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from the I'm-positive-there-are-false-positives dept.
Pro Publica and The New York Times Magazine have each written about field drug testing by U.S. law enforcement agencies. The tests are undertaken with disposable kits containing chemicals. A sample is brought into contact with the chemicals and there may be a colour change, which is assessed by the officer. The essay tells the story of people against whom criminal charges regarding illegal drugs were filed, with the results of these field testing kits as the primary evidence in the prosecutions.
According to the essay, the use of the kits has various pitfalls which can lead to false positive results. For one thing, analytes which are legal to possess can produce the same colour change as illegal substances. For another, poor lighting which may be encountered in the field can distort the officer's perception of colours. Confirmation bias can occur. Also, officers may receive inadequate (or--the submitter supposes--incorrect) training in the interpretation of the colours. A former Houston police chief offered the opinion that
Officers shouldn't collect and test their own evidence, period. I don't care whether that's cocaine, blood, hair.
The essay mentions gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy (GC-MS), an instrumental method which is typically undertaken in a laboratory, as providing more reliable results. The submitter notes that portable GC-MS equipment does exist (1, 2).
Nationwide, 62 percent of forensics labs do not conduct further testing in cases in which a field drug test was used and the defendant made a guilty plea. However, the Houston crime laboratory has been doing such testing. They have found that false positives are commonplace. The district attorney's office for Harris County, Texas, which handles cases from Houston, has been informed about those test results and is undertaking "efforts to overturn wrongful convictions." In three years, about as many such convictions have been overturned in Harris County as in the rest of the United States.
Referenced stories:
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 26 2016, @08:29PM
Jury nullification isn't a real solution to the problem of an unjust law or unjust legal system.
The reason is that jury nullification only works for defendants at least 1 juror likes personally. Which can be a problem if you're in the Bible Belt with an all-white all-conservative-Christian jury, and you're a gay black Satanist (or the other way around in Castro, for that matter). If nearly everybody can get busted for dope, whether or not they actually have any, but only some people are going to jail for it, then effectively what you've made illegal is not having dope but being a gay black Satanist in the Bible Belt.
And the flip side is also a problem: If juries are routinely nullifying, then defendants at least 1 juror likes can now commit crimes with impunity. This problem isn't theoretical, either, as the families of people who were lynched back in the day can tell you all about.
The real solution to the problem, of course, is to repeal the laws that you'd rather like to engage in jury nullification to make unenforceable. The good news is that the Overton Window (the range of ideas that are not considered political suicide) regarding victimless crimes is shifting significantly. To give you an idea of how significant, Bernie Sanders did very well for himself this election calling for an end to the War on Drugs, and Gary Johnson who is calling for the same thing is also doing better now than any Libertarian candidate before him. I have every reason to believe that pot will be completely legalized within the next decade or so, and I wouldn't be surprised to see opiates and meth and the like begin to be treated more like a medical rather than criminal problem.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.