Magical Cop Detects Drugs Better Than Blood Tests; Continues To Lock Innocent People Up

from the let's-just-shut-down-the-crime-lab-and-save-taxpayers-some-$$$ dept

In court filings, testimony, and warrant affidavits, law enforcement officers refer constantly to their "training and expertise." Given enough time on the job and enough laser-printed certificates, any law enforcement officer can be an "expert" in anything… even detecting nonexistent drug impairment.

Atlanta's 11 Alive News has been digging into Officer T.T. Carroll's impressive run of Driving Under the Influence arrests and finding some that aren't all that impressive. [h/t PitchforksAtTheGate] T.T. Carroll is a certified "Drug Recognition Expert," having attended 160 hours of classes put on by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Carroll is referred to by his coworkers as the "go-to guy" for impairment arrests and was given an award by the Mothers Against Drunk Driving for racking up 90 DUI arrests in one year.

Whatever the IACP is teaching in its classes must be powerful stuff. Officer Carroll's observational powers allow him to detect people impaired by drugs they've never had in their system.

Officer Carroll: "I'm going to ask you a question, okay? When was the last time you smoked marijuana?"

Katelyn Ebner: "Oh, I don't do that. I can give you a drug test right now."

Officer Carroll: "You don't smoke marijuana?"

Katelyn Ebner: "I do not, no."

Officer Carroll: "Okay. Well, you're showing me indicators that you have been smoking marijuana, okay?"

Katelyn Ebner: "I'm going to jail for marijuana?"

Officer Carroll: "No, ma'am -- not possession, unless I find any in your car. I believe you're impaired by the marijuana you've smoked."

Katelyn Ebner: "Okay, so when I do a drug test, I'll be free to go, correct?"

Officer Carroll: "You're going to jail, ma'am. Okay? I don't have a magical drug test that I can give you right now."

Ah, but Officer Carroll does have a "magical drug test." It's one he performs during stops that provides him with the probable cause for arrest, even when roadside impairment tests disagree with his PC assessment. And if his amazing drug recognition skills fail him, it's the arrestees that pay the price. In the case of Ebner, whose blood test came back clean, it cost her her job. Ebner worked for a bar but her license to serve alcohol was revoked because of the impairment arrest. Four months after her bogus arrest, she was cleared of all charges. All well and good, but being cleared of charges doesn't undo the damage done during the four months when charges were still pending.

The 11 Alive report examines two more arrests involving Officer Carroll's superhuman ability to detect drugs blood tests can't even find. In all three cases, lab tests for substances came up clean. Rather than offer to take a look at the super-productive officer's body of work, the police department has doubled down on its assertion that Officer Carroll detects drugs better than a blood test.

Complaints filed by arrestees have gone nowhere. The Cobb County PD's internal investigators responded with one highly-dubious claim…

Cobb County Investigators exonerated the officer and doubted Ebner's innocence, insisting, 'the marijuana could have already metabolized out of the blood.'

And one highly-infuriating one:

"When you brought up that you had a clean blood test when complaining to Internal Affairs, their answer was what?" Keefe asked.

"They said, 'Yeah, we see this happen all the time. Um, the test results come back wrong all the time,'" she said.

These would be the same drug tests prosecution experts would claim to be infallible if needed to secure a conviction. This lab apparently only hands out false negatives.

The consequences of Officer Carroll's "drug whispering" will never be felt by Officer Carroll. His department is already shielding him from the press and if these complaints become civil rights lawsuits, it's highly likely Carroll's "expertise" will result in a granting of qualified immunity. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but no more so than in the hands of someone with a great deal of power and very little accountability.

Filed Under: blood tests, drugs, police, tt carroll

DailyDirt: What Are We Going To Do With All This Genetic Information?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Genomic sequencing is becoming more readily available and cheaper by the minute. It's not quite as easy as it looks on TV (ie. we don't have a Star Trek tricorder just yet), but minuscule amounts of DNA are revealing a vast amount of information about our health and our ancestors. This treasure trove of data is literally lying around everywhere just waiting to be collected.

• The genetic information of 2,636 Icelanders has helped researchers more accurately pin down when the father of all humanity lived -- some time between 174,000 and 321,000 years ago. Our mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived about 200,000 years ago. However, our most recent common ancestor (MRCA) likely lived just 2,000-4,000 years ago. [url]
• A routine blood test can determine the sex of a baby just 7 weeks into a pregnancy. Can we expect people to use the results of these tests responsibly? How accurate do these tests really need to be? [url]
• A diagnostic test for cancer based on a simple blood test could save a lot of time, money and stress. The Lymphocyte Genome Sensitivity (LGS) test is still in clinical trials, but early results suggest it might be possible to detect cancer or pre-cancerous conditions without requiring biopsies. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, if you have some spare change (or more) and would like to support Techdirt, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: blood tests, cancer, data, dna, genetics, genomic sequencing, health, icelanders, lgs test, lymphocyte genome sensitivity test, mitochondrial eve, mrca

MN Supreme Court Finds DUI Blood Draws Aren't 'Coerced,' Despite Refusal Resulting In Criminal Charges

from the constitutional-issue-still-up-for-grabs dept

A rather bizarre ruling has been handed down by the Minnesota Supreme Court on the warrantless acquisition of blood and urine samples from DUI suspects. The plaintiff, Wesley Brooks, provided the samples which were used as evidence in each of his three DUI convictions. Brooks is arguing that he can't truly have "consented" to these searches because the state's laws provide no acceptable way to decline them. According to him, the statutes governing these collections turn it into state-approved coercion.

According to the court, Brooks had already given his "implied consent." Furthermore, he voluntarily agreed to each of the collections. But these two facts, which seemingly paint Brooks into a corner, aren't what they seem at face value.

First, the way the state determines "implied consent" to blood and urine collection is very questionable.

That law [relating to implied consent], established in 1961, says anyone issued a driver’s license has automatically agreed to chemical testing during a DWI arrest and the results can be used against them in court.

If you don't agree to this, you don't get a driver's license. Tying what many people consider to be an essential object to implied consent is problematic. For most people, a driver's license doubles as an ID card, something nearly everyone needs to access employment and a host of other services. While an ID card can be obtained on its own, the lack of a valid license opens drivers up to many other charges if they choose to operate a vehicle, another indispensable part of many people's lives.

Even if someone wanted to skip out on the tied-in "implied consent" by using a license registered in another state, they can't. Out-of-state licenses are only valid for 60 days in Minnesota [stat. 171.03(g)] and operating a vehicle past that point opens the driver up to misdemeanor charges for driving without a valid license [stat. 171.24 subd. 4,5] ("disqualified" by not passing a written exam or skills test [by not taking one], the first of which is required to transfer a license).

So, this "implied consent" is for all intents and purposes unvoidable. If you have a MN drivers license, you've given your "implied consent" for these searches. This likely flew under the radar because it's tied to driving while intoxicated. If this instead gave drivers' implied consent to searches of their vehicles whenever pulled over for certain violations, the law wouldn't have made it past the voting stage. But because it's tied to a universally reviled behavior, it's still on the books fifty years later.

The next problem is that, while this is only "implied" consent, opting out of this collection only makes things worse. Refusal to consent to the searches results in additional criminal charges.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't, but still the court found this didn't add up to coercion.

“A driver’s decision to agree to take a test is not coerced simply because Minnesota has attached the penalty of making it a crime to refuse the test,” Chief Justice Lorie Gildea wrote in the opinion.

No, it may not be explicitly coercion, but it looks very much like it when every option contains the possibility of criminal charges. The fact that the court was looking at Brooks' specific case rather than the constitutionality of the law itself seems to have contributed to these illogical conclusions.

“By reading Brooks the implied consent advisory, police made clear to him that he had a choice of whether to submit to testing,” Gildea wrote. “While an individual does not necessarily need to know he or she has a right to refuse a search for consent to be voluntary, the fact that someone submits to the search after being told that he or she can say no to the search supports a finding of ­voluntariness.”

Gildea's opinion was challenged by another judge, however.

In a concurring opinion, Justice David Stras agreed that no warrant was necessary but disagreed that implied consent does not amount to coercion.

“It’s hard to imagine how Brooks’ consent could have been voluntary when he was advised that refusal to consent to a search is a crime.” Stras wrote.

Because this was limited to Brooks and not the law itself, the court hasn't made a definitive statement on whether the law is constitutional. But given the facts presented here, Minnesota's law is standing on very shaky ground. An earlier US Supreme Court decision might help push this law off the books, though.

The Brooks ruling was the first case analyzing how Minnesota law could be affected in the wake of Missouri vs. McNeely, an April U.S. Supreme Court decision that said police officers must try to get a search warrant for a blood sample if they want it to hold up in court. The fact that alcohol quickly dissipates in the blood is no longer justification for not getting a judge’s sign-off, the high court reasoned.

As it stands at this point in Minnesota, "voluntary" means nothing more than being allowed to pick one of two equally awful options.

Sure, people can just not drive drunk and avoid all of this. But it's not just drunk drivers who are affected. Any number of people suffering from medical conditions have been mistaken for being intoxicated over the years, with diabetes sufferers being the most common. Thanks to Minnesota's law, these people will be forced to agree to warrantless blood draws and urine collection simply because they're considered to be driving while impaired. While those will be the exception rather than the rule, the first concern should be limiting the deployment of warrantless searches rather than justifying unconstitutional measures because the end result is drunks drivers being punished.

The state is trying to have it both ways. At the very least, it needs to remove one of the two aspects that make this look nearly indistinguishable from coercion. What should go first is the implied consent the state has tied to an indispensable document, something that forces every driver pulled over for suspected intoxication to provide evidence against themselves.

Filed Under: blood tests, coercion, dui, minnesota