DRUGS IN DALLAS….Mark Kleiman has a good post today about the Dallas police fake-drug scandal, something I hadn’t heard about before:
Dallas police paid their drug informants based on the quantity of drugs seized. So some informants decided to manufacture cases by planting fake “cocaine” — variously described as the powder used to chalk billiard cues and as ground-up gypsum wallboard — on about 80 Mexican immigrants.
The police did “field tests,” all of which mysteriously registered positive for cocaine, and testified to having witnessed transactions that never happened.
….The public defender’s office refused to pay for independent lab testing, and several of the defendants pleaded guilty to avoid 10- and 20- year mandatory sentences.
Read the whole thing, but note especially that last sentence: “several of the defendants pleaded guilty” despite the fact that they were entirely innocent and had been framed. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you that anyone who pleads guilty must, in fact, actually be guilty.
