can police charge a defendant for the cost of evidential testing
Wed, 01/13/2010 - 11:28 — Dave Campbell
Several recent cases have highlighted the practice of Police attempting to coerce defendants into incriminating themselves via the use of threats. In many of these cases the Police will ask the accused if the substance they uncovered is cannabis. Of course admitting that a substance in your possession is cannabis is a guarantee of a guilty verdict, and no defendant in their right mind would incriminate themselves in that way. After all it is the job of the Police to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt not the job of the defendant, so if they want to know what the substance is they should do the job that they are paid for. Of course evidential testing is expensive and it would be much easier and cheaper for the police to just get a confession out of the accused, but here's a suggestion, if they think it is too expensive and time consuming to carry out tests on every seized sample of cannabis, how about stop prosecuting cannabis users!!! Unfortunately the police do not seem to have considered this interpretation of discretion, and instead of abandoning a lost cause, they have turned to threatening defendants with financial penalty even before guilt has been established. Usually they say something along the lines of if you don't admit that this is cannabis and we find that it is we will charge you for the cost of the testing. This is intimidation of a material witness in an ongoing trial and surely a violation of the bill of rights. It is the job of the Police to prosecute and establish guilt, don't make their job any easier and don't buy into their illegal intimidation tactics.
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I received the documents you supplied relating to Mr XXX
It is my view that the proof of the substance is the responsibility of the prosecuting agency, ie. the police. If we use the analogy of the cases involveing Drink Driving with Excess Blood Alcohol we know now that the police are able to claim back the medical costs and analysts fees in relation to analysing blood to see if in fact there has been a breach in the Land Transport Act Provisions.
It may well be that the police can ask to be reimbursed for any costs involved in determining if any substance is in fact cannabis but of course if a defendant was legally aided I very much doubt that any court would grant such costs.
In determining whether to grant reimbursement a court might have regard to whether or not there was any real merit in putting the police to the bother of obtaining scientific proof that the substance is cannabis.
If there is some real ground for doubting that the substance was cannabis then I have no doubt that the court would not order reimbursement.
However if it was patently obvious that the substance was cannabis in any given case then a court might take the view that the police were being needlessly put to expense to prove what was already perfectly apparent.
I hope this is of some assistance but in the end I imagine that if a person was legally aided (as most defendants in this area would be) then the prospects of the police successfully claiming such reimbursement might be low.
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