Las Vegas PD Continues To Use Faulty $2 Drug Field Tests Because Convictions Matter More Than Justice
from the drug-warriors-gotta-drug-war dept
The War on Drugs has never really been about eradicating illegal drugs. It's been about putting up numbers: seizures, busts, indictments, convictions. A steady flow of illegal drugs into the country ensures a steady flow of tax dollars into hundreds of government agencies. Officials talk a lot about taking down cartels, but they spend more time grabbing cash from travelers and anything they can from someone who's got nothing more on them than quantities that could be generously called "personal use."
Making law enforcement's Drug War "efforts" easier and a whole lot cheaper are field drug tests: notoriously unreliable chemical cocktails that are worth every cent of $2/per they pay for them. In an earlier story about these tests, two New York Times journalists detailed Amy Albritton's experience. Albritton spent three weeks in jail after a false positive from a field drug test determined that the caffeine-and-aspirin "crumb" (roughly the size of a "grain of salt" according to the lab test) was crack cocaine. For $2, Albritton lost most of her life. She served her short sentence -- one she only obtained by pleading guilty -- and now faces a future where her permanent record shows she's a convicted felon.
ProPublica is also tackling the issue of cheap, unreliable field tests -- ones deemed just reliable enough to cost people their lives. The Las Vegas Police Department's own crime lab found the field tests used by officers to be so inaccurate they actually lobbied to have their use discontinued.
In a 2014 report that Las Vegas police submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice under the terms of a federal grant, the lab detailed how the kits produced false positives. Legal substances sometimes create the same colors as illegal drugs. Officers conducting the tests, lab officials acknowledged, misinterpreted results. New technology was available — and clearly needed to protect against wrongful convictions.
The lab's opinion didn't matter. Cops and prosecutors loved the field tests. It ensured a steady flow of busts and convictions.
Yet to this day, the kits remain in everyday use in Las Vegas. In 2015, the police department made some 5,000 arrests for drug offenses, and the local courts churned out 4,600 drug convictions, nearly three-quarters of them relying on field test results, according to an analysis of police and court data. Indeed, the department has expanded the use of the kits, adding heroin to the list of illegal drugs the tests can be used to detect.
And while the drug lab that bats cleanup for field tests found them unreliable, these findings have never been passed on to the people who matter: judges. Not that it appears to matter. ProPublica brought its findings to the chief judge of the Las Vegas District Court only to receive a shrug in response.
“These are tests that have been accepted for years,” said Bonaventure, who became a judge in 2004. “They’re not being challenged.”
In other words, the police have told me they're reliable so they must be reliable. Otherwise, why would so many people plead guilty to possession?
Perhaps it's because someone pleading out to avoid a longer prison sentence is engaged in arbitrage -- weighing the potential years they could be facing if their bid fails against a quicker in-and-out local jail sentence that makes the immediate future look a bit brighter than the alternative.
Phil Kohn, chief of the Las Vegas public defender’s office, acknowledged that the prospect of serious prison time has the effect of strong-arming pleas.
“If you’re wondering why the public defender is pleading these cases, it’s because the alternative is horrific,” Kohn said.
In Las Vegas, only eight of the 4,633 drug convictions were the result of a trial. The rest were plea deals. And that's where the reliance of faulty field tests turns into the blackest of human comedies. If someone pleads guilty, the evidence that possibly isn't simply vanishes.
While DOJ standards for the last 40 years have called for qualified labs to re-examine all field test results, the agency has made no effort to insist that happens or to install other protections against mistakes and the wrongful convictions that could result.
And the destruction of field tests after guilty pleas is hardly limited to Las Vegas. In some jurisdictions, defendants accepting guilty pleas agree as a term of the arrangement that the evidence against them will be destroyed. In others, the alleged evidence is simply discarded over time. In a 2013 federal survey of local and state crime labs, 62 percent reported that police agencies don’t submit suspected drugs when a defendant pleads guilty early on in the process.
To make matters worse, ProPublica found public defenders haven't done much to challenge the use of unreliable fields tests. A 2000 report covering the Las Vegas public defender's office showed some lawyers hadn't filed a motion to suppress "in over five years." While the quality of representation has gotten better over the years, follow-up reports still found a dearth of aggressive defense. Of course, like almost every other public defender's office in the US, Las Vegas's is overworked and underfunded, with each attorney saddled with 200+ active cases at any given time.
Adding to the plea bargain problem (and exacerbating the troubling reliance on faulty field tests) are local laws, which are far harsher than federal drug laws. It only takes four grams of an alleged illegal substance to bring trafficking charges. At the federal level, it takes anywhere from 50-500 grams (depending on the substance) to trigger trafficking charges and their lengthier potential sentences.
Even though the Las Vegas lab had expressed concern about the fallibility of field drug tests, it never did anything to determine an error rate. When concerns were raised again about these cheap but error-prone tests, the lab's main concern wasn't about innocent people being jailed, but that it did not have the capacity to perform testing on all seized substances.
But judges and cops will keep believing field drug tests are reliable. And why wouldn't they? A demonstration in 2015 pretty much proved them infallible. But the test was rigged. First off, the demonstration involved an actual scientist, rather than a more error-prone officer. Second, the scientist demonstrating the reliability of the tests knew beforehand the substance he was "testing" was actually heroin… thanks to a lab test. The demonstration was presented as being tests of seized, but unknown, substances. As ProPublica points out, no false positives resulted because there was no possible way for the demonstrator to do so.
Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Police has upped the ante on a broken testing system, adding heroin to the list of substances it supposedly can detect using a $2 test. And nearly every crumb of undetermined origin will just add another case to overloaded public defenders. But the important thing is that it will add another drug bust -- and quite possibly another successful prosecution -- to Las Vegas drug warriors' stats. And that's all that really matters.
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Filed Under: drug tests, drug war, forensics, las vegas, police
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Perhaps seeing themselves labeled as drug users so quickly might open their eyes.
Lets also do sweeps of the lockers for the officers, and suspend without pay anyone who has positive results.
The system hasn't actually been fair in a very long time, but resorting to using shitty tests is a new low for trying to score points.
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Re:
Now there's a pleasant daydream...
Every single one of those defending the use of the drug tests(police, judges, lawmakers, all of them) is on the receiving end of the tests, with the testing carried out by someone left completely in the dark as to who exactly the tests are from.
Any false(or real) positives are treated just the same as it would be for anyone else, and most importantly once the testing is over with, but before the objections to any 'mistakes' are made all of this is made public, so that those now facing 'drug' charges are left either objecting to the very system that they were insisting was accurate enough to jail people over, or spending time behind bars themselves.
Would never happen for any number of reasons of course, but it's certainly an entertaining thing to think about.
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Re: Re:
Backed into a corner they would submit to the testing, because otherwise the idea they have something to hide jumps to the forefront. And seeing some doughnut reside showing positive for meth or something, might make them have to question the results.
While it would be nice to see all of them facing jail time from the same system, seeing how bad these tests are & trying to justify their continued use on camera would be fun.
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what it might be about
Maybe it's also about keeping 'for profit' prisons full.
Fewer vacant cells means more revenue. Higher profits. Executive bonuses. Increased shareholder value. What's not to like?
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They are a feature
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Yep. Maybe we can go straight to guilt-sniffing dogs.
Or further down the line, guilt-detecting bullets.
If they can decide that a faulty kit determines guilt, surely they can decide that a killing bullet does as well.
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Re: Yep. Maybe we can go straight to guilt-sniffing dogs.
Nah, why waste the time training the dogs or developing the bullets, simply update the law to match what's already considered true by the courts fairly often, where anything a cop does is considered legal by default.
If a cop says someone is guilty then they are guilty.
If a cop shoots someone then that person deserved to get shot.
With the 'good faith exception' allowing cops to completely ignore what the law actually says, and instead replace it with what they think it said and have the 'change' applied by the court, this wouldn't exactly be that big of a change, more formalizing what's already unofficially in place.
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Re: Re: Yep. Maybe we can go straight to guilt-sniffing dogs.
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Re: Re: Re: Yep. Maybe we can go straight to guilt-sniffing dogs.
Unofficially yes, hence the last point in the comment about how it wouldn't really be that much of a change, merely formalizing that which is already happening.
(It is freakin' hard to poe a system this broken...)
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Incentives and priorities
More accurate testing methods would return less 'positive' results.
Less positive results means less charges for drug use/possession/distribution.
Less charges mean less convictions/plea deals.
Less convictions/plea deals mean less ability to crow about how 'tough on crime and drugs' the person is.
And since the ones bragging and using it to further their careers aren't the ones behind bars...
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Re: Incentives and priorities
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broken scales
After all, what else are prisons good for other than providing a cheap 'self renewing' labor workforce.
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Re: broken scales
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Time to turn the tables on these traitors
"The more obvious the failure becomes, the more shamelessly they [the prohibitionists] exhibit their genuine motives. In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate — which is to say, upon everyone who is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having a better time in the world than they are."
"They cannot stop the use of alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they can badger and annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they can fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences, and they can get satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy. And all this they can do with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk."
—an extract from "Notes on Democracy" by Henry Louis Mencken, written in 1926, during alcohol prohibition, 1919-1933
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Last Week
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