False Positives

There hasn’t been much in the news besides the Dallas shooting, but I did stumble across this NY Times story on the notoriously unreliable roadside drug tests used by police across the nation; apparently false positives are so common that the tests are not even admissible in court which, as Reason.com points out, isn’t a big deal for the justice system as over 90 percent of the cases plea out.

            Interestingly enough, the illustrative case in the article is a woman who was pulled over in Houston, Texas.

“Based in part on the information gathered by Marie Munier, the former prosecutor Anderson hired to examine the drug convictions, we determined that 301 of the 416 variants began as arrests by the Houston Police Department, with the rest coming from surrounding municipalities, and that 212 of those 301 arrests were based on evidence that lab analysis determined was not a controlled substance, or N.C.S.”

            As has been posted many times before, no physical evidence was used to convict Carlos Coy; the case against him was put together completely on the (changing) testimony of his supposed victim and her mother by a police department, district attorney’s office and court system that has shown the most careless, cavalier attitude towards justice in the past decade and a half. It boggles the mind to think of how many innocents have served, or are currently serving, prison sentences because they were not lucky enough to have physical evidence fabricated against them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside-drug-test-sends-innocent-people-to-jail.html?_r=0

http://reason.com/blog/2016/07/11/tens-of-thousands-wrongly-convicted-base