Footage of a pregnant woman who was tasered in her cell has gone viral after it was emerged she lost her baby as result of the ordeal.
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Martini Smith was jailed in September 2009 when she was pregnant and taken into custody at Franklin County Jail in Ohio on a misdemeanor domestic violence.
Corporal Matthew Stice tasered Smith simply because she couldn’t remove her tongue stud, which was the last bit of jewelry she was wearing.
She had been stripped of her top with and has just her jeans.
The shocking footage shows Smith screaming then falling against a concrete wall after the officer tasers her.
The Daily Mail reports: She did not directly state that the taser caused her to lose the child. It is not clear how far along she was in her pregnancy at the time.
She sued the police force afterward and, in 2011, was awarded $27,500 in a settlement but it was not reported at the time that she had been pregnant.
In an interview last week, however, Martini, now 26, told Reuters that the loss of her baby still haunted her.
‘It stays with me like it was yesterday,’ she said.
Smith had been taken into custody after for stabbing the boyfriend who she said was beating her. Once she had arrived at the county jail, she was ordered to remove all her jewelry and clothes.
When it came to taking out her tongue stud, she said she had trouble because her fingers were numb from having been handcuffed for six hours.
Stice then tasered her, sending bolts of electricity into her chest. She fell back against the wall and slid to the ground.
Afterwards, she pleaded: ‘Why did you Tase me? I wasn’t harming nobody.
I can’t just take it out.’In the video, she can be heard yelling: ‘I’m about to have a seizure.
‘Her miscarriage happened five days later. The domestic violence charges against her were eventually dropped.
She spoke with Reuters as part of a wider investigation into excessive force of tasers across the country.
Other videos gathered show inmates sitting on benches in their cells handcuffed before being tasered. One man was deaf.
Their investigation uncovered 104 deaths in prisons since 2000 that were the result of taser use.
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