San Diego City Beat reports on a lawsuit filed by the family of Ramel Henderson, who died in police custody May 29, 2007:
John Peters, expert witness and former police officer who now heads the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, said it would be impossible to replicate in a lab what happens to a person physiologically during an altercation with police.
“Universities, medical doctors—any of us—can’t just go out and, say, go to the California state prison in Soledad and say to the volunteers, ‘We’re going to give you coke and ramp you up, and then you’re going to wrestle with some guys, and we’re going to hogtie you and, oh, by the way, you might die, but it’s in the interest of research,’” Peters said. “That isn’t permitted under any of the ethical guidelines. So what the courts have generally done is they’ve said, ‘OK we have to go with the existing research—we can’t go with what should have been or what could have been.
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