This is how you can be arrested for DUI -- even if you're stone cold sober

you haven't had anything to drink tonight not tonight no tonight okay one of the things that we do is we ask people to go through this thing okay caitlin ebner crossed the line and got pulled over on her way home from work blow real hard until i asked you to stop keep going keep going keep going no she wasn't drinking all tests for alcohol came up empty was last time smoke marijuana oh i don't do that i can give you a drug test right now i haven't you you don't smoke marijuana well you're showing me indicators that you have been smoking marijuana okay i didn't realize that you could get arrested for something that you didn't do until it happened to me watch your wrist for me i don't want to be in health and marijuana no ma'am not possession unless i find it in your car i believe that you're impaired by the marijuana that you've smoked before you felt those handcuffs closing over your wrist did you understand just how serious this was i didn't understand i as soon as i took that breathalyzer i thought i was going home this time you're being taken into custody okay for dui drugs the waitress spent the night in jail and had her alcohol servers permit revoked because of the dui arrest after four months prosecutors dismissed all charges because her blood test came back completely clean you had to spend months and thousands of dollars proving your innocence i did when's the last time you smoked weed i don't know you don't smoke weed at all the same thing happened to this college student two weeks earlier on good friday well i believe you have okay i need to borrow your arm real quick okay i believe that's why i believe that's why you were failing to maintain your lane and driving halfway on the ramp when i was behind you hold on give me just one second give me just one second that's correct i didn't understand i'm like why are you arresting me like what did i do he said do you i have a substance i'm like what are you arrested because you think i smoke marijuana i believe you're impaired by cannabis yes ma'am sir search i don't smoke weed is there a way you can test me right now princess umbamara was also jailed and fought the dui drug charges for half of 2016. so the blood test comes back they toss the case i remember my lawyer trying to talk about a deal i was like what i'm not taking a deal i didn't do anything i want like my life back can you reverse time can you stick your tongue out real big months later it happened a third time to this auburn student you're giving me indicators that you have consumed marijuana you're being placed under arrested dui okay the prosecutor filed this dismissal of the student's dui drug charge five months later defendant performed well on field sobriety evaluations and blood and urine were negative three dui drug arrests three talk screens negative for marijuana one police officer cobb county's tt carroll documents show carroll is one of the highest rated and best trained officers on cobb county's legendary dui task force well you're showing me numerous indicators he's a certified drug recognition expert well i don't believe you're telling me the truth okay i don't wait because i'm seeing some involuntary indicators that you've consumed marijuana one of 250 georgia officers who've gone through this intensive month-long training a drug recognition evaluation involves a dozen observations that allow officers not only to pronounce a driver is on drugs but to identify which of seven types of drugs are in their system marijuana how do i look at somebody and say marijuana there are involuntary responses of the body that we can observe that would suggest impairment of marijuana he did these techniques that he was taught and he determined you were on something you weren't on yeah unfortunate for me because he's ingested marijuana that's what my training suggests officer carroll relies on his drug recognition expert training but in these three dismissed cases he didn't do the full dre evaluation after the arrest the standard protocol requires all 12 steps to be complete yet any police officer can make a dui drug arrest on fewer observations if i establish probable cause you know and i believe that based on my training that's why i put the handcuffs on you several several several indicators okay so when i do a drug test i'll be free to go correct you're going to jail ma'am okay i don't have a magical drug test that i can give you right now but he just did the magic drug test that resulted in your arrest they're ruining innocent people's lives caitlin ebner filed an internal affairs complaint against officer carroll cobb county investigators exonerated the officer and doubted caitlyn's innocence insisting the marijuana could have already metabolized out of the blood they said yeah we see this happen all the time the test results come back wrong so the test results were wrong yeah that's what they said that the test results were wrong and also if i had a urine test that it would have came back positive for drugs but caitlyn got her own urine test the same week as her arrest the urine test was also negative for marijuana or other drugs this training is so powerful that they believe they can detect drugs that a blood test will not detect it's extremely surprising that's my life that they're playing with last week cobb county's dui task force was awarded a trophy by mothers against drunk driving 1696 duis and officer carol was given a silver medal for 90 dui arrests in 2016. he put dozens of actual convicted drunk drivers behind bars last year but if he got three people who were innocent behind bars having to defend themselves how does that balance out for you it's something i have to carry for the rest of my life they are suing the cobb county police department in this federal suit they are the same drivers we showed had negative blood tests for marijuana despite spending months defending themselves against dui charges i want to ask you a question okay okay when's the last time marijuana oh i don't do that i can give you a drug test right now you don't smoke marijuana you're giving me indicators that you have consumed marijuana okay because i'm seeing some involuntary indicators that you've consumed marijuana three dui drug arrests because you think i smoke marijuana i believe you're impaired by cannabis yes ma'am all three blood tests negative for marijuana the charges were eventually dropped but the lab results took months and still the cobb county police department insists its officers can detect marijuana in drivers that a crime lab cannot can these blood tests be trusted to convict a driver if they can't be trusted to exonerate a driver that's a fair question and that certainly is a topic that needs to be debated with expert personnel medical personnel cobb county's new police chief michael register is not named in the aclu lawsuit but he is overseeing changes to his department's policies as a direct result of our investigation all three drivers suing the police were jailed overnight now cobb county is releasing drivers suspected of marijuana impairment and delaying formal charges until the blood tests come back we certainly want to protect the citizens on the roadways of cobb county by getting a suspected impaired driver off the roadway but we also don't want to make an unnecessary arrest on a citizen the 11 alive investigators uncovered the clean drug test by reviewing dozens of dui arrests by the same drug recognition expert officer we manually checked 85 cases through court records and found multiple dismissals three were nearly identical the three drivers who are now suing the police department for wrongful arrest they're kind of treating him like the human drug sniffing dog he's the drug whisperer he can see impairment in people that other officers can't see i think that they think that because he has so many arrests one day i'm going to go and get a real job and people are going to be able to google my name and see that i was arrested for drugs that i didn't do and that's caitlin ebner one of the three plaintiffs in this case we did talk with the police chief before this lawsuit was filed but it's really not just cobb county tonight on the late feed we're going to actually show you dash cam from a professor down in south georgia who nearly lost custody of his two young children because of an over-the-counter tylenol pm he had taken the day before he was stopped that is at 11. and there's so many medicines these days that people are taking you know for an assortment of ailments that you can't really tell what you know what it will be on their bodies i mean and the way this would become a culture exactly and the way this works is if they find anything in your blood and they saw you touch the yellow line one is proof for the other and you are dui wow and months later it's still getting sorted months later it takes the gbi crime lab that that long and in the meantime you're guilty to prove an innocent it's amazing [Music] you don't smoke marijuana you don't consume any marijuana or nothing like that i don't well i believe you have okay i need to borrow your arm real quick okay the drug recognition expert did not believe these drivers because you think i smoke marijuana i believe that you're impaired by cannabis yes ma'am all three gave their blood to prove their innocence can i take a drug test anything please the charges were dropped months later when all three blood tests came back negative as far as the individuals unjustly arrested i think at the time of the arrest the officer felt that they were making a just arrest will you submit to the state administration chemical test if you're blood and you're under the imply consent law that test also came back negative 10 years ago cobb county police have known about this problem for at least a decade lab tests for marijuana are notoriously unreliable for proving or disproving impairment studies show there's no amount that affects every user the same way internal affairs investigations show cobb county consistently questions negative lab results not its drug recognition experts the officer's opinion based on his training is more accurate at detecting impairment of marijuana in a driver than the blood test is that your understanding we have to base our ability to prosecute on the threshold of the law and when the evidence or the circumstances does not meet that threshold then the person should not be prosecuted publicly the department announced a policy change after our investigation no longer jailing suspected cannabis impaired drivers but privately cobb county was in damage control in an internal email an official wrote the department has taken quite a negative pr hit because of this story our facebook page has been blowing up with tons of negative comments being taken into right after our story and a full year after caitlin ebner's arrest cobb county had the crime lab check her blood a second time the gbi was asked to use a more sensitive test for the components of thc again the crime lab reported negative across the board did they ever apologize nope they never apologized officer abbott did say i know you don't trust me but i'll always be there for you and my response was to put me back in jail again for something i didn't do lieutenant greg abbott head of the dui task force was praised by county officials for this five-page internal memo attacking our investigation falsely claiming we allowed caitlin ebner to lie on camera those three cases fit keith's narrative that officer carroll was making bad arrests he wrote that there were no other negative blood tests for arrest by this officer where the drivers denied consuming marijuana 85 arrest reports this is what the cobb county police department gave us when we asked for every dui arrest officer carroll made in 2016. but officer carroll made 90 dui arrests last year not 85. yet the cobb county police department had no problem reporting every arrest to mothers against drunk driving for which officer carroll received a silver medal last year so why when we asked for every arrest were five reports missing i'm gonna ask you a question need to be perfectly honest with me okay when's the last time you smoke weed you don't smoke weed you can graduate you can make your pan a cup i don't smoke i have a kid this is one of the cases cobb county didn't tell us about shown here for the first time you're giving me signs of ingestion of marijuana okay young mother brittany penwell a fourth arrest by officer carroll most people tell me that they don't but ma'am i believe based on my observation that you have consumed marijuana okay the points made you an impaired and less safe driver all right her blood test also came back negative her case dismissed and automatically expunged back in march a police captain certified in writing there were no other reports excluded due to expungements the department gave the 11 alive investigators this drug recognition law for officer carroll with much of the toxicology blacked out but we obtained this unredacted copy shared internally among commanders hiding behind those redactions pen wells negative drug test and yet another negative tax report for a fifth marijuana arrest dismissed for no traces of marijuana in the blood two more negative tests hiding behind cobb county's black marker yet the dui task force commander told his superiors we picked the only three cases lieutenant abbott wrote to his new chief before our interview why are we still speaking to this dishonest guy lieutenant abbott commands a unit that has the power on a single officer's opinion to lock someone up if he is willing to alter the facts to fit his case in a written document an official document how can we trust him to not alter the facts in a case that might result in someone losing their freedom i've always known him to be an honorable person and a good officer but you're not black remember we only kill black people yeah we only kill black people right all the videos you've seen have you seen white people get killed this is the dui task force commander in a video that surfaced shortly after our interview with the chief lieutenant abbott retired in lieu of termination remember we only kill black people yeah we only kill black people right sir would you mind stepping back here for me please i'm gonna pull him out and check his sobriety okay are you on any medication or taking any medication for anything none at all no anything to drink tonight okay a college professor arrested for dui this time do me a favor put your hands around your back in front of his son and daughter how's your children 12 and 10. i'm lieutenant chapman with garden city pd is this your dad i'm placing you under arrest for suspicion to do you uh let's save drugs okay well he's being placed under arrest right now and i'll explain everything to your mom the fact that my kids had to watch all this thing it was just very very distressing i didn't have a chance to explain to them you know what was happening they only saw me being put in handcuffs your father's going to be treated very well okay it's going to be he's going to be okay there's a problem with his driving the police tried to play it down like oh we're going to treat your dad nicely and he's going to sleep in his own bed tonight but my kids you know forever they're going to have to live with the memory of seeing their dad put in handcuffs you know right in front of them the professor is still so traumatized he doesn't want us to use his name garden city police charged the father with dui drugs and two counts of child endangerment because his kids were in the backseat two convictions for child endangerment right would have been you don't see your kids they go to either your ex-wife or foster care right in the back of my mind is really the whole time i know this that i'm innocent and i didn't endanger my children in any way your husband has been placed under arrest for suspicion of dui of drugs yes ma'am even my uh my ex said i know that he wasn't doing anything to endanger the kids and i know that he doesn't do drugs or anything like that [Music] he's gonna be under arrest for dui okay but he doesn't drink for medication the blood test came back positive for one drug tylenol pm specifically diphenhydramine the active ingredient in the allergy medicine benadryl either of these over-the-counter pills can impair a driver worse than alcohol but only four to six hours after taking one i had taken a tylenol pm 19 hours before the arrest was made indeed the gbi crime lab detected the benadryl in such a small amount it was consistent with a single dose taken a full day before the stop they wanted me to go to a lesser plea and go to dui school because of a benadryl you took because of the best 24 hours earlier yeah this was the next day the next night not even the next day the next night is this driver innocent of dui well he is now i mean the court dismissed the charges against him garden city police chief david lyons who once led georgia's association of chiefs of police says the officer's opinion is the only tool approved for detecting drugs pre-arrest if it's alcohol you can do an intoxilizer and no on the spot for dui drugs no such thing some tool that i have beyond an educated guess that you're impaired or not it's like a guessing game well maybe the drug test will turn out something the officer did not have a crystal ball he had no way of knowing what the drug test would reveal weeks or months into the future the gbi crime lab takes an average of seven weeks if testing for drugs alone and nearly three months if testing for alcohol as well in the meantime the future for the accused is unclear and their world is turned upside down you know i know that when you go to a doctor you can get results from lab tests two or three days at the most but you know here because it has to go to the gbi and all this stuff it's going to take uh three months to get your your lab tests back you may not get a definitive answer for weeks or months exactly sir would you mind stepping back here for me please so the only drug detector available in the field is the officer himself what i'll have you do is put your back towards my patrol car and just face me you could have gone to jail and lost your kids over the opinion of a police officer that's right state records show the arresting officer completed advanced roadside impairment training including drug detection just 15 days before stopping the professor if you give someone a hammer everything starts looking like a nail absolutely is there a human element once you get advanced training that causes you to see things uh that are either there or not there i i don't have an answer for that i i would that argument could probably be made that uh i have this new training and i'm going to go out and show the world that i know how to do all this stuff and i'm going to take advantage of my new my new latest toy maybe it's not a toy it's not well let's go let's go pull them out and check the sobriety let's go see what we can find it's like somebody's life you're dealing with garden city police stand by their arrest they even pointed to a nearly undetectable amount of ambien in the blood test so small it couldn't be measured by the gbi lab i don't have to be perfect i have to be reasonable and i have to have probable cause when they lose in court nothing happens to them they have nothing to lose and the citizen has everything to lose their name their reputation their lifestyle in the end the professor didn't lose the case his job or his kids but he lost something else his trust in the system i'm placing you under arrest for suspicion to do you uh let's save drugs okay these people are supposed to be protecting saving lives and they're they're messing up lives they're they're ruining lives i'm not in the business of ruining somebody's life we are put in a position of getting impaired drivers off the road at the end of the day we did our job if they arrest 10 people and eight of them are positive who cares about the two innocent that's right that's right except the two innocent people [Music] this time you're being taken into custody okay for dui drugs my name is caitlin and it happened to me it happened to me well i believe you have okay i need to borrow your arm real quick okay it happened to me innocent people arrested for driving on drugs it happened to me our investigation shows this is not limited to one arrest or one officer i'm placing you under arrest for suspicion to do you uh let's save drugs okay it's a nationwide phenomenon it happened to me it happened to me oh you're saying that you don't smoke marijuana it happened to me it happened to me to me to me to me what is so troubling about these arrests to you we have police officers arresting innocent people and throwing them into jail based on a training that is completely unreliable and is based on junk science sean young and the aclu of georgia are suing the cobb county police department on behalf of the four drivers we discovered in our investigation hey my name is officer carroll county police are we talking about bad police officers or are we talking about bad training we're talking about police departments teaching them how to be these so-called drug recognition experts and telling them that they need to start pulling people over and throwing them into jail based on the results of this completely bogus methodology that methodology has been validated by multiple studies but most were funded by the same federal agency pushing the drug recognition expert program some independent studies have concluded a dre's opinion of drug impairment is not much better than flipping a coin in order to graduate drug recognition experts are tested using 12 real world intoxicated subjects in jails or rehab facilities they are not required to evaluate a sober person as part of that test group i'm seeing indicators that you've consumed marijuana they hit the streets having seen drugs in every suspect they've evaluated can you stick your tongue out real big at me what's troubling to me is that these police officers are being told that they can now conduct medical examinations on random people by the side of the road i wouldn't trust my own brother to do a medical examination on me because he's not a doctor there are documented visible indicators in drivers who test positive for marijuana red eyes pupils not dilating or recovering normally raised taste buds and a coating on the tongue but all of those symptoms can be caused by something else totally benign i think it turned out real big the officers believe they're seeing impairment because they're taught to see it when they tell you to begin they learned from other officers and former officers who have been certified as dre instructors rebound some of the most pronounced thing in a while here is the video of the infractions resulting in the traffic stops that landed all four drivers in jail a touch of a lane marker one straddled the line while deciding between two exits you're halfway in the middle of the ramp when you're to see if i driving okay straight to 85 or straight to 75 right here you can check my car you can do whatever you need to do no drugs or drug paraphernalia were found the officer's opinion alone was enough to justify a dui drug arrest even though in three of our four cases the drug recognition expert did not do the full dre evaluation all of the certification studies were done on doing this full protocol this full evaluation but the officers don't need that under the law to make an arrest they need probable cause which is a much lower standard than 12 steps and probable cause requires that police officers use some kind of meaningfully reliable method of detecting whether someone has committed a crime it turns out drug recognition officers get it right in the vast majority of full 12-step dre evaluations in the last three years georgia dres completed toxicology tests on 507 drivers suspected of marijuana impairment 430 came back positive for thc that means 77 drivers tested negative the highest trained dui officers in the state got it right 85 percent of the time you can throw statistics at our clients all day what they know is that they were thrown in jail overnight some of them have never been arrested ever in their lives and they now have to answer for an arrest record for a crime they didn't commit for the rest of their lives officers have learned the dre training allows them to see all they need to justify an arrest without completing the full post arrest evaluation to confirm it no one is tracking those cases for accuracy the arrests of caitlin ebner kuhnle oriomi and princess umamara and their negative talk screens aren't in any federal database because dres are required to report only full evaluation opinions happened to me it happened to me to me to me to me this slide is part of the dre class in georgia no drugs detected instructors tell their officers when this happens to you and it will it's important that you don't let yourself become discouraged the laboratory is not perfect and the toxicologists won't always be able to corroborate your opinion even though your opinion may be accurate when someone tells you you're an expert and puts you through this training do you blame the officers for thinking they have these powers yeah they're going to be led to think that they are now an expert in whatever training they went through but this piece of paper this printed certificate means absolutely nothing and courts in some states such as florida and california do not allow prosecutors to use the word expert when referring to certified dres they're called drug recognition evaluators or examiners dozens of the new dres just hit the streets in georgia funded by a special grant from the governor's office for highway safety you know i'm a former prosecutor right and that's the way i kind of see the world sometimes but i'm uncomfortable with that 85 percent number that the best of the best in doing this only get it right 85 percent of the time when it comes to marijuana in georgia that's correct i mean they're getting better every year last year they were 87 but what if you're in that 13 the community is still saying maybe the drug test was wrong the cases were dismissed but they still think in many cases those people were actually impaired because the dre said they were all right and is there any money in in this whole thing is there money trail yeah we wanted to follow the money what i can tell you is that a lot of times these drug recognition expert officers and dui task force officers their raises are tied to the number of arrests they make not convictions arrests and that can result in a merit raise and there used to be a grant that for all of this where basically the number of arrests the department made arrests in general they could get federal grants that has finally been changed to where now it's a more quality-based system than a quantity-based one we're going to stay on it all right absolutely great great reporting thanks so much

Channel: 11Alive

Views: 5,440,053

Keywords: DUI arrest, Drug arrest, Drug Whisperer

Id: Zk99NofbLVQ

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2017