Confidential Settlement After Deputies Tased Restrained Teen in Cheatham County Jail

In November 2016, Jordan Norris, an 18-year-old being held at the Cheatham County jail in Ashland City, Tennessee, began showing signs of a mental health crisis. He struck his head against his holding cell door and told staff he was thinking of harming himself. Deputies responded by strapping him into a restraint chair.

What happened next became the center of a federal civil rights lawsuit. With Norris physically immobilized in the chair, Corporal Mark Bryant deployed a Taser against him at least four times in a single session, for a combined roughly 50 seconds. When a colleague seemed uncertain whether to continue, Bryant said: "I'll keep on doing that until I run out of batteries." Norris's father later counted more than 40 pairs of Taser burn marks across his son's body, several of them just inches from his heart.

Surveillance video and Taser camera recordings captured the episode. Ben Raybin, who represented Norris alongside David Weissman, said of the footage: "We think the tapes speak for themselves." Sheriff Mike Breedlove fired Bryant after the recordings became public and later acknowledged that the department had made "a terrible mistake."

In 2017, Norris filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee (Case No. 3:17-cv-01067), alleging excessive force and failure to protect under federal civil rights law. The defendants were three Cheatham County Sheriff's deputies. A grand jury separately indicted Bryant on September 5, 2017, on four counts of aggravated assault and one count of official misconduct.

The civil case settled on confidential terms in September 2017. Norris's attorney noted that his client was "grateful for the outpouring of support he has received from people all over the world." Federal criminal charges followed in 2018: Bryant faced deprivation of rights under color of law and obstruction of justice; Sergeant Gary Ola faced charges for making false statements to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the FBI.

United Nations officials publicly described the jail incident as "torture," adding international attention to what local cameras had already documented. An autopsy of Norris, who died in March 2018 at age 19, found damage to the right ventricle of his heart.