Faulty Forensics:
Spotlight on
Roadside Drug Testing
The same roadside drug tests have been used since the 70s and often cost less than three dollars
These tests can be wildly inaccurate. Certain tests that are intended to identify cocaine can also produce a positive when exposed to over 80 different compounds that are not drugs, such as baby formula, donut glaze, or cat litter.
Factors in the environment such as temperature, lighting that prevents the results from being accurately read, and human error from the officer administering the test can also produce false positives.
Faulty roadside drug tests can encourage guilty pleas
When a roadside drug test comes back positive, defendants are incentivized to make a guilty plea.
Given information about how much shorter their sentence will be if they take a plea deal, how costly the process of trial is, in addition to the seemingly strong evidence of the drug test itself, pleading innocent may seem like an ill-advised or irrational course of action for many. Nine out of ten jurisdictions nationwide accept guilty pleas based solely on a roadside drug test, and more than 90% of drug charges come by way of plea deals.
Roadside drug tests are extremely inaccurate
26.5%
3/5 Houston defendants in cases involving false positives were Black
59%
Roadside Drug Testing Case Study: Amy Albritton
In 2010, Amy Albritton was riding in her car with her boyfriend when they were pulled over by Texas police for failing to signal. At that time, police discovered Amy’s boyfriend was driving without a license. An officer thought he spotted a needle in the car and asked for consent to search the vehicle. Amy knew she had nothing to hide, so she consented to the search. No needle was found, but officers pulled a white crumb from the floor and conducted a roadside drug test to detect the presence of cocaine. The test was positive.
Amy was arrested and offered a plea deal. If she went to trial, she faced 2 years in prison. If she took the plea deal, she would be sentenced to 45 days and serve just 21 days. Worried about her housing, job, and child, she chose the plea to get back to her life as soon as she could. The evidence in her case was ordered to be destroyed after the plea. But luckily, that didn’t happen. Due to a backlog, a judge never signed off on the order.
When Amy returned to her life, she had been evicted, her belongings gone, and her job was no longer waiting.
In 2015, journalists from ProPublica began investigating the problems surrounding roadside drug tests. They discovered 212 wrongful convictions in Houston due to roadside drug testing. They tracked Amy down to inform her that the lab found no cocaine in the crumb found in her car. The state had attempted to notify her 3 years after the results came back, but her address on file was no longer up to date and she had not received the notice. ProPublica journalists informed her of the results and in 2016, Amy was fully exonerated.
Read ProPublica’s coverage by Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders.
To learn more, listen to the re-release of Wrongful Conviction Podcast: Junk Science with Amy Albritton, hosted by Josh Dubin and our executive director, Kate Judson.
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Learn more about Roadside Drug Testing forensics on our Resources page. If you’d like to help us fight for justice in American forensic science, please consider donating to the Center for Integrity in Forensic Science.