PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Chong and Lim are now suing for costs, which the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has refused to pay. The case has been adjourned to March." (I will be following developments closely. HL)
STORY: "Mother and Daughter Spend Months in Jail After Cops Mistake Tea for Drugs," by Reporter Gavin Butler, published by Vice on November 17, 2021.
SUB-HEADING: "The two served time even while police were aware of the problems with the testing of the drugs."
PHOTO CAPTION: "Border authorities initially misidentified the brown ginger tea as an illegal stimulant called Phenmetrazine.:
GIST: "When Vun Pui “Connie” Chong and her daughter, San Yan Melanie Lim, imported 25 kilograms of brown ginger tea into Australia this year, they intended to sell it at a marked-up rate. The beverage is a well-known remedy for period pain in the women’s home country of Malaysia. All going to plan, they stood to make a profit of about $90 AUD.
It didn’t. Instead, heavily-armed police officers raided Chong and Lim’s home in south-west Sydney in January, after Australian Border Force (ABF) officials intercepted the tea packets at the international airport and wrongly identified their contents as amphetamine. The women were arrested and jailed for four months – despite the fact that authorities were made aware of problems with the tests used to identify the substance in the weeks and months following.
Sydney’s Downing Local Court heard that the ABF used a presumptive “hazmat” test to identify the imported product as Phenmetrazine, an illegal stimulant drug commonly used for recreational purposes. Police subsequently confiscated the contents of the tea packets and replaced them with an inert substance, which was delivered to the women’s home and seized when authorities raided it the next day.
The court also heard, however, that the presumptive test merely generated a spectrum of similar substances to Phenmetrazine – and that the illicit drug was fourth most likely behind sugar, sucrose and powdered sugar.
“Mate in a nutshell we cannot take from this ABF result that the sample contains or does not contain Phenmetrazine,” a forensic operator from the Australian Federal Police wrote to Detective Senior Constable Tara Conaghan, the officer in charge of the investigation, in February, adding that she would need to have the sample tested independently to be sure.
The court heard that Conaghan did not pass this information onto the women’s defence team, nor did she inform them when she asked for forensic testing of the samples to be expedited after another officer from AFP emailed her claiming that laboratory results from two earlier seizures of similar products had determined there were “no prohibited substances detected.”
Chong and Lim were not bailed until May, and the charges against them were not withdrawn until August 10, after the New South Wales Police received their own forensic analysis.
When cross-examining Conaghan, Chong’s barrister Steve Boland asked her why she didn’t disclose the new information to the detainees sooner – to which she replied: “Because the drugs were still waiting to be completely tested.”
“So, what, they’ve got to sit it out in jail?” Boland asked, and was met with silence, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. “I’ll assume that question is not going to be answered,” he said.
Chong and Lim are now suing for costs, which the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has refused to pay. The case has been adjourned to March."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog; -----------------------------------------------------------------
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL, FINAL WORD: "It is incredibly easy to convict an innocent person, but it's exceedingly difficult to undo such a devastating injustice.
Jennifer Givens: DirectorL UVA Innocence Project.
