Prosecutors Thursday said they are seeking more possible victims after arresting a Harris County employee accused of taking bribes to provide clean urine to defendants out on bail.

Details.

The comments on the article are great!

We had one even worse--a defendant got her daughter to perform her drug test for her....and, yes, you guessed it, she came up dirty. I bet the dinner table was not too friendly that evening.

Okay, I read the article. First, who exactly are the "victims" in this scenario? Second, I think I would have to seriously re-examine my career choices if I found myself employed as a "county urine monitor."

quote:

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Originally posted by Shane Phelps:
Okay, I read the article. First, who exactly are the "victims" in this scenario? Second, I think I would have to seriously re-examine my career choices if I found myself employed as a "county urine monitor."

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I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say the victims are the probationers who got fleeced into paying for clean urine. I'll take another wild guess and say that I don't think there will be a stampede of folks who passed their probation u/a's running to the police to tell on themselves.

Is it anything like a john complaining that a prostitute failed to deliver promised services after payment? Or perhaps a college student complaining that the marihuana was oregano? Or maybe a person complaining that the DVD bought from the trunk of a car was a bad copy?

Well, I think it would be, if the urine didn't have the promised result.

But that's urinalysis.

Bad pun?

Good luck proving it was actually urine. I have a case now involving a person (a public official) sneaking someone else's urine into a UA. We alleged the 'substance' under 481.133 was urine (since that's what the defendant told the APO it was).

The problem is that neither SWIFS nor DPS does a test to prove a liquid is actually urine - just what foreign substances happens to be in it. Accu-Chem has been sold and I haven't been able to find a certified lab who can do it. My local urologist isn't interested in getting DPS certified.

I got with the prison prosecutors and found out which lab they use in 'chunking' cases. They use the Dept. of Health Services in Austin. The boss there lied to me and said they never did those tests, although the lab folks admitted they really did but just for the TDCJ. Kinda their little secret, I guess.

I'll get around it by amending to call the 'substance' something less specific. But the DoHS guy really ticked me off.