Name
Field Drug Tests: Coerced Pleas, Wrongful Convictions, and Racial Injustice
Description

The widespread use of presumptive field drug tests is generating tens of thousands of wrongful arrests in which innocuous substances are misidentified as illegal drugs, leading to the arrest and conviction of innocent people. While the innocence community had long been aware of the field test, no one had previously understood the scope of its use. In 2023, a groundbreaking national survey was conducted by the Quattrone Center suggesting that tests like these - presumptive drug tests used in the field vs. controlled tests in a crime lab - are used in half of America's 1.5 million drug arrests, and that the rate of error from these tests is far greater than ever imagined by the many police agencies that regularly use them. As a result, it appears that these tests are the single largest known cause of wrongful conviction in the United States by a huge margin; and Black people are arrested as a result of inaccurate drug field tests at a rate 3X higher than white people.