Seattle cops taser pregnant woman because she won't get out of the car.

In 2004, Malaika Brooks was driving her son to Seattle's African American Academy when she was stopped for doing 32 mph in a school zone. When she was handed the ticket, she misinterpreted the signature requested of her as an admission of guilt and refused to sign.

Rather than give her the ticket and let her go on her way, the officers decided to arrest her. One reached in, turned off her car and dropped the keys on the floor. Brooks stiffened her arms against the steering wheel and told the officers she was pregnant, but refused to get out, even after they threatened to stun her.

The cops, Sgt. Steven Daman, and Officers Juan Ornelas and Donald Jones, then carried out their threat, electrocuting her three times, in the thigh, shoulder and neck, and hauled her out of the car, laying her face-down in the street. She now has permanent scars from the Taser.

Brooks filed a lawsuit against the offending officers for violating her constitutional rights, and U.S. District Judge Richard Jones allowed the case to continue, refusing to grant the officers immunity but in a 2-1 ruling on March 26, 2010, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. Judges Cynthia Holcomb Hall and Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain held that the officers were justified in making an arrest because Brooks was obstructing them and resisting arrest.

The trouble is that under Washington law, the officers had no authority to take Brooks into custody: Failure to sign a traffic infraction is not an arrestable offense, and it's not illegal to resist an unlawful arrest. To obstruct an officer, one must obstruct the officer's official duties, and the officers' only duties in this case were to detain Brooks long enough to identify her, check for warrants, write up the citation and give it to her. Brooks' failure to sign did not interfere with those duties.