Janet H. Lee is the Bryn Mawr student falsely arrested at a Philadelphia airport for drug smuggling. Lee had stuffed several condoms full of flour for use as a stress-buster during final exams. When officials found the condoms at the airport, Lee was arrested. Inexplicably, police then conducted a field test, and the condoms came back positive for cocaine and opium. Lee was held in prison for 21 days until further testing revealed the powder to be flour, confirming Lee’s explanation. Lee just settled with the city for $180,000. Unfortunately, the settlement means we’ll never know exactly why those field tests allegedly showed common flour to be something it wasn’t.
Some terrific professionalism among federal drug agents uncovered in a new report by the Justice Department’s inspector general:
In an audit published Friday, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine examined thousands of seizures between October 2003 and November 2005.
Fine’s report states that drug agents rarely counted the cash they took, often didn’t provide receipts for seized money, rarely recorded the seizures in agency ledgers and often didn’t ask their colleagues to witness their counting and handling of the money.
Police in Atlanta rough up a history professor for jaywalking. Or at least that’s what they arrested him for. Seems his real crime was to question the officer’s authoritah.
More puppycide in Wilmington, North Carolina, the same site as the shooting death of college student Peyton Strickland and the messy slaughter of his dog.
Last August, I linked to a disturbing video in which Greg Slate, director of the Police Complaint Center, was violently arrested after trying to get a police complaint form from a police station in Independence, Missouri. Remarkably, after video of the incident came out, police and prosecutors declined to discipline the officer. Instead, they charged Slate with “causing a riot” in the police station. Last November, Slate was acquitted when police cameras inside the station showed he’d done nothing wrong. But not until the judge praised the officer who smacked his head against the plexiglass for “showing restraint.” There has yet to be any disciplinary action taken against the officer.
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on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 9:10 pm by Radley Balko
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