Georgia woman spent three months in jail for possession – of cotton candy, lawsuit says
A Georgia woman is suing after she says she was jailed for three months after a faulty drug test mistook a bag of blue cotton candy for methamphetamine, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court in November.
The lawsuit names the board of commissioners in Monroe County, two deputies, and the manufacturer of the drug test, Sirchie Aquisition Company.
The Monroe County attorney did not respond to a request for comment from Newsweek or WTSP.
The lawsuit says it was New Year’s Eve in 2016 when deputies Cody Maples and Allen Henderson conducted a traffic stop on a car in which Dana Fincher was a passenger because the window tint was too dark.
Police asked the driver if they could search the car, according to the lawsuit, and they found “a light blue substance, spherical in shape” in a bag on the floorboard.
An incident report obtained by WMAZ says the officer noticed Fincher “shaking” during the traffic stop, and that she became “very anxious” when asked what was in the baggie.
Fincher and the driver said it was a bag of cotton candy, and one of the officers sniffed it before performing a drug test on it with a Nark II roadside test kit, according to the lawsuit.
The test came back positive for methamphetamine, and Fincher and the driver were arrested. Fincher was eventually charged with trafficking methamphetamine and possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute, according to the lawsuit.
She continued to proclaim her innocence. But when a judge ordered her jailed on a $1 million bail, she could not afford to bond out, and so she remained in jail for about three months while the Georgia Bureau of Investigation conducted a drug test on the blue material, according to the lawsuit.
On March 22, the GBI reported that there was no controlled substance in the material. She was released more than a week later, on April 4, and her charges were dropped on April 18, according to the lawsuit. Information was not available on what happened to the unnamed driver.
Fincher said her incarceration caused her to miss several serious life events, including the birth of two grandsons and her daughter’s miscarriage, according to the lawsuit.
Fincher says in the lawsuit that the officers should have known that the drug test could result in false positives, that it would have been unlikely a large bag of meth would have been left lying in plain sight, and that the county improperly trained the officers in how to identify illicit drugs.
The particular brand of drug test has been known to cause false positives. Fox 5 reported that the same test showed a false positive for a woman’s folic acid prenatal supplements. When the station tested it themselves on folic acid, the drug test came back as a color that could have been read as positive for illicit substances, according to the station.
The lawsuit asks for punitive damages, as well as court fees. “I want Monroe County to pay for they did to me,” Fincher said, according to WMAZ.
This story was originally published November 21, 2018 at 2:25 PM with the headline "Georgia woman spent three months in jail for possession – of cotton candy, lawsuit says."