That is baffling, unless they are talking about testing done on January 0 in the following year.
Prosecution : “Oh ? Fine, we’ll get you for fraud and false advertising then. Thanks for the confession, dude !” 
ETA : joke aside, there’s the pressing concern of where he found the “wax”, isn’t there ? Even if the dumb jury buys the “I didn’t know it was real crank !” shtick, rocks don’t grow on trees…
You mean you can rip buyers off for several days and no comes back for a refund? The market for cocaine must as big as that of a shopping mall.
I was defending a (female) drug carrier. Overwhelming evidence. Arrested at a bus stop, 2 people ready to testify that she had been shifty, verbally uncooperative with the police etc. Narcotics recovered from her person.
During XX I asked the Investigating officer: where was the narcotic found on her person
IO: Bra, stockings (:eek:)
Me: Did you search her and recover the narcotics? (IO was male)
IO: No a female constable Soandso did
Me: after a few seconds of examining papers. Soandso is not on the list of witnesses
IO: checking lists errr, no she is not death glares at his junior
Trial stopped, acquittal ordered. 
Also, he was observed for several days without a repeat customer?
Please explain for those of us who learned everything about law from TV. The officer who actually found the crack wasn’t on the list of witnesses so that meant Instant Acquittal. Why?
That was the LearFan, which was to have been produced in Northern Ireland but had to be airborne by the end of 1980 to qualify for a UK subsidy. The official date of the first test, with smirks all around, was December 32, 1980, not 1/1/81.
This ought to be found under the dictionary definition of “Chutzpah”.
Alongside the kid who murdered both his parents and asked the court for leniency on the basis he was an orphan.
I thought there were federal and state laws that make the sale or attempted sale of fake drugs just as illegal as real ones? Or at the very least, convicted of criminal fraud.
The word you’re looking for is “intent”. If the court can establish that the drug buyer really was expecting to purchase genuine cocaine, that’s still a crime even if the bag contains only talcum powder. This is also the technique used by Dateline’s To Catch a Predator to nab horny pedophiles even though the people who make the offer are always over 18.
Did you actually read the link you provided? Do you really think the actual case was ridiculous?
Because IMHO, the actual argument made was completely reasonable.
An insanity defense was completely legal and common enough to be believable. In making that defense, pointing out that the defendent, in the days immediately before the crime, was acting very unusually (for them) is hardly unbelievable. A dramatic change in eating habits, for someone with a known dedication to a particular dietary regime, as one part of that is maybe not the strongest evidence of mental upset all by itself, but still enough that a defense team should bring it up if they have other evidence of mental upset.
Note that the defense made no attempt to (and weren’t required to) establish why or how the mental disturbance came about. The diety change was merely evidence that he was not himself, NOT presented as causing mental upset.
What’s unbelievable about any of this?
[Sorry for the rant, but we are fighting ignorance right?]
The Twinkie Defense is one of the clearest examples for me of the general public’s (even the educated public’s) inability to understand simple legal concepts, especially when they are unsatisfied with the result of a case.
Obviously AK84 is a better source of information, since it was his trial, but while I’m a little surprised at the remedy being instant acquittal, I can offer some insight.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees every criminal defendant the right to confront his (or her) accuser. In this case, the officer on the stand couldn’t testify that the accused had drugs in her bra, since he didn’t see that himself. The female constable told him of this fact. So this is hearsay – an out-of-court statement, offered into evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the statement. This question and answer should be stricken from the record – and because the female constable was not going to testify, the prosecution had no way of getting the necessary evidence into the record, so that no reasonable jury could convict the accused as a matter of law.
I don’t know why the court decided that the prosecution could not cure this defect by calling the female constable – perhaps the defense made the argument that because they had relied on the extant witness list, allowing the extra witness to be called represented a prejudice to the accused.
Thanks, Bricker.
Spot on, except for the fact that we have no sixth amendment in jurisdiction, although we do have the equivalent of a confrontation clause.
Courts here tend to frown upon belated introduction of inculpatory evidence. I think they could have allowed the evidence in because this was a technical error, but I think the acquittal was ordered since they knew that a conviction would probably result in an appeal and the High Court might have reversed in fair trial issues.Plus, I am pretty sure that IO has been careful since then.