Fox 4 Dallas Fort Worth
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Scale gave incorrect measurements in some Kaufman County drug cases
Posted
June 25, 2018
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2:24Now PlayingThe Kaufman County District Attorney’s office is alerting defense attorneys that its scales used in drug cases were returning incorrect readings.
They’re saying the machines were out of calibration, leading to lower readings. This means that some people could have faced higher criminal charges had the scales been correct.
It came to the office’s attention in January after dope in that case weighed less at the sheriff’s office than it did at the Department of Public Safety’s crime lab in Garland.
They determined that one of the three scales in the sheriff’s office was out of whack.
“We looked at the weight and the lab weight was a lot more,” Kaufman County Prosecutor Marc Moffitt said. “It was like 1.3 to 2.7 so we knew something was off.”
The department took a look at cases that hadn’t been sent to the DPS lab and found several that could have been affected. It then notified those four defense attorneys of the error, even though it was in their favor.
“It’s the right thing to do, even if its weighing less,” Kaufman County District Attorney Erleigh Wiley said. “That’s their job: to use that information any way that they may deem it appropriate.”
The problem scale was replaced and new protocols were put in place to make sure the mistakes don’t happen again.
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