Wednesday, December 28, 2011

A miscarriage of justice on marijuana | Stewart J Lawrence and John Kelly

6:18 AM | Posted by Free Game Zone | | Edit Post

U.S. police

use scientific proof wrong drug seizures that gives "false positives" citizens difficult to plea bargaining

As highly publicized "war on drugs" are not already facing a credibility gap, two judges of the Superior Court USA - A Washington, DC, one in Colorado - raise questions as to whether the Federal Drug Agency (DEA) and the police use "pseudo-scientific" methods of identifying drugs to bust hundreds of thousands of suspected drug users, many of them from center of the city minority children. A faulty drug test means that innocent people are imprisoned as suspects, denied their rights to due process and then pressed to accept plea bargains, he is guilty or not .

is at stake in the growing controversy is whether the current methods of identification of drugs, including the widely used "Levine Duquenois-test", you can check - and accuracy - that the police confiscate the substance during an arrest to say it is. The test, a variation of simple techniques first used in 1930, exposed to the substance suspected of a chemical liquid, and if it turns a certain color - purple, in the case of marijuana -. It is considered likely that the real thing

But according to defense experts advanced, including Heather Harris, a highly trained chemist who went head to head with the DEA laboratory "experts" and won, there are hundreds of substances legal, many of them readily available on the market, or in nature, usually turn purple in the same test conditions. This means that the Duquenois test, while the marijuana to power "in" as a theoretical possibility, perhaps, can not confirm its presence, either - at least not "beyond a reasonable doubt" required a legal limit Crime

But that did not stop the police to use the extended test. In a recent case in Florida, police came upon a middle-aged woman, bird watcher in a public park and stopped after seeing your piece of a substance in a package in her purse, which proved later be wiser than had bought as incense for your home. The woman tried to inform the police about the medicinal and spiritual wisdom, and even Google the site of the manufacturer of your laptop, which tied the game on the container. But police broke anyway, after that the substance became purple in a laboratory test. She now plans to sue for damages.
  • In fact, the problem of testing "false positive" drug is not only limited to substances that appear to look like marijuana. In Canada, owners of a family business in chocolate have been identified as drug dealers dangerous Duquenois a field test, and found themselves in prison.
  • Chocolate
    • The case may seem extreme, but is happening all over the United States, experts say. This is partly due to incentives for payment in question. The police can win large amounts of overtime by making a routine drug bust, especially after hours, but even a name for the practice ". Necks of dollars "in New York, where possession of less than one ounce of marijuana was decriminalized in recent years, marijuana busts have not decreased but increased dramatically - from 5,000 to about 30,000 per year - partly because the police found a
course Duquenois-Levine is not the only test approved by the DEA drug available. A more conclusive test, known as GC / MS, using more advanced techniques, can also be performed, but the accused and even many lawyers are often unaware that they can not insist on a test, or have little incentive to do so.

and, indeed, even the test of GC / MS is increasingly under fire, because the DEA is no standard laboratory protocols to govern their use, and caused the wrath of the judges, including Washington and Colorado to exaggerate the reliability of evidence in court. In a recent case, a Colorado judge of the Superior Court dismissed all claims of the DEA in a drug case after his testimony, when questioned, could not show proof of GC / MS performed in one of its 18 national laboratories was reliable. This is a legal precedent that the winding DEA, experts say.


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