Prosecutors Looking Into $2 Field Drug Tests After Investigation, Figure Defense Attorneys Should Do All The Work
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The fallout from cheap field drug tests continues. The lab that does actual testing of seized substances for the Las Vegas PD had previously expressed its doubts about the field tests' reliability, but nothing changed. Officers continued to use the tests and defendants continued to enter into plea bargains based on questionable evidence.The Las Vegas PD knew the tests were highly fallible. After all, the department had signed off on a report saying as much and handed it into the DOJ in exchange for federal grant money. But cops still used them and prosecutors still relied on them when pursuing convictions.Nothing changed until ProPublica stepped in with its own investigation into the faulty drug tests. In response to this reporting, prosecutors are finally taking a closer look at the tests officers deploy hundreds of times a year.The Clark County District Attorney’s Office in Nevada established a conviction review unit in October. In what appears to be one of its first efforts, the unit has been seeking information about problematic convictions resulting from one of the office’s routine practices: accepting guilty pleas in drug cases that rely largely on the results of field tests done by police that can be unreliable. Unfortunately, this initial move is being handled poorly. Rather than have its prosecutors reexamine any cases relying on field-tested evidence, the DA's office is dumping the workload on already-burdened public defenders.Daniel Silverstein, head of the newly formed unit, in November asked a statewide organization of defense lawyers for any information they had on cases that might have involved inaccurate field tests, and thus resulted in potentially wrongful convictions. This isn't the defense attorneys' problem. While they're definitely interested in a solution, the wrongful convictions were pursued by the DA's office and its attorneys should be the ones looking for convictions that might need to be overturned. The DA's office has more resources and it is the entity that chose to continue pursuing cases against citizens based on nothing more than unreliable $2 test kits.Howard Brooks, the Clark County Public Defender’s appellate director, called the district attorney request to defense attorneys “an absurd challenge.” Brooks argued it is the duty of prosecutors to verify the integrity of their convictions — both those that have already been won and those being brokered today in Clark County courts. Then there's the fact that this examination process won't end up reversing many convictions. As ProPublica points out, seized evidence is routinely destroyed after convictions are obtained. And while lab tests are run on seized substances, that only happens if everyone coordinates to run the samples through as soon as possible. This is something that almost never happens.Prosecutors routinely delay crime lab analysis to check results of field tests until the eve of trial, court records show. When defendants plead guilty at preliminary hearings, the alleged drugs rarely even reach the lab. In Clark County last year, according to court data, just eight of 4,633 drug convictions went to trial. Add to that the fact that the PD itself has never tracked the failure rate of its field drug tests, despite having access to this data. It may have signed off on a damning report, but its discoveries about the tests' fallibility changed nothing about its day-to-day business. The drug tests remained in use by the police department and were treated as unquestionable evidence by the DA's office when pushing for plea deals.About the only immediate positive result of this investigation is the higher bar prosecutors will have to clear before admitting field drug test results as evidence. The state's public defenders are planning to challenge every field drug test submission during evidentiary hearings. Of course, this assumes the judicial process will even make it this far.For many of the accused, accepting plea deals nets them shorter sentences and a slightly less-awful future than going to trial might. Defendants often accept deals just to avoid actual jail time. On the prosecution scorecard, it still counts as a win. As a bonus, additional evidence possibly pointing to the field tests' abysmal accuracy rate vanishes, allowing cops, prosecutors, and sympathetic judges to continue lying to themselves about the tests' accuracy.
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Tanzanian Farmers Face 12 Years In Prison For Selling Seeds As They've Done For Generations
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Seeds might not seem to have much to do with digital technology, but the DNA that lies at their heart is in fact digital information, and thus many of the issues that concern Techdirt also apply here. One of the key battlegrounds for seeds and their ownership is Africa, as we discussed back in 2013. The Belgian site Mondiaal Nieuws has an update on what's happening in one of the poorest African countries, Tanzania. Things aren't looking good there following a change in the relevant law:"If you buy seeds from Syngenta or Monsanto under the new legislation, they will retain the intellectual property rights. If you save seeds from your first harvest, you can use them only on your own piece of land for non-commercial purposes. You're not allowed to share them with your neighbors or with your sister-in-law in a different village, and you cannot sell them for sure. But that's the entire foundation of the seed system in Africa", says Michael Farrelly [from an organic farming movement in Tanzania].
Under the new law, Tanzanian farmers risk a prison sentence of at least 12 years or a fine of over €205,300 [about $213,000], or both, if they sell seeds that are not certified.
"That's an amount that a Tanzanian farmer cannot even start to imagine. The average wage is still less than 2 US dollars a day", says Janet Maro, head of Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT). The article indicates that "certified" in this context means patented. That's obviously a problem for small-scale farmers, since they would be unable to afford to go through the patenting process, even if that were even a realistic option. For multinationals like Syngenta or Monsanto, by contrast, patenting is as natural as breathing, and so the new system will strengthen their hand considerably. "As a result, the farmers' seed system will collapse, because they can't sell their own seeds", according to Janet Maro. "Multinationals will provide our country with seeds and all the farmers will have to buy them from them. That means that we will lose biodiversity, because it is impossible for them to investigate and patent all the seeds we need. We're going to end up with fewer types of seeds." Here's why this is all happening:Tanzania applied the legislation concerning intellectual property rights on seeds as a condition for receiving development assistance through the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN). The NAFSN was launched in 2012 by the G8 with the goal to help 50 million people out of poverty and hunger in the ten African partner countries through a public-private partnership. The initiative receives the support of the EU, the US, the UK, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. What's particularly regrettable here is not just the loss of biodiversity, and the fact that African farmers will be beholden to Western corporations, but that the NAFSN program will achieve the opposite of its stated aims, and end up taking away what little independence Tanzanian farmers enjoyed under the traditional seed system. No wonder, then, that last year Members of the European Parliament called for the NAFSN to "radically alter its mission". Judging by what's happening in Tanzania, there's no sign of that happening.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
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