Disastrous Drug Arrests

Cheese. Maple Syrup. Tortillas. The Crushed-Up Corner of a Pop Tart. A Jolly Rancher. An article appearing on Slate details eight incidents across the country involving controlled substances that—when tested in a crime lab—turned out to be some sort of candy or a piece of cheese.

Humor is one of the great features of working in the criminal justice system. Hilarious characters and circumstances abound. Other times, depending on your vantage, it is not fun at all. Consider the rare, unique kind of vantage point of this scenario: police searched you, found on you suspicious looking red and blue crystalline rocks, arrested you for possession of meth. Then, you bond out after you’ve spent an excruciating day or several days in jail. Later still, possibly much later, police discover that these sticky little rectangles were not a Schedule I Controlled Substance, but colorful Jolly Ranchers candy.

This is a funny scenario in the way that sitcom hijinks are funny. Obviously it’s also incredibly sad and unfortunate. This would be enough to put all of us through most of the 5 stages of loss and grief. This incident occurred in 2012 in New York (because the police were suspicious of the bright colors, these must have been fans of Breaking Bad).

False Convictions

The Slate article mentions the head-shaking story of the guy who crushed up the corner of a pop tart in North Carolina and sold it to an undercover officer. But cases just like that end up tragically, because defendants plead guilty to get out of jail instead of waiting for an exonerating lab report. In Houston alone, drug convictions were reversed 33 times in 2014.

The criminal justice system is famous for getting jammed up and moving slowly, almost glacially at times. Some of my clients get impatient with having to go to court more than once over a longish period of time. All I can do is explain the built-in delays in the simplest way, shrug, and give them my best it-is-what-it-is face. Often the slowness is simply a function of the system, although occasionally it is something more harmful, like in these drug cases. In the last couple of years false convictions stemming from long delays in getting lab reports back have become shockingly frequent, as I wrote about recently.

Have you been arrested for a crime? Call my office: 817-689-7002. Come into the office for a free and confidential case evaluation. Our office is downtown: 108 Main Street, Fort Worth, TX,76102