> For those who get arrested due to colorimetric testing, “over 90% of people are taking a plea deal because they can’t afford to remain in jail and wait six months for laboratory tests,” Walsh said.
This touches on a question to which I'd love to know the answer: what would happen if those charged with crimes could not waive their right to a speedy trial and plea deals were disallowed?
For the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense. Disallowing plea deals would remove the possibility of coercing lower-severity conviction pleas.
For the prosecutor: less time to mount a prosecution.
Benefits to courts and jails: much cleaner and more open dockets, jails cleared out much quicker.
Presumably this would lead to more rational charges - fewer charges and charges that were higher priority and easier to prove.
In the short term, prosecutors would have no choice but to drop a huge number of charges as they would be overwhelmed.
EDIT: here's an interesting data point where it looks like NYC passed a law that required prosecutors to have all evidence ready prior to the speedy trial date. It seems like it drove a lot of dismissals of low level stuff:
It's obviously a problem with efficiency, resources and incentives. Earlier court dates is reshuffling deck chairs on the titanic, basically after the ship sank.
Since the problem is about labs and technology, and that the state labs declared themselves too busy to do justice, the solution is to provide accountability for those decision-makers. Just to reinforce: the reporter read the label on these field drug tests police were using to charge crimes, and ascertained that they were unfit for this use; yet the state lab which should have been broadcasting this information to the police, not only failed, but refused to test the same articles for months and months, until the case was literally at trial. I know it wouldn't make good press, but this story should be "labs, labs, labs, what in the world is wrong with state labs". You can't fix it with new laws, you need better people in charge of these labs.
Cynical outcome: the system can't handle the case load and instead of scaling, it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble. Justice between commoners is effectively abandoned as a duty by the state, and left to vigilantism.
> it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble
Oh I got news for you, that already happened.
Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.
And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.
The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.
Waiving rights is weird. It’s well understood that you can’t waive your right not to be a slave, for example. Why should you be able to waive any right? The 6th amendment doesn’t say “unless the accused doesn’t want it.”
Plea deals were illegal for the majority of America's history.
You could help fix this problem by removing the 'trial' tax. Currently you receive a much lower sentence if you take the plea. If a punishment is truly fair based on the crime the sentence should be required by law to be the same in both cases.
Private jails generally don't want this because they are paid by the government for the number of people they hold and many states need the slave labor of the incarcerated.
Another thing that enables the plea bargain system is the existence of bail, which has long been criticized for being a pay-to-win scheme baking inequality into the legal system. It's also seen by other parts of the world as bizarre.
You just...don't hold people before their court date if they're unlikely to harm other people. If they can be released on bail, there's no reason they shouldn't be without the grift.
> The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to state laboratories, which would be far more expensive and could take days or weeks to return results.
Sounds like the govs problem, not the people accused of a crime. Limitations in testing do not justify using inaccurate tools. If it takes weeks, it takes weeks. Gov doesn’t get to ruin innocent lives just because it’s more convenient. At least, they shouldn’t… apparently they do
All of the simple drug tests are intended for use as screening tools, with positive results sent to labs for verification.
> Even colorimetric test makers say their products only screen for the possibility of illegal drugs – and should not be considered tools for verification.
> “NOTE: ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY!” reads one warning for a pack of colorimetric tests.
They should have known this and followed proper procedure.
Also keep this in mind for your employment drug screening. This will typically use more advanced tests for the first pass, but if someone comes up positive then they should automatically send it to the more advanced and accurate screening step. The good testing companies do this automatically but I’ve heard stories where some cheap testing companies did not do this and falsely accused employees didn’t know to request the accurate screening step.
I suspect if you disallow arrests based on these tests and require a lab followup, the tests will cease to be used entirely.
The police know the false positive rate and they'll stop wasting their time and rely on their training and instincts, instead.
There's an implication of automation bias here, too. "It came back blue, so I can just make an arrest knowing that the blue bag told me I should. Not my fault if it's wrong."
Pushing farther, if the law said that if there was a false positive, the arresting officer would have to spend one day in jail per day the suspect was jailed, no cop would ever dare use this test. That demonstrates the amount of trust they actually have in it.
AFAIK some types of drug tests can't measure whether you're high on $drug now or if you're taken it before and you're sober now. If you're driving sober but you've taken $drug yesterday, you might be arrested for DWI.
If these tests can't reliably show you're high at the time the test was taken, don't use them.
For anything other than driving or operating heavy machinery and so on, there's no point in such tests at all. Let people take whatever drugs they want. Just do what we do with legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes - regulate the quality, require an ID card for purchase and tax them.
This will obviously lower organized crime. If you make prostitution legal, you'll lower it even more. There will still be people trying to sell their shitty home made drugs cheaper than the regulated ones - like we have illegal cigarettes, but that's nothing compared to what we have now.
Make drugs less of a taboo. Educate people on harm reduction and make it easy to admit when you have a problem with something.
As a somewhat-educated person without medical education, I've taken almost everything under the sun and still function well within society. It's really possible to use drugs responsibly. If the image you have is a junkie with ragged clothes lying on some old mattress under a bridge sharing a dirty needle, you're only looking at the uneducated people with no safety net from society. Believe it or not, educated drug users are everywhere. We just don't often talk about it like we don't casually mention our fetishes to others in work or academia.
But drugs and sex are fun, maybe too fun, and we can't let the citizens enjoy themselves too much. :/
The purpose of the system is what it does. Here, drug laws result in tens of thousands of wrongful arrests, some portion of which will take the plea deal even though they are innocent. Typically because they are low income and need to get out of holding so they don't lose their job.
Instead they get a record (for nothing) and risk prison. They cannot afford to prove their innocence.
Fundamentally, the problem is that we have too many arrests. An officer arresting someone on the spot because of suspicion should only be done when they are assumed to be endangering people or likely to be victimizing more people. Someone carrying a small amount of drugs is not doing that if they are not visibly impaired.
If they want to take a sample into evidence and have it tested, it can wait a few weeks for real testing and then they can issue a bench warrant.
We really need to start asking for this to be the norm in the US.
105 comments
> For those who get arrested due to colorimetric testing, “over 90% of people are taking a plea deal because they can’t afford to remain in jail and wait six months for laboratory tests,” Walsh said.
This touches on a question to which I'd love to know the answer: what would happen if those charged with crimes could not waive their right to a speedy trial and plea deals were disallowed?
For the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense. Disallowing plea deals would remove the possibility of coercing lower-severity conviction pleas.
For the prosecutor: less time to mount a prosecution.
Benefits to courts and jails: much cleaner and more open dockets, jails cleared out much quicker.
Presumably this would lead to more rational charges - fewer charges and charges that were higher priority and easier to prove.
In the short term, prosecutors would have no choice but to drop a huge number of charges as they would be overwhelmed.
EDIT: here's an interesting data point where it looks like NYC passed a law that required prosecutors to have all evidence ready prior to the speedy trial date. It seems like it drove a lot of dismissals of low level stuff:
https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
Since the problem is about labs and technology, and that the state labs declared themselves too busy to do justice, the solution is to provide accountability for those decision-makers. Just to reinforce: the reporter read the label on these field drug tests police were using to charge crimes, and ascertained that they were unfit for this use; yet the state lab which should have been broadcasting this information to the police, not only failed, but refused to test the same articles for months and months, until the case was literally at trial. I know it wouldn't make good press, but this story should be "labs, labs, labs, what in the world is wrong with state labs". You can't fix it with new laws, you need better people in charge of these labs.
> it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble
Oh I got news for you, that already happened.
Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.
And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.
The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.
You could help fix this problem by removing the 'trial' tax. Currently you receive a much lower sentence if you take the plea. If a punishment is truly fair based on the crime the sentence should be required by law to be the same in both cases.
> ... jails cleared out much quicker
Private jails generally don't want this because they are paid by the government for the number of people they hold and many states need the slave labor of the incarcerated.
You just...don't hold people before their court date if they're unlikely to harm other people. If they can be released on bail, there's no reason they shouldn't be without the grift.
> The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to state laboratories, which would be far more expensive and could take days or weeks to return results.
Sounds like the govs problem, not the people accused of a crime. Limitations in testing do not justify using inaccurate tools. If it takes weeks, it takes weeks. Gov doesn’t get to ruin innocent lives just because it’s more convenient. At least, they shouldn’t… apparently they do
> Even colorimetric test makers say their products only screen for the possibility of illegal drugs – and should not be considered tools for verification.
> “NOTE: ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY!” reads one warning for a pack of colorimetric tests.
They should have known this and followed proper procedure.
Also keep this in mind for your employment drug screening. This will typically use more advanced tests for the first pass, but if someone comes up positive then they should automatically send it to the more advanced and accurate screening step. The good testing companies do this automatically but I’ve heard stories where some cheap testing companies did not do this and falsely accused employees didn’t know to request the accurate screening step.
The police know the false positive rate and they'll stop wasting their time and rely on their training and instincts, instead.
There's an implication of automation bias here, too. "It came back blue, so I can just make an arrest knowing that the blue bag told me I should. Not my fault if it's wrong."
Pushing farther, if the law said that if there was a false positive, the arresting officer would have to spend one day in jail per day the suspect was jailed, no cop would ever dare use this test. That demonstrates the amount of trust they actually have in it.
If these tests can't reliably show you're high at the time the test was taken, don't use them.
For anything other than driving or operating heavy machinery and so on, there's no point in such tests at all. Let people take whatever drugs they want. Just do what we do with legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes - regulate the quality, require an ID card for purchase and tax them.
This will obviously lower organized crime. If you make prostitution legal, you'll lower it even more. There will still be people trying to sell their shitty home made drugs cheaper than the regulated ones - like we have illegal cigarettes, but that's nothing compared to what we have now.
Make drugs less of a taboo. Educate people on harm reduction and make it easy to admit when you have a problem with something.
As a somewhat-educated person without medical education, I've taken almost everything under the sun and still function well within society. It's really possible to use drugs responsibly. If the image you have is a junkie with ragged clothes lying on some old mattress under a bridge sharing a dirty needle, you're only looking at the uneducated people with no safety net from society. Believe it or not, educated drug users are everywhere. We just don't often talk about it like we don't casually mention our fetishes to others in work or academia.
But drugs and sex are fun, maybe too fun, and we can't let the citizens enjoy themselves too much. :/
Instead they get a record (for nothing) and risk prison. They cannot afford to prove their innocence.
If they want to take a sample into evidence and have it tested, it can wait a few weeks for real testing and then they can issue a bench warrant.
We really need to start asking for this to be the norm in the US.