STORY: "Cops mistook Krispy Kreme doughnut glaze for meth, Orlando man says," by reporter Rene Stutzman, published by the Orlando Sentinel on July 27, 2016.
SUB-HEADING: "Daniel Rushing was arrested after an Orlando cop searched his car and tested Krispy Kreme doughnut glaze as positive for methamphetamine. He was charged with possession of meth and carrying a firearm."
SUB-HEADING: "Road-side drug tests get it wrong. Orlando man says he went to jail because of doughnut glaze."
GIST: "Daniel Rushing treats himself to a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other Wednesday. He used to eat them in his car. Not anymore. Not since a pair of Orlando police officers pulled him over, spotted four tiny flakes of glaze on his floorboard and arrested him, saying they were pieces of crystal methamphetamine. The officers did two roadside drug tests and both came back positive for the illegal substance, according to his arrest report. He was handcuffed, arrested, taken to the county jail and strip searched, he said. A state crime lab, however, did another test several weeks later and cleared him.........The officer who made the arrest, Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins, an eight-year department veteran, had staked out the 7-Eleven because of complaints about drug activity, she wrote in her report. She pulled over Rushing because he failed to come to a full stop before pulling out of the convenience store. When Rushing opened his wallet, she saw that he had a concealed weapons permit, she wrote. He told her that he had a gun, and she asked him to step out of his car, a small Chevy. That's when she spotted "a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were," she wrote. "I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic," she wrote. She asked for permission to search his vehicle, the report says, and Rushing agreed. "I didn't have anything to hide," he said. "I'll never let anyone search my car again." Riggs-Hopkins and other officers spotted three other pieces of the suspicious substance in his car, according to the report. "I kept telling them, 'That's … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, 'No, it's meth, crystal meth.'" His arrest report confirms that he tried to tell them. "Rushing stated that the substance is sugar from a Krispie Kreme Donut that he ate," Riggs-Hopkins wrote. She booked him into the county jail on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with a firearm. He was locked up for about 10 hours before his release on $2,500 bond, he said. According to FDLE, an analyst in its Orlando crime lab did not try to identify what police found in his car. She only checked to determine whether it was an illegal drug and confirmed that it was not. Three days later, the State Attorney's Office in Orlando filed paperwork, saying that it was dropping the case.........The Orlando Police Department did not explain why the two drug field tests that Riggs-Hopkins conducted were wrong. When asked how many other road-side drug tests have produced false positive results, an OPD spokeswoman wrote, "At this time, we have no responsive records. … There is no mechanism in place for easily tracking the number of, or results of, field drug testing." FDLE spokeswoman Molly Best wrote that her agency has no information about the prevalence of false-positive field drug tests. The New York Times reported on July 7 that its review of FDLE data showed that 21 percent of the time, drug evidence that was listed by local authorities as methamphetamine turned out to be something else. In its statement, OPD described the arrest as a lawful one."
The entire story can be found at:
See New York Times story referred to above at the link below: (How a $2.00 roadside drug test sends innocent people to jail): Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinelyproduce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors across the country still using them?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside-drug-test-sends-innocent-people-to-jail.html?_r=0
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts.
The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to:
Harold Levy;
