Over three months in jail for possession of cotton candy mistaken for meth

A woman in Georgia has filed a lawsuit in federal court over her arrested at a traffic stop on charges of trafficking meth and possession of meth with intent to distribute. She spent over three months in jail on the charges under a $1 million bond.

The substance she actually had in her possession? Cotton candy.

That's according the lawsuit, filed against the Monroe County board of commissioners, two sheriff's deputies, and the maker of the drug test ket, which alleges wrongful arrest. The roadside kit flagged a bag of cotton candy as methamphetamine, leading to her being incarerated for nearly four months, it says.

The woman, Dasha Fincher told WMAZ in Georgia that deputies with the Monroe County Sheriff's Office pulled her over and searched her car on New Year's Eve in 2016. The incident report shows the car was pulled over for window tint.

"Then they found the cotton candy in the floorboard of the car," she said.

The two deputies used the kit, which came back positive, and placed her under arrest. She was not able to afford the bond, and it was over three months before the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) lab test results came back, finding there were "no controlled substances confirmed in the sample."

The lawsuit claims that the Nark II test kit they used, manufactured by North Carolina-based Sirchie Acquisitions, is unreliable and has a history of false positive test results(see embed below) .

The charges were dropped in April of 2017. During that time, she says, she missed major events of her life. "My daughter had a miscarriage. I wasn't there for that. My twin grandsons were born. I missed that," Fincher told WMAZ.

"I want Monroe County to pay for they did to me," she said.

Monroe Lawsuit by 13WMAZ on Scribd