Get caught with breath mints, spend three months in jail and lose everything

Narcotics field testing kits have long-since proven themselves to be disturbingly unreliable as they will often pull up false positives on anything from chocolate chip cookies to soap, with deodorant and billiards chalk in between. Now, a new item can be added to that list of stuff-you-mustn't-own-lest-you-be-thrown-in-jail-for-possession: breath mints.

As silly or borderline amusing as that may sound, the story behind the revelation is severely less so. Witness how Donald May was caught by a crooked cop and lost everything over mere breath mints.

May was pulled over for an expired tag on his car. When the officer walked up to him, he noticed something white in May’s mouth. May said it was breath mints, but the officer thought it was crack cocaine.

“He took them out of my mouth and put them in a baggy and locked me up [for] possession of cocaine and tampering with evidence,” May explained.The officer claimed he field-tested the evidence and it tested positive for drugs.

Cops sure love making snap assessments. Too bad they're quite often wrong, as in this case. How 'bout – I dunno – TASTING the fucking mints? Pretty sure that would give you a bit of an answer right then and there.

The officer said he saw May buying drugs while he was stopped at an intersection. He also stated in his report May waived his Miranda rights and voluntarily admitted to buying drugs.

May said that never happened.”My client never admitted he purchased crack cocaine. Why would he say that?” attorney Adam Sudbury said.

Simple: he wouldn't. Congratulations, May: you've run into a crooked, lying cop.

As a result of the false arrest, May was thrown in jail and wasn't able to bond out for three long months. During this timespan, he lost his apartment, and the cops even auctioned off his car. Yeah, 'cause that was all of their goddamned business, wasn't it? (Seriously – what the fuck? It's his car!)

The test results did eventually come back clean: he was proven innocent and was released. Too bad he'd lost everything by then: his home, his car, and presumably any job he might've held previously.

I'd normally complain about how cops really need to get a fucking grip on themselves and learn not to treat every single suspect as a proven criminal – but it's becoming increasingly clear they have no interest in being fair, so why bother.

(via The Agitator)