Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/26/woman-spent-3-months-in-jail-f.html
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It has long been held that cotton candy is a gateway confection.
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How the hell did the bond get set a $1,000,000??? That right there is as much, or more, of the issue as the inaccurate roadside test.
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The justification was that there was so much meth that she had to be a dealer of course.
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I’d be very anxious too, if I was talking to a group of heavily armed people who couldn’t tell the difference between meth and candyfloss.
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the bag contained blue cotton candy
Blue meth. They must have been watching Breaking Bad.
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Even after the GSBI lab came back with “nope, it’s cotton candy” it still took four weeks for the charges to be dropped.
I wonder if she was offered a plea deal during that time?
It’s a travesty that the parties actually responsible for this injustice are virtually guaranteed to escape any consequence at all.
I hate that the taxpayers of the county will end up on the hook for some gigantic settlement.
But until said taxpayers start voting in a way that will change this bullshit behavior by the sheriff, the only way the victims can get any justice will be taxpayer funded payouts.
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Here’s a shocking fact: Color change tests are affected by colored dyes! Who could have anticipated such a thing?? What kind of witchcraft is this??
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There is something seriously wrong when all the government needs to do to curtail your rights is accuse you of a more severe crime, the time when your rights should be even more absolute until such accusations are proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
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Luckily the cops didn’t find the blue raspberry rock candy.
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What’s worse is that these roadside tests are notorious for proving whatever the cops want to believe is true nationwide.
Here in Florida in the last 3 years alone:
- man locked up for weeks because cop said the glaze from a krispy kreme was meth
- man locked up and probation revoked because cop said drywall was coke
- woman locked up for months because vitamins tested positive for ecstacy.
And this is just the top of my head ones that made the news in just one state.
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She should have eaten the evidence //sarcasm— or maybe not, who knows?
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It only takes an hour or so to do detailed chemical analysis using chromatography. Where the hell was her lawyer, even if we’re talking public defender. Get a judge to sign off on an expedited 3rd-party lab test on priority. That would take 48 hours, max.
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But that would rob the prosecutors of the time to push a plea bargain on her to “get it over with.” And pad their conviction stats. These guys are evaluated by “cases closed” not necessarily “guilty party punished.” These are not interchangeable concepts.
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The kind of judge who is going to set bail at a million dollars for a roadside test showing up positive and keeping her in jail for months is not likely to be the kind of judge who is going to sign off on an expedited test from a 3rd party lab at the taxpayer’s expense.
And it should come as no surprise that the individual involved is as unlikely to have the money to pay for bail out of her own pocket as she is to have the money to get an expedited test performed. Because anyone with the money to get that done would never have been targeted by the untrained fools trying to score an arrest in the first place.
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I’m going to take a wild guess that a southern state like Georgia egregiously overloads and woefully under funds public defenders.
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Scroll down to the section on Common Presumptive Color Tests for som good face-palmery
https://sites.google.com/site/inquiryforensicdrughs/home/indicators-and-presumptive-color-tests
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They do seem to have bottomless funds for prosecution and incarceration.
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I think this is the one Georgia cops use most frequently, and it has a pretty long record of false positives.
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I have a sneaky suspicion that the results on this one strongly influence the interpretation of any others that might be run.
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