Yesterday I posted about the Fort Worth area teenager who was arrested for delivering drug laced cookies to several police departments. He didn't stay long in jail. It seems like the police jumped the gun - tests done on cookies taken to two of the departments were negative for drugs. I guess it was just a bad batch of cookies.
What is bothersome about this story is how the police apparently arrested this young man with no evidence. You would hope that if they were charging someone with lacing cookies with drugs, they would verify there were drugs. Maybe it was the fact that he was doing community service that caused them to assume he was responsible.
While the standard for issuing an arrest warrant is low (probable cause instead of beyond a reasonable doubt), you would hope that a magistrate would want some hard evidence - that is supposed to be one of the "checks" in our justice system. Unfortunately, too often they simply accept the word of the police who request the warrant.
The end result is that this action could destroy this young man's future, at least in the short term. He was arrested, and charged with a serious offense. Not only was he arrested, the story was picked up by the Associated Press. So instead of only a few people knowing about, thousands did. He probably will be remembered for a long time as the kid who delivered drug laced cookies to the police - the general public has a way of forgetting that someone was cleared of charges.
In many cases, the criminal justice system works - sometimes, though, it is too slow. No matter what the law says, the stigma of being arrested is something that doesn't go away. That is why the government should make sure they have the evidence before they brand someone as a criminal.
