Prosecutor Tosses Charges Against Driver After Field Drug Test Claims Bird Poop On A Car's Hood Is Cocaine

from the dollar-store-drug-warriors dept

Maybe with enough lawsuits, this nation of zealous drug warriors will finally abandon field drug tests. The tests are cheap, which makes them popular with law enforcement agencies. But they sure as hell aren't accurate.

A field drug test declared a small crumb of an over-the-counter pain relief medicine to be crack cocaine, resulting in the wrongful jailing of a woman for three weeks. Thanks to this faulty field test, this person lost her home and her job.

A man received a $37,500 settlement for an arrest predicated on a drug field test that turned Krispy Kreme donut crumbs into methamphetamine. In the same state (Florida), another man was arrested after drywall residue was declared to be cocaine by the $2 test.

Despite a plethora of evidence showing these tests routinely misread legal substances as illegal, law enforcement continues to use them. The low cost is one factor. The desire to turn routine traffic stops into fishing expeditions is another. It's a faster, cheaper way to obtain probable cause than calling for a K-9 unit -- an option that's been constrained by bit by the Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision.

In this case, covered by Radley Balko, a Georgia college football player has just seen charges dropped after officers used a field drug test to declare bird poop on his vehicle's hood to be cocaine. The story was first reported by Travis Jaudon of the Savannah Morning News:

The possession of cocaine charge has been dropped against Georgia Southern quarterback Shai Werts, the prosecutor in Saluda County, South Carolina, told the Savannah Morning News on Thursday, Aug. 8.

Al Eargle, the Deputy Solicitor for the 11th Judicial Circuit which includes Saluda County, told Werts’ attorney, Townes Jones IV, that these kinds of charges would not be pressed on “his watch,” Jones said.

South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) tests were conducted on the substance samples collected from the hood of Werts’ 2016 Dodge Charger, but the results confirmed that no controlled substance was present in the samples.

The entire arrest was captured by a Saluda County deputy's dashcam, allowing viewers the chance to observe trained professionals come to the conclusion that the most likely substance on a vehicle's hood is illegal drugs. Once that conclusion is reached, the tests are deployed and give the deputies all they need to arrest the driver.

Fortunately, this debacle ended with just an arrest. Werts has been reinstated to the football team after passing a drug test. The disruption to his life was minimal, thanks mainly to a prosecutor who decided to escalate lab testing of the substance found on the hood of Werts' car, rather than sit on it until a guilty plea was secured.

Werts didn't get much help from his lawyer, as Balko points out. His lawyer claims the officers were well within the law to do everything they did, so Werts shouldn't even ask for an apology for his arrest. When you let law enforcement walk away from the stupid stuff they do, it makes it that much easier for them to continue doing stupid stuff.

And the stuff they did here is indeed stupid. From Balko:

Do the officers who pulled Werts over really believe that cocaine would remain on the hood of a car after that car was driven at 80 miles per hour? What manner of consuming cocaine would cause the cocaine to stick to the hood? I’m having a difficult time imagine any interaction with the drug that would result in portions of it being stuck to the hood of a car in a manner that could withstand wind at 80 miles per hour.

Given all of that, why would these deputies see a white substance on the hood, and immediately assume it was cocaine, rather than the dozen or so other more likely explanations? Have they ever mistaken bird poop for cocaine before? Why would they decide that this was a substance that needed to be tested at all?

Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is driven by "reasonable officer" standards. There's probably a lawsuit in here, even though it would have very little chance of making it past a motion to dismiss. The questions Balko asks are the questions judges need to ask if Werts decides to sue: is arriving at the conclusion the substance on the hood of a vehicle clocked doing 80 mph is most likely drugs a "reasonable" conclusion? It certainly doesn't seem to be.

This latest failure of field drug tests isn't going to drive the last nail into their flimsy coffin. But it at least swings the hammer a bit.

Filed Under: bird poop, cocaine, drug tests, field test, police, saluda county, shai werts, sled, south carolina