This Woman Spent Months in Jail Because Cops Thought Her Old Cotton Candy Was Meth – By River Donaghey (vice.com) / Nov 26 2018
Just to be clear: Not meth. Cotton candy.
Back in July 2016, police in Florida arrested a very unlucky retiree after mistaking the blue glaze from the guy’s donut for crystal meth. The man was strip-searched and held for ten hours before everyone realized the donut frosting was, well, just donut frosting. But apparently, that 64-year-old got off pretty easy for his Krispy Kreme meth debacle, because a Georgia woman just spent months in jail for the same goddamn thing.
Now, Dasha Fincher is suing Georgia’s Monroe County after spending over three months in jail—all because the cops thought her cotton candy looked like meth, WMAZ reports.
According to the lawsuit, Fincher was arrested back on New Year’s Eve 2016, after being pulled over because cops thought her tinted windows were too dark. The windows reportedly wound up being totally legal, but that wasn’t exactly the worst mistake police would make that night. The two officers who stopped her, Cody Maples and Allan Henderson, spotted an open bag on the floor of Fincher’s car containing “a light blue substance, spherical in shape,” the suit reads. Fincher told them the bag was full of cotton candy, which it was—but the pair weren’t buying it.
As any seven-year-old or frustrated parent knows, cotton candy can crystallize when it gets compressed or wet or drooled on or whatever. Fincher’s bag of old cotton candy had apparently crystallized, turning it into something that the cops thought seemed suspiciously like meth.
Maples and Henderson did a roadside test on the stuff, and, unfortunately, the test gave them a false positive for methamphetamine. So Fincher was hauled off to jail for meth trafficking with the intent to sell and slapped with a massive, $1 million bail. Again, just to be clear: Not meth. Cotton candy.
It somehow took until March of 2017 for anyone to do an actual, honest-to-god drug test the cotton candy and clear Fincher of her charges. She was finally released on April 4, four months later, and filed a lawsuit against the George County Board of Commissioners and the makers of the roadside test last Thursday. The court documents, first published by WBAZ, are seeking money for damages “in an amount to be determined” by a jury.
Fincher told WMAZ that she missed the births of her twin grandsons while she was locked up, and couldn’t be there for her family after her daughter’s miscarriage. “I want Monroe County to pay for what they did to me,” Fincher said.
