Georgia woman spends 3 months in jail over cotton candy mistaken for meth

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A woman is suing Monroe County, Georgia, and a North Carolina company after a roadside drug test popular with law enforcement agencies falsely identified her cotton candy as methamphetamine. The woman, Dasha Fincher of Monroe County, seeks unspecified damages alleging false and malicious arrest and imprisonment, among numerous other complaints, in the incident on New Year's Eve 2016. The suit, which was filed Nov. 15 in U.S. District Court in Macon, claims that because she couldn't pay a $1 million bond on charges methamphetamine trafficking and possession, Fincher was improperly held in jail for more than three months in early 2017 before a state lab test found the false positive. The charges were dropped in April 2017.

The suit says Fincher was a passenger in the car when it was stopped on Dec. 31, 2016. It claims that Monroe County sheriff's deputies said they stopped the car because it had dark tinted windows and then became suspicious of the bag of blue cotton candy that Fincher was holding. In video from the deputies' dash camera that was provided to NBC News by Fincher's attorney, James Freeman, both deputies can be seen sniffing the bag as Fincher clutches her hands to her face. The video, which ends with Fincher's being handcuffed, includes captioned commentary from Freeman.

"I just couldn't believe it was happening," Fincher said Tuesday in a statement provided by her attorney. "Being locked up was hard on me because I was away from my family. I was most scared of my granddaughter forgetting who I was," she said. "My twin grandsons were born and I was supposed to be in the delivery room. My daughter had a miscarriage and I couldn't console her."

According to the suit, the field test was administered using a NARK II meth reagent pouch manufactured by Sirchie Acquisition Co. of Youngsville, North Carolina. It accuses Sirchie of negligence in its manufacturing of the NARK II and in its training of its client agencies.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/georgia-woman-sues-over-drug-test-said-cotton-candy-was-n940926

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

1. It took 3 months to determine the cotton candy wasn't meth? Really?

These cops never seen cotton candy before? Do they make cotton candy like meth now? This is a bizarre story. I hope she wins a ton a money.

[USALiberal]

2. Bail only hurts poor people. 1 million for drugs? What a mess. Nt

[NutmegYankee]

3. These field kits are notorious for false results.

What needs to happen is a court order ruling them invalid in all cases.

[MagickMuffin]

4. Agreed, law enforcers should never administer anything over than citations

And just as you said false positives gave this woman a jail sentence for no damn good reason.

Oh and another thing it violates are 4th Amendment



BAN FIELD KITS. . . . . . . . NOW!!!

[MineralMan]

5. Dumb-Ass Deputy Had Never Seen a Bag of Cotton Candy Before?

If he had, he'd know what it was on sight. It looks like, well, cotton candy. It smells like cotton candy. It IS cotton candy.

Meth doesn't look like cotton candy.