Some twat of a Customs Officer in Japan planted cannabis on an innocent traveller’s suitcase to test security. BBC story here.
What a complete and utter blithering idiot!
So now, worldwide, drug trafficers who are caught can claim that the drugs might have been planted and point to this story. And juries will have to find them Not Guilty because this will indeed constitute Reasonable Doubt.
Similarly, no street drug cases can ever be prosecuted again, because a cop once planted evidence in a street drug arrest.
And I understand that murder’s going to be off the table pretty soon, once a cop somewhere decides to try to plant evidence for murder on someone.
Yes, days of anarchy and social collapse lie ahead. If I were you, I wouldn’t even bother paying off the Mastercard.
I hope that that poor bastard’s visit to Japan wasn’t a layover to Singapore. Things could get ugly.
Not too likely, given the circumstances in the story.
I can’t say it never happens, but I doubt many smugglers just put their drugs in the side pocket where they could also show up on x-ray.
This though, is my favorite part of the article
Yeah…that’ll happen.
You guys loose a baggie full of pot?
Yes, do you have it?
Well I found the baggie.
That’s actually known to happen alot in some places. Upset the wrong cop; spend some time in jail on a bogus drug charge.
Yeah, I saw this article earlier and could only hope that it wasn’t planted on a 75 yr old woman traveling to a country with the death penalty for drugs.
Why can’t the cops ever stuff a 5 oz sack of weed in MY luggage? Some people have all the luck.
I doubt Bricker is unaware of that circumstance. Considering he’d practiced IIRC as a defense lawyer for a while, I bet he’s even heard the claim a few times. Perhaps even credibly. He was simply pointing out that simply because planting evidence has been known to happen isn’t sufficient to represent a reasonable doubt in the minds of many jurors.
Whether it should be considered more often is a question I’ll leave hanging. One wants to think that the majority of law enforcement is above such tactics, but one also has to admit 51% is still a majority. (This is not meant to be a slam on anyone in law enforcement, specifically. Just saying that it is depressingly easy to point to stories of deliberate malfeasance. I doubt, strongly, that it tops out at more than a few percent of the people in the field, but that’s still much higher than I’d like for it to happen.)
My question is why did he feel the need to use so much? Aren’t these dogs capable of sniffing out gram quantities?
I’ve wondered the same thing when watching COPS—you know that episode where the guy gets arrested and has drugs in his pants pocket or glove compartment, which some unknown stranger must have stashed there? Oh, wait. That’s every episode.
I’m pushing forty and still waiting for it to happen to me, even though I frequently walk around with roomy, suggestively empty pockets, blatantly “asking for it.”
So just include a slip of paper with your stash “Test conducted by inspector 545, please contact when found.”
Almost as good as a get out of jail free card.
It’s an interesting question though. How to safeguard against planted evidence?
I expect airports would have to implement a chain of custody or something, with checks at each stage. Perhaps putting many bags into a cage with a tamper seal?
But this is a clear case of Quis custodiet custodes, as it was one of those we charge to prevent smuggling causing the problem in the first place.
Somewhere, right now in Japan, someone is eating shitload of sushi.
Yes, some of us already wonder this.
This was in checked luggage. They used a sidepocket since it was unlocked.
The were running the test just before the bags went out on the belt, and just lost track. Stupid.
Did. Just heard on the radio that someone turned it in.
They showed this on TV last night, and how the searches work. The bags are unloaded onto trailers from the plane, and then unloaded directly onto the carrousel, and then go directly out to where the passengers pick them up.
The dogs run over the bags, and are supposed to be able to smell the drugs. It looks like the dog missed it this time, and the bag went out into the carrousel. Once you pick up your bag (one-bag limit from Asia) it’s really quick to finish clearing customs and then you’re gone. Sunday was pretty light traffic; we cleared customs in minutes once we had our bags.
I guess that the officer who hid the drugs hid them while the bag was still in the trailer. They say he lost track of the bag, which is being unloaded by the regular baggage handlers.
I can’t muster Bricker’s sarcasm, but I can’t see how this would possibly constitute reasonable doubt. The drugs were placed on bags coming into Japan, not going out.
I can’t find the story, but somewhere in Milwaukee there’s a 5 lb. package of live explosives which the bomb-sniffing team hid during a training exercise - and then lost.
Schapelle is innocent! I never doubted her.
Good question. It would be helpful to have a clear legal standard that ties the definition of “reasonable search” to the level of legitimate need (e.g. the level of scrutiny used in airport searches is justified as an anti-terrorism defense, but not for ordinary offenses such as drug possession, so evidence of the latter discovered via such methods would have to be thrown out). However, that only solves this specific problem, not the general issue of evidence planting.