"Tens of thousands" wrongly convicted based on unreliable drug tests

It is hard to say exactly how common false positives are, although a Las Vegas study found that one out of three samples identified as cocaine was in fact something else. In Florida, Gabrielson and Sanders write, “21 percent of evidence that the police listed as methamphetamine after identifying it was not methamphetamine, and half of those false positives were not any kind of illegal drug at all.” Since field tests are widely used and police arrest more than 1 million people for drug possession every year, even a relatively low error rate could lead to thousands of erroneous arrests each year. In their analysis of drug cases in Harris County, Texas (where Albritton was arrested), Gabrielson and Sanders found that 212 people were convicted of possessing a substance that a field test mistakenly identified as an illegal drug between January 2004 and June 2015. “If Albritton’s case is one of hundreds in Houston,” they write, “there is every reason to suspect that it is just one among thousands of wrongful drug convictions that were based on field tests across the United States.”

Despite the dubious nature of the evidence against her, Albritton ended up taking a plea deal that involved a 45-day jail sentence after she was told that she otherwise could spend up to two years behind bars. She ultimately spent just three weeks in jail, but that was the least of her punishment. She lost her job as the manager of an apartment complex in Monroe, Louisiana, and her new status as a felon made it impossible to find steady work that paid nearly as well, which in turn made it difficult to care for a son with cerebral palsy. Her whole life was upended by a crumb on the floor of her car that a lab test later found was not any sort of illegal drug. Albritton had no idea she had been exonerated until Gabrielson and Sanders tracked her down and got in touch with her.