Ryan Gabrielson

The Legacy Of The Infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio

The former Maricopa County sheriff made his name in part by targeting immigrants — even after a judge ordered him to stop. As President Trump considers a pardon, it’s worth remembering precisely what Arpaio did in his decades in law enforcement.

Ryan Gabrielson
By Ryan Gabrielson

For most of Joe Arpaio's two-plus decades as Maricopa County sheriff, he directed operations from the top floor of a downtown Phoenix tower, worlds away from the jails overseen by rank and-file deputies. The executive offices wrapped around an expansive conference room, where I spent weeks in early 2008 with banker boxes full of arrest records, and

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Houston Police End Drug Tests That Produced Wrongful Convictions

The cheap kits were often the sole evidence used to win guilty pleas, against the innocent as well the as guilty.

Ryan Gabrielson
By Ryan Gabrielson
drug test

The Houston Police Department has ended its longstanding practice of using $2 chemical kits to make drugs arrests, a policy that had contributed to hundreds of wrongful convictions in recent years. In announcing the change, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the department was abandoning the use of the kits, known formally as chemical field

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The Truth Behind The “New” Police Tool For Confronting Fentanyl Menace

Drug test manufacturer repackages old, error-prone chemical formula as cutting-edge product.

Ryan Gabrielson
By Ryan Gabrielson
Heroin and fentany seized in a drug raid in the Asylum Hill neighborhood in Hartford, Conn. Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016.

(REPORT) — Heroin overdoses killed thousands nationwide last year 2014 some 75 over just three days in Chicago. The central culprit in many of the fatalities was fentanyl, a lethally powerful compound often added to drugs sold on the street. As a result, health officials have called fentanyl a new public menace, and police forces across the U.S.

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‘No Field Test Is Fail Safe’: Meet the Chemist Behind Houston’s Police Drug Kits

Decades after L.J. Scott developed a test for cocaine, his invention played a role in hundreds of wrongful convictions in Houston.

Ryan Gabrielson
By Ryan Gabrielson
drug test

In 1973, L.J. Scott, Jr., was a chemist at the recently created Drug Enforcement Agency, hard at work on a critical breakthrough: a chemical mixture that could identify the presence of cocaine. The trafficking and use of the drug was exploding, and federal and local authorities wanted help confronting the problem. Scott and the DEA wanted something

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