Cotton Candy Arrest

Dasha Fincher is suing Monroe County, Georgia, two deputies, and the company Sirchie, which manufactures a roadside drug test popular with law enforcement for false and malicious arrest. Fincher is seeking equitable relief and monetary damages. 

Fincher spent three months in jail after a car she was riding in was pulled over by cops who thought an old piece of blue cotton candy was methamphetamine. A crime lab found out that they were wrong. 

The two sheriff's deputies said they pulled over the car on New Year's Eve in 2016 because the windows were tinted, but they later admitted the windows were legal. They said they found a clear plastic bag which contained a blue substance, spherical in shape, which was located in the floor board. Fincher and the driver said that it was just a bag of blue cotton candy. 

The officers arrested Fincher and the driver after the roadside test said the substance was positive for methamphetamine. Fincher was charged with trafficking and possession of meth with intent to distribute it.

Propublica published a story in 2016 about the limits of the Nark II despite a marketing campaign by Sirchie who supplies equipment to law enforcement agencies. A year earlier, the Innocence Project published a story that included strange items incorrectly identified by police tests as drugs, leading to wrongful arrests.

Fincher was incarcerated for over three months because she was unable to pay her $1 million cash bond. The crime lab showed that the cotton candy wasn't a controlled substance on March 22, 2017, but Fincher wasn't released from jail until April 4, 2017 when her charges were dropped. However, the charges remained on her record. Fincher missed the birth of her twin grandsons and broke her hand on a concrete wall when she punched it in frustration during her incarceration. The complaint mentions that she also missed her daughter's miscarriage and was unable to console her in jail.

Comments from Allen:
 Let’s start with the stop.  In this case, the “stop for window tint.”

I was told, in a national narcotics crime seminar several years ago, that if you lived within 50 miles of an interstate highway, you were living near a “drug corridor.”  That means, since about 99% of the nation’s population lives within 50 miles of an interstate highway, the highway down the street from your house is an expressway to disburse illegal drugs throughout this country.  The State Police do not want this to happen, so they will be looking for any legal excuse to search every car they stop, so they can look for drugs.

And if your car has out-of-state plates?  Well...maybe your car with all of the Christmas presents purchased in Salt Lake City is hiding meth and cocaine inside those packages.  Even worse, if your car passes through Idaho, where marijuana is illegal, and your plates identify you as coming from Montana, Nevada, California, Oregon or Washington, where marijuana is legal, guess what illegal drug the State Police are sure will be found in your car.

Along with speeding, one of the common excuses police use to stop cars is “illegal window tint.”  Most people do not know that car windows can only be tinted to a specific darkness.  A car window that is too dark can be stopped by police, even if the window tint is legal in the state the car came from, and even if the car was built with that window tint.  Too dark is too dark.

Frankly, the police generally do not care how dark your tinted windows are; if you are stopped for window tint, they are looking for drugs.  This is called a “pretextual stop,” and it is perfectly legal.  However, when the police know that your window tint is legal and stop you anyway, that is an illegal arrest, and any contraband found after an illegal arrest cannot be used to prosecute you for a crime.

Further, if you suffer a significant harm, you can sue the police officers under federal law for a violation of your federal civil rights.  You cannot sue the state, county or city, however, for a federal offense; that would violate state sovereignty, unless you can prove a pattern of illegality that violates civil rights.  That does not mean you cannot actually recover money, however, as police officers are commonly insured against wrongfully arresting people.

In this case, Ms. Fischer sued the county as well as law enforcement officers.  If she can’t prove a pattern of violations of people’s rights by the county, that part of the suit will be dismissed.

Sources for more information:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mbvd/wrongful-arrest-police-mistook-cotton-candy-meth?fbclid=IwAR0Sj3FkXfRnpT3EcSVrzj1wY3F9dr5ogffXC0AqPfXMXADDfXkChOzGV-M

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

7 Things Lawyers Can't Tell Jurors

Image
 It is a trial lawyer's job to educate jurors, and tell them what they need to know in order to decide cases. Despite this, there are many things, true things, that lawyers are not allowed to tell jurors directly in statements to the jury or indirectly through testimony of their witnesses. Lawyers know these things, though, and I thought you might like to know some of things. #1. A lawyer can't tell the jurors anything that happened during settlement negotiations. He cannot let the jurors know, when asking them to make the defendant pay his client $100,000 that the defendant agreed to pay him $80,000 prior to the trial. The reason for this is that you want settlement negotiations to be very open. You don't want to damage a negotiation session because someone is afraid that what they say will get repeated to a jury if you don't strike a deal. #2 In Idaho, a lawyer can't tell the jurors that the defendant has insurance. In many other states, he can. Bec
Read more

Man Framed by Prosecutor Released After 29 Years in Prison Seeking Lawsuit

Image
19 year old, Charise Kamps, was found raped and strangled to death in her apartment in June 1980. Ralph Armstrong told the police that both of them were at the apartment alone doing cocaine before leaving to go see friends around 9:30 pm. Police said that they learned that Armstrong owed Kamp's boyfriend $400 and witnesses saw Armstrong handing Kamps money that night. However, the money was not found in the apartment, and Armstrong deposited $315 in his bank the next day.The defense argued that he got the money from his brother. One of the neighbors saw a lean, muscular man about 5 feet 5 inches tall with long, dark hair drive up to the apartment. Before the identification process, the police had the witness hypnotized. He was shown a photograph of Armstrong, and After being hypnotized, the witness changed the height of the man he saw. Later at a lineup to have the witness select the man he saw, he chose Armstrong. The other people in the lineup were police officers in wigs
Read more

Tuesday Tip: Reid Interrogation Technique

Image
Various methods have been used in police interrogations to elicit a confession. By far the most popular method used for over seventy years is the Reid Technique. This interrogation method assumes guilty suspects can be identified from certain behavioral cues. It is said to be proven as highly effective at getting confessions; however, there has been criticism about it for many years because it has been linked to many wrongful convictions.  Around 25 percent of post conviction DNA exonerations have been associated with a false confession from authorities using the Reid Technique. Even one of the first cases in which John Reid used this technique turned out to be a false confession. More and more scientists and scholars are saying this approach is based on outdated psychology. There are several components incorporated in this technique, including room design and how the investigator conducts the interview. There are three spatial zones the investigators use, which can be seen in
Read more