Oh, and if I was the attorney for the defendant, I'd forget suing the field test company. They market the tests as a probable cause test, not a conclusive beyond a reasonable doubt test. The company will blame the prosecutors for relying on the test. I would sue the prosecutor who had the results but failed to dismiss the charges, or at least agree to a release, for another month.
Personally, how would this work? Basically, rather than letting cops commit damages and requiring you to sue to get compensated(occasionally) if they did something
wrong, treat it like a construction company tearing something up to repair something. The repair is the prosecution of the crime. It doesn't matter if the pipes needed fixing so you tore somebody's driveway up, you're fixing the driveway.
IE if you tear apart somebody's car looking for drugs? You owe them something like $100 for wasting their time. Whether you find drugs or not. Slit their seats like I've heard has happened? You now owe for replacement seats or replacing the upholstery. If you do find drugs, then the costs come out of the fine, they don't suddenly become "justified". Throw a flashbang in and destroy a room? You're paying for the room and contents. Etc...
I'd rate time in jail starting at $1k/day pre-trial. And sentencing has to be done in ignorance of the time they have actually spent in jail awaiting trial. Hold somebody for a year, and then sentence them to a month(no 'time served' under this proposal)? You owe them $334k, minus restitution. Restitution is the same deal - done in ignorance of time served, so they can't simply be tweaked to take the owed amount into account.
I'm sure the $1M in bond was done because the prosecutor, before the test results came back, assumed that she was a drug mule with a large amount of meth.
Though I'm not sure that you could even render meth into a cotton candy type form. Methamphetamine hydrochloride salt has a melting point of 170-175C, which is compatible, I guess, with sugar's 140-186C, so you could put it into a candy machine, which works by melting the sugar and "throwing" the melt out into a bowl, where it solidifies into a thread in mid-air. But the sugar is mixed with "floss", which is used to improve the texture and add flavor and such.
Reminds me of *expletive deleted*it like people being
arrested for having
baking soda. In this case, that's over $112k for keeping the two in jail for over 8 weeks, plus damages to their truck. Oh, and even more money until their security clearances are revalidated.
Hell, can't find the link right now, but I remember reading about people getting arrested for suspected drugs when cops opened the
tamper evident packages in grocery bags while investigating people heading home from the grocery store over false drug positives.
Meanwhile prosecutors will offer deals, with defense attorneys pressuring their clients into accepting them, that are "sweet" enough to convince
factually innocent defendants into accepting them as the lower cost option. 45 days vs 2 years? Who wouldn't take that if they're stressed, pressured by their own representative, panicked, unaware of the long term consequences, etc...?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside-drug-test-sends-innocent-people-to-jail.html