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Title: Innocent Couple Locked in a Cage for Months Because Cops Mistook Baking Soda for Cocaine
Source:
Free Thought Project
URL Source: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/in ... a-cocaine/#ArLUl2FeCCPrpbEf.99
Published: Nov 19, 2016
Author: Matt Agorist
Post Date: 2016-11-20 14:22:42 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 8536
Comments: 32
Fort Chaffe, AR — On May 8 of this year, Gale Griffin and her husband Wendall Harvey, who’ve been driving trucks together for the last seven years, were targeted by public servants whose job it is to seek out arbitrary substances deemed illegal by the state. While it is certainly bad enough that the state kidnaps, cages, and kills people for ingesting a substance that makes them happy — they are often dead wrong — and innocent people suffer at the hands of police incompetence. After being falsely accused of possessing cocaine, Griffin and Harvey are living proof that the war on drugs lays waste to any and all lives, not just those who use drugs. In May, Griffin and Harvey were on a delivery. The couple has a security clearance and has been delivering explosive ingredients since 2009. However, they were targeted by incompetent cops who used criminally ineffective drug test kits on a white powdery substance found inside the couple’s truck. The kit identified the substance as cocaine. But it was not cocaine. It was baking soda Griffin used for stomach problems. “I use baking soda for everything,” said Griffin. “When you start talking about a schedule one controlled substance, your talking about a major case,” Fort Chaffee Police Chief Chuck Bowen said of the case in May, apparently ecstatic that his officers had found a couple with some cocaine. The police at Fort Chaffee thought they had caught themselves two dangerous cocaine traffickers with 13 ounces of fine white powder. “I saw the guy hand out a bag of baking soda outside the driver’s door, and I told him that’s just baking soda, and I think that’s when it started,” said Harvey. The Barling Police Department’s narcotic unit, who specializes in depriving people of their freedom for possessing substances, was called to the scene. “We tested it three different times out of two different kits to make sure that we weren’t having any issue, and each time we got a positive for controlled substance,” said Chief Bowen. “They thought we had like 13.22 ounces of cocaine, and the guy said I had over $300,000 in cocaine,” said Griffin. Harvey, who is a former cop from Indiana was shocked to learn that he’d been traveling with cocaine. Since he was a former LEO, he never doubted that the police could have possibly been wrong. “How did cocaine get into the baking soda?” Harvey recalled. “You don’t even doubt the tests because I guess I’m stupid, I’m just a citizen and it never occurred to me that the tests were invalid,” said Harvey. “They’re not infallible. They are subject to misreadings,” explained Greg Parrish, Director of the Public Defender Commission. “There’s a lot of these instances where they get false positives.” Yet, he and his band of government drug enforcers continue to use them! For being in possession of 13 ounces of baking soda, the couple was kidnapped and thrown in a cage. “The door opened, and there’s a woman in the top bunk and a woman in the bottom bunk and a woman on the floor, and I had to sleep on the floor on the other side right next to the toilet,” recalled Griffin. “I thought that I’d died and gone to hell. Really.” They couple would be held in a cell for 10 days before they even got to speak to a public defender. Since their cellphones were confiscated and they did not know their family members’ phone numbers by heart, four weeks went by before they were able to communicate to Harvey’s son that they’d been thrown in jail. “I felt like I was somewhere that didn’t feel like America. I can’t call anybody, nobody knows where I’m at,” said Harvey. But he was in America, and it’s in America where people get treated like this over substances deemed illegal by the state. After continuous negligence and dereliction, it would be four more weeks before the police would finally figure out that the substance in the bags was not cocaine. After spending two months in jail for a crime entirely fabricated by those sworn to protect them, they were released. However, the damage was already done and their lives had been ruined. After their employer found out they were in jail, the couple was fired and their security clearances revoked. Also, they couldn’t go back to work even if they hadn’t lost their jobs as it took two additional months for the couple to get their trucks out of impound. When asked how an innocent couple could be kidnapped and locked in a cage for carrying around baking soda, Chief Bowen callously responded, “We’re not chemists and we don’t roll with a chemistry set in the back of police cars.” Well chief Bowen, these are people’s lives. If you are going to be depriving people of their freedom for completely legal substances, maybe it’s high time you do start to ‘roll with a chemistry set in the back of police cars.’ “Two law-abiding working people, and there’s no telling how many mistakes they’ve made. It’s a mistake, but these mistakes happen quite often I think,” said Harvey — and he’s right. Thousands of innocent people have been deprived of their freedom as a result of these faulty tests. According to the national litigation and public policy organization, the Innocence Project, at any given time there are an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 innocent people currently locked in cages in U.S. prisons. Couple this staggering number with the number of people locked up for non-violent drug possession and the United States looks more like the Gulag of the 1930’s than the Land of the Free. But how can so many innocent people be locked up, how does the state present evidence, that it doesn’t have, to get a conviction? Well, the folks at the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the U.S., Marijuana Policy Project, made a short video that explains just how easy it is for police to turn an entirely innocent person into a criminal. During the short video below, the researchers demonstrate how easy it is for police to generate a false positive during a field test for drugs. The group tests over the counter Tylenol PM in a police test kit for cocaine — the test kit says the Tylenol is cocaine. The group also tests the most popular chocolate in the world, Hershey’s chocolate, for marijuana, it also tests positive. Perhaps the most disturbing test was when the group put absolutely nothing into the field test kit, and they received a positive result. The implications associated with wrongfully accusing and then claiming to have evidence of an individual in possession of an illegal substance are formidable — to say the least. Most people are simply unaware of the fact that police test kits are a crapshoot. According to Forensic Resources: The director of a lab recognized by the International Association of Chiefs of Police for forensic science excellence has called field drug testing kits “totally useless” due to the possibility of false positives. In laboratory experiments, at least two brands of field testing kits have been shown to produce false positives in tests of Mucinex, chocolate, aspirin, chocolate, and oregano. In spite of these recommendations and multiple examples of innocent people being incarcerated for their error, police departments across the country continue to employ the use of these “totally useless” kits. In October, college student John Harrington was thrown in prison after police, with one of these field drug test kits, tested sugar, and came up with a false positive for cocaine. “Really, I’m really in jail right now for powdered sugar, ” John Harrington thought after it happened. We’ve also seen the case in which police mistook Jolly Ranchers for meth and jailed an innocent man. Love Olatunijojo, 25, and an unidentified friend purchased Jolly Ranchers at the It’Sugar candy emporium in Coney Island in June of 2013. Several blocks away, cops stopped and searched the friends and mistook the candies for crystal meth. Olatunijojo was then thrown in jail. In August, we reported on the story of a man who was held in prison for over four months because police falsely identified salt as crystal meth. And the list goes on… What does it say about police departments across the country who knowingly use test kits that will implicate innocent people in a crime that they did not commit that will land them in jail? It is bad enough that the state will kidnap, cage and kill people when they possess a substance deemed illegal by the state. But, when they kidnap, cage and kill people because of their own negligence involved in testing someone’s personal items — they stoop to an entirely new low.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 21.
#1. To: Deckard (#0)
Not one cop thought to TASTE the powder? NOT ONE FRICKIN COP???
If you were cop and you did TASTE this powder….then your “muscles would start contracting within minutes….nausea and vomiting would follow soon thereafter. Next, the muscle convulsions would lead to asphyxiation that would, in turn, kill you. Death would occur within half an hour after.” The powder is Strychnine. Come on, man….you really don’t want cops TASTE testing some unknown powder substance….do you? Well, if you were Deckard….you may.
Gatlin, upon whom does the burden of proof fall? The police, or the accused?
Gatlin, upon whom does the burden of proof fall? In criminal cases, the burden of proof falls on the prosecutor.
It falls upon the state. Prosecutors routinely note that to judges that it is the state that presents it's case, not the prosecutor personally, and police are employees of the same state. Your apparent justification for locking up innocent people and ruining their careers is pretty sadistic.
Pinguinite: Ursula K. Le Guin once said something that you definitely need to give close consideration to….she said: What you did with your poorly worded question was to create a false dilemma (also called false dichotomy) when you presented two alternative answers as the only options, whereas other answers were available….one of which would have been the correct answer. I would have expected the false dichotomy to be created by the likes of those libertarian dumbasses: Buckeroo, Deckard or Honda….but I figured you to be smart enough not do such a thing. Extract from the Legal Dictionary: Exactly where did I “justify locking up innocent people and ruining their careers?” All did in my in my Post #2 to Justified was to ask: If you were a cop, would you TASTE this powder and the powder I showed was Strychnine. Read my post carefully again….and then come back and tell me specifically where I in any way “justified locking up innocent people and ruining their careers. In your haste to condemn me, you are guilty of jumping to a conclusion (officially the jumping to conclusion bias, often abbreviated as JTC, and also referred to as the inference-observation confusion). when you created a communication obstacle where you judged, or decided, something without considering all the options. You really need stop with that …
You need to cut out your melodramatic responses. I didn't condemn you! It's time *YOU* start reading my postings. I said: Do you understand the word "Apparent"? It's related to the word: "Appear". You can look those words up, perhaps. Your postings on this thread APPEAR to be an attempt to justify locking up innocent people and ruining their careers because you *apparently* suggest cops don't have a safe way to reliably test for drugs in the field. Any neutral person would come to that conclusion. But I am glad to see that you are *apparently* now denying this. Your most recent post to me now *implies* that you are at least neutral on the subject of innocent people being locked up and their careers ruined. Maybe you'll even come out and give a clarifying statement as to the nature of your opinion, but I guess it's more likely you'll continue trying to entertain LF readers with your silly word games and refuse to make any statement that condemns the treatment the couple received at the hands of the police and/or the system that ruined them.
It is called probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A positive presumptive field drug test provides probable cause. That must be subjected to a confirmatory lab test to constitute proof.
Agreed. Only a trial (or guilty plea) can formally & officially conclude whether there was a crime committed. In the present case however, it seems charges were dropped with no trial, but the couple in question nonetheless suffered time in jail and a loss of their income, which unless they are compensated by the jurisdiction involved, is a loss of property and liberty without due process in violation of the 4th Amendment. It seems the police could have handled the matter more expeditiously to minimize these hardships.
#27. To: Pinguinite (#21)
The charges were dropped after the confirmatory lab test failed to show the presence of an illegal substance. Due process was observed. The detention was based upon probable cause. The evidence was subjected to laboratory testing. As you observe, the confirmation could (should) have been delivered more quickly. It still appears they have no case to bring. The Sebastian County police could not have done much to handle it more quickly. They had to send the sample off to the Arkansas State Crime Lab. The delay was at the State Crime Lab, not the county police. There is no indication the field test was defective. A negative result indicates the absence of the target substance. A positive result indiates probable presence of the target substance or component of the target substance. It may test positive for a component substance found in both cocaine and baking soda. http://katv.com/news/local/baking-soda-confused-for-cocaine-lands-innocent-couple-behind-bars KATV Little Rock noted, "In Florida, the Department of Law Enforcement Lab Systems found 21 percent of the substances that tested positive for meth in the field gave a negative result in the crime lab." Stated differently, 79% of the tests for meth were confirmed as meth. It meets the standard for probable cause, but not for admissible proof. In the instant case, they tested the substance three times, using two different kits. Assuming the test typically yielded a false positive 25% of the time (1:4), the probability of two false positives in a row would be 1:16 and the probability of three false positives in a row would be 1:64 — unless the chemical subcomponent targeted by the field test was present in the baking soda (which proves nothing). The search could not be challenged as it was upon entry to a military base. When you enter, you volunteer to be searched, warrants and probable cause not required. Your only choice is to not enter the base. The search was performed by the Army National Guard, not the civilian police. It may be notable that their clearances (or more likely access authorizations) were pulled and evidently not yet returned. There is not much of anything to do about that.
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#2. To: jeremiad, Deckard (#1)
(Edited)
Not one cop thought to TASTE the powder? NOT ONE FRICKIN COP???
If you were a cop, would you TASTE this powder: 
Strychnine is an alkaloid that is bitter, colorless and crystalline, and it is used as a pesticide mostly for killing small animals. Though it occurs naturally, it is also produced in the lab, and is deadly. If it enter into your body through inhalation, ingestion or absorption. your muscles will start contracting within minutes. Nausea and vomiting will follow soon after. The muscle convulsions will lead to asphyxiation that will, in turn, kill you. Death will occur with half an hour after ingestion of the poison.
#4. To: Gatlin (#2)
Come on, man….you really don’t want cops TASTE testing some unknown powder substance….do you?
#5. To: Pinguinite (#4)
(Edited)
Come on, man….you really don’t want cops TASTE testing some unknown powder substance….do you?
Neither.
The police, or the accused?
#7. To: Gatlin (#5)
In criminal cases, the burden of proof falls on the prosecutor.
#8. To: Pinguinite, Justified (#7)
(Edited)
Gatlin, upon whom does the burden of proof fall?
I answered:
The police, or the accused? Neither. In criminal cases, the burden of proof falls on the prosecutor.
You did not accept my correct answer and you came back with: It falls upon the state.
Ahem….then why didn’t you list the state as an answer option? There are no right answers to wrong questions, dumbass.
Well, to be perfectly honest with you (as I am always), the word “dumbass.” was not part of her original quote. I added “dumbass” for your benefit since you went “butterfly” on me and fluttered all over the place searching for some wriggle room and a way out to CYA on a poorly worded question. Prosecutors routinely note that to judges that it is the state that presents it's case, not the prosecutor personally …
[…] In criminal cases, the burden of proof is placed on the prosecution [prosecutor], who must demonstrate that the defendant is guilty before a jury may convict him or her. […]
Your apparent justification for locking up innocent people and ruining their careers is pretty sadistic.
WOAH….hold on a minute.
#12. To: Gatlin (#8)
In your haste to condemn me, you are guilty of jumping to a conclusion
Your apparent justification for locking up innocent people and ruining their careers is pretty sadistic.
#17. To: Pinguinite, Gatlin (#12)
Your postings on this thread APPEAR to be an attempt to justify locking up innocent people and ruining their careers because you *apparently* suggest cops don't have a safe way to reliably test for drugs in the field. Any neutral person would come to that conclusion.
#21. To: nolu chan (#17)
It is called probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A positive presumptive field drug test provides probable cause. That must be subjected to a confirmatory lab test to constitute proof.
Replies to Comment # 21. It seems the police could have handled the matter more expeditiously to minimize these hardships.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 21.
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