Finally major police departments are taking note that these cheap field kids produce false negatives that lead to wrongful convictions, what even worse is the state labs didn’t even validate this fields kits results most of the time and people were forced into wrongful convictions.
The Houston Police Department has ended its longstanding practice of using $2 chemical kits to make drugs arrests, a policy that had contributed to hundreds of wrongful convictions in recent years.
The hundreds of wrongful convictions, reported on by ProPublica and the New York Times last July, had moved then-Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson to require that any positive field test be confirmed in the crime lab before a guilty plea could be won. ProPublica, in a subsequent article on the field tests used to identify fentanyl, had highlighted the threat to police officers.