Posted on 04/27/2016 9:10:34 AM PDT by Focault's Pendulum
TRENTON — The state Supreme Court has appointed a judge to handle potential lawsuits by defendants whose cases relied on drug evidence handled by a North Jersey lab technician accused of falsifying a marijuana test result.
Kamalkant Shah, the now-retired lab worker at the State Police Officer of Forensic Sciences North Regional Laboratory, was the primary laboratory examiner in 7,827 drug cases, state officials have previously said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj1015.com ...
I am assuming a false positive?
The lab tech flat out lied.
L
Will he get to keep his cushy retirement if he’s found guilty?
In over 7,00 cases.
All 7,000 tests will be invalidated.
I’d guess that most of the drug convictions will be thrown out and the people released.
But, this is how it should be. If he falsified just one test, you can’t be sure he didn’t falsify another.
Was this POS even vetted for legal status?
Surely being a member of the "club" he will walk and will not even get a slap on the hand.
I think this tec was smoking his samples.
Years back, when drug testing first appeared, as a contract programmer, my policy was “If you don’t trust me, don’t hire me.”
For those who insisted on a test, I replied that since my reputation was at stake, if they would accept the liability in case of a false positive, I would take the test.
You could almost sense the color draining from their face. A couple of outfits, like Compaq, never replied, but at that time American contractors were still being hired, so it was their loss, not mine.
After I retired, I took a beer-money job at Wal-Mart, who also demanded a drug test. I was about to go into my canned response, when they said that if I failed, they would do another in case of that false positive. Fair enough, took it and passed, no problem.
[Sidebar I]I found it interesting that when I talked with the lab tech about ways people tried to fool ‘em, she said that she watched how I walked to the bathroom - some idiots tried holding a sample from a drug-free friend under their armpit to keep it warm and walked like Jerry Lewis.
[Sidebar II] My son worked for a railroad in Alabama for a while, and they occasionally held surprise tests (naturally everybody knew when that would happen). A guy he knew smoked pot and knew he would fail, so he had his girlfriend do a sample for him, which he submitted.
Later he got called in the office for some good news/bad news. The good news was that he was pregnant, the bad news was that he was fired.
I occasionally smoke pot.
I got a new job, and did that exact thing with the urine in my armpit, except it made me hold my arm in an odd manner so I taped it to my groin.
God punished me when ripping all that duct tape off my groin at the end. I thought I had shaved it pretty clean; I was wrong!
He works in not-so-mysterious ways. :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.