stop, just off Mercy Drive in a low-income neighborhood on Orlando's west side, an angry Chaney refused to produce his drivers license. Ultimately, Cute, who is white, threw the black man to the ground and twice used his Taser, which temporarily paralyzes a suspect with a 50,000-volt charge of electricity. A gathering crowd then forced police to whisk Chaney out of the area. The jury that awarded Chaney $100,000 had "concluded that Officer Cute had probable cause and the authority to make the arrest," Conway wrote in a 24-page order dated Friday and made public Monday. "The authority to make an arrest permits an officer to use reasonable force." In addition, she wrote, Cute was entitled to a "qualified-immunity" defense protecting government employees from being sued personally because he acted within the law and did not use excessive force. Orlando police have fired the controversial stun guns more than 1,200 times in the past three years. The city of Orlando, also named as a defendant in the suit over questions of its police training policies, was cleared of liability by the jury and again by Conway. In March, the jury of seven whites and one black agonized for 15 hours over a verdict form they found complicated and confusing. [more]

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