Thursday, December 29, 2005

Three weeks in jail for possession of flour

A Bryn Mawr freshman, Janet Lee, was arrested at the Philadelphia airport in 2003 as she was going through screening to fly home to California for Christmas. Her checked luggage contained three condoms filled with white powder, and field tests showed that the white powder contained opium and cocaine. She insisted that the powder was flour, and that the condoms were stress reliever toys, to be squeezed during exams.

As it turned out, the field tests were wrong or falsified. Had she not obtained sufficient legal help which led to a retest of the powder, she faced 20 years in prison on drug charges.

She now has a lawsuit against city police in Philadelphia which seeks to answer the question of why the field tests came back positive for drugs.

(More comment at The Agitator.)

3 comments:

Cori said...

umm. good thing she got them retested. But, what the fuck was she thinking, taking condoms filled with white power on an airplane?
duh!

Einzige said...

Yeah. You gotta admit that that's about as bone-headed as you can get.

e said...

They sell those stress squeeze balls everywhere.
Why would anyone want condoms with flour in them?
The screeners probably falsified the results because they are tired of people being idiots.