There's been plenty of stories over the years regarding people who have gone to jail for crimes they didn't commit, but a Georgia woman's recent arrest might be one of the most ridiculous in recent memory. BuzzFeed News reports that Dasha Fincher was arrested and put in jail for more than three months, and it's all because the police officers who pulled over the car she was riding in misidentified cotton candy as meth.
Fincher is now suing Monroe County, Georgia, the two deputies who arrested her, and the North Carolina company Sirchie for contributing to her "false and malicious arrest." Sirchie is the company behind the roadside drug test product the two cops used on her cotton candy, leading to the mistaken identification.
Fincher was arrested on New Year's Eve in 2016 when the car she was a passenger in was pulled over, with the two sheriff's deputies saying they pulled over the car because the windows were tinted.
The cops found what they called a "clear plastic bag which contained a light blue substance, spherical in shape, which was located in the floor board." The bag only contained blue cotton candy, however. Contrary to popular belief, methamphetamine is very rarely blue, despite what Breaking Bad might have some people believe. Sirchie's Nark II drug test said the substance was positive for meth, and Fincher was subsequently charged with trafficking and possession of meth with intent to distribute.
A crime lab would later show that the Nark II was wrong, and that it was just cotton candy. As BuzzFeed notes, the Innocence Project previously published a story that detailed some of the items that have been wrongly identified by police tests as drugs, including sage and breath mints among other bizarre items.
Since Fincher could not afford to pay the $1 million bond she was set, she had to stay in jail for over three months. In March last year, a crime lab test of the cotton candy proved it was not meth, but she wasn't released from jail until the following month.
