Move Along — Nothing to See Here!
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I am not going to write a lengthy post about the story of drug testing kits (and their failure) linked below.  Please read it.  Because I think that it speaks for itself  —  loudly, predictably, shamefully….

Here is a taste:

In our own examination of those 212 cases — thousands of pages of arrest reports, court filings and laboratory-testing records, along with interviews of prosecutors, police executives, officers, defense attorneys and innocent defendants who pleaded guilty — we saw a clear story about both who is being arrested and what is happening to them. The racial disparity is stark. Blacks made up 59 percent of those wrongfully convicted in a city where they are 24 percent of the population, reflecting a similar racial disparity in drug enforcement nationally. Patrol units, not trained narcotics detectives, appeared to be the most prolific field-test users.

The kits, or the officers interpreting them, got it wrong most often when dealing with small amounts of suspected drugs. Sixty-three percent of the N.C.S. cases involved less than a gram of evidence. The smallest possession cases are the ones in which a field test can be of greatest consequence; if officers find larger quantities of white powder in dozens of baggies or packaged in bricks, they have sufficient probable cause to make an arrest regardless of what a color test shows. (Though in those cases, too, they are generally required to test the drugs.) It’s widely assumed in legal circles that these wrongfully convicted people are in fact drug users who intended to possess drugs. Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that seeks to overturn wrongful convictions, says some who work toward exoneration have complained to him that those exonerated of drug charges often are just accidentally not guilty, and shouldn’t be added to the National Registry of Exonerations. The assumption is not entirely without basis — 162 of the 212 N.C.S. defendants had criminal histories involving illegal drugs. However, 50 had no criminal history involving drugs at all.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/common-roadside-drug-test-routinely-produces-false-positives

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Move Along — Nothing to See Here! — 1 Comment

  1. The Propublica piece points at two much bigger problems with contemporary criminal justice systems that are rarely even discussed, much less addressed.

    The first is the steadily increasing importance of highly technical evidence in criminal trials and the fact that while prosecutors and police have received considerable public funding to keep up with these developments the same can’t be said of defendants.

    The second is that forensic science in almost all areas has a massively over-inflated reputation, thanks in part to programs such as CSI.

    After faulty eyewitness evidence, false or misleading scientific evidence is the second most common factor leading to wrongful convictions (or at least those that have been detected) with it playing a crucial part in around 60% of cases in Australia (most wrongful convictions arise from multiple causes).

    It’s not just a matter of semi-trained police using dodgy test kits. The problem is endemic right across the forensic science spectrum with even iconic technologies such as DNA profiling routinely presented as far more accurate and reliable than they really are.

    So when a defence lawyer advises an innocent client up against scientific evidence to plead it out s/he is only being pragmatic. The playing field tilts steeply in favour of the side that can invoke ‘scientific certainty’ and defendants rarely have the resources to challenge such claims.

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