The city of Louisville paid $150,000 this week to settle claims that two police officers used excessive force when they shocked a naked man with a Taser in September 2006.
The Metro government payment to the estate of Larry Noles on Wednesday settles a lawsuit accusing the officers of depriving Noles of his civil rights when they tried to take him into custody after he was found acting erratically at Seventh Street and Algonquin Parkway.
The suit claimed that Noles, 52, a Marine veteran who suffered from bipolar disorder, posed no threat to the officers or the public.
Noles died after he was Tasered, but the Kentucky medical examiner's office ruled that the cause of death was excited delirium, which affects people with a history of mental illness, alcoholism or drug addiction.
Garry Adams, one of the estate's lawyers, said he hopes the case "will play some part in the education of the Louisville Metro Police Department as to when it is appropriate to use a Taser, the number of times it should be used and where it should be used on the body, to make fatalities less likely."
The settlement was "fair and reasonable under the circumstances," he said, and will be divided between Noles' two sons.
Lt. Col. Vince Robison, an assistant chief, said the department has modified its Taser policies in response to Noles' death and other incidents around the country to "come up with the best practices."
Bill Patteson, a spokesman for the county attorney's office, which defended the suit, said the decision to settle it was based in part of the costs of another trial.
A previous trial in Louisville federal court ended in a hung jury on one of the police officers named as a defendant.
Following an internal department investigation into Noles' death, Police Chief Robert White ruled in 2007 that the officers - Michael Campbell and Matthew Metzler - followed proper department procedure when they confronted him.
An assistant county attorney who represented the officers told the federal jury that Noles' death was a tragedy but that the police were trying to take him into custody so he could be brought to a hospital for treatment.
But testifying as an expert for Noles' estate, Dr. Robert Pfalzgraf, the chief medical examiner in Fort Myers, Fla., testified that the death was a homicide caused by the Taser.
The officers and eyewitnesses gave conflicting accounts of the incident.
Adams said both officers said Campbell shot Noles with the Taser from a distance, then applied it directly to his shoulder and then his back.
But Adams said eyewitnesses reported that Campbell fired the shot and that Metzler later stunned Noles in the neck, which Adams said is "out of bounds" under Metro Police policies because of the potential danger to the subject.
The jury cleared Metzler but was unable to reach a verdict on Campbell.
Taser International, which manufactures the weapons that deliver up to 50,000 volts, issued new training guidelines last October on preferred strike zones for the weapons, encouraging police to aim for the abdomen, legs and back, avoiding the chest, head and groin when possible.
As a result of the company's recommendations, Louisville Metro and Kentucky State Police began advising officers to avoid shooting suspects in the chest with their Tasers.
The company says that while the "risk of an adverse cardiac event" from being stunned by a Taser is "extremely low," the change would lower the risk of lawsuits if a stunned suspect suffers an adverse reaction.
The Courier-Journal reported in 2008 that the city had paid more than $6 million since 2000 to settlement lawsuits against the police department.
Most of the suits alleged the use of excessive force or wrongful arrest, including one in which the city paid $3.9 million to a Louisville man freed from prison after DNA evidence showed he'd been wrongly convicted of rape.