A Bryn Mawr student gets caught at an airport with condoms filled with flour. She and her dorm mates made them as gag squeeze-toy stress relievers during finals. A field test — conducted twice — indicates that the condoms are filled with opium, cocaine, and amphetamines. The girl spends the next three weeks in jail on drug charges that could bring 20 years in prison.

A jail guard recognizes the girl from volunteer work, believes her story, and tips off local Catholic groups to her cause. The group gets her competent representation, who demands the substance be retested. More extensive tests show it was flour after all.

Here’s my favorite part:

Ellen Green-Ceisler, who directed the Police Department’s Office of Integrity and Accountability from 1997 to 2005, called Lee’s case highly unusual. Field tests are rarely wrong.

“I’ve looked at thousands of these cases, and in the context of trained narcotics officers, it almost never happens,” she said.

Sure. And drug-sniffing dogs are almost never wrong, either.

Also, ya’ gotta’ wonder if things would have turned out as they did had the suspect had been someone less sympathetic than an academic honor student at Bryn Mawr.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2005 at 4:09 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.