Williams, who had apparently suffered some sort of psychotic breakdown, is handcuffed and his feet are bound, and he is begging deputies not to kill him. He struggles against his restraints, but he poses no danger.

However, within 90 seconds of the videotape's beginning, Williams is already unconscious and near death.

As deputies frantically pull him one way or the other, unaware of his condition, you can see on the tape that Williams' eyes are closed and that his facial and neck muscles have gone entirely slack. That's not surprising. Even though he was restrained hand and foot, Williams had already been hit several times with a Taser, an electric stun gun, and in fact was Tased yet again, even after all resistance had ended.

In fairness, it's important to reiterate that because of the turmoil in the room, the deputy administering the stun gun was still unaware of Williams' unconscious state. In fact, two minutes go by on the tape as deputies wrestle his now limp body into a restraint chair. Finally, somebody notices.

"Is he breathing?" a female voice asks.

"Get the nurse to take a look at him real quick," someone else responds.

He is apparently not breathing; when the nurse arrives, he has trouble finding a pulse, and Williams does not react to smelling salts under his nose. In perhaps the most damning thing at all, that dire state of affairs inspires no sense of urgency whatsoever. It is a full five minutes until someone bothers to begin CPR.

"It could be," Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway admits when I ask him about that time lag. "It seems like a lot of time goes by. I wish they had realized earlier that he had quit struggling."

But by then, whatever hope might have remained for Williams was lost.

Williams died almost a year ago, officially of a heart attack and subsequent brain damage. In the aftermath, no one on Conway's staff was disciplined. (The deputy who administered the Taser charges was fired later on unrelated charges. He had shot a neighbor's dog.)

And while Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter promised Williams' family a prompt investigation, he did not deliver. By January — seven months after Williams' death — the family became so frustrated that they referred the case to the FBI.

Claiming his honor had been insulted, Porter then announced he was dropping the investigation altogether.

So in March, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution requested a copy of Porter's investigative file, including the videotape. Under the Open Records Act, the file had become public record once the case was closed.

But rather than release that file, Porter changed his tune yet again, saying, "I have never officially closed my investigation other than a few remarks to reporters."

Last month, Porter finally brought the matter before a county grand jury. Even then, however, he did not seek indictments; his purpose, he said, was to ask the grand jury whether it wanted to look into jail policy on use of Tasers.

And the grand jury never got to see the tape.

"I informed them of its existence," Porter told me Tuesday. "They chose not to view it."

I asked Porter whether it seemed odd that it took five minutes before anybody in the sheriff's office began CPR.

"I found the whole tape odd," he replied.

Curious about how law enforcement professionals might react, I described the case to David Klinger, a former police officer and now an associate criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Klinger specializes in police policies about the use of force and is the author of "Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force."

The use of Tasers as a "pain compliance tool" is not unusual, Klinger said. It causes intense pain, and officers commonly use it to force suspects or prisoners to comply with orders.

But Klinger was surprised by the repeated sustained use of the stun gun against Williams — it was fired five times within a minute, although Conway doubts all five charges hit Williams' body. And while cautioning that he had not seen the tape, Klinger said he would have "a great deal of uneasiness about it" if the Taser was used as described to him.

"If it happened as you describe — five or six large deputies holding him, he is already restrained, in an institutional setting — it's fairly hard to argue that's a reasonable use of force," Klinger said.

Although Taser is marketed as a nonlethal law enforcement tool, more than 70 people have died in the last few years after being shocked by the device. Williams, for example, was the second person to die after Taser use at the Gwinnett County jail in an eight-month period. The weapon's manufacturer claims that is happenstance, that there's no proof Tasers caused those deaths.

However, the growing number of fatalities is drawing the attention of the law enforcement community.

"One of the things we're starting to suspect — it appears that generally when people are dying, it's in cases where you see multiple applications," Klinger said. "That's the working assumption now of people in the know on this."

On Tuesday, the day I spoke with Klinger, a Phoenix man died after being hit with a Taser. Like Williams, he was hit multiple times.

I asked Porter whether the grand jury had been given access to such facts in considering whether to study jail policies on Taser use more closely. No, he said, they had not.

"The facts of THIS case were presented to them. They chose not to open an inquiry."

So to review: Almost a year after the death of a fully restrained prisoner, a Gwinnett grand jury is finally convened to look into the matter. However, it is not asked to consider criminal charges; it is not shown the videotape; it is not told that Tasers might be lethal; it does not hear evidence that sustained use of a Taser against a fully restrained man might not be considered a reasonable use of force in law enforcement circles.

In other words, the grand jury was used by those in power to make an uncomfortable case go away.

I can't say I know what justice is in this case; I just know that this isn't even close.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

© 2005 Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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