Wednesday, August 05, 2009

People v. Haddad (Cal. Ct. App. - Aug. 4, 2009)

The failure to appear for a required drug test is a drug-related offense. Testing dirty in a required drug test is a drug-related offense. But showing up and trying to pass a drug test by using someone else's pee is not a drug-related offense. So sayeth the Court of Appeal (with Justice Mosk dissenting).

Parenthetically, I smiled when I noticed that Justice Turner -- unlike both the trial court and Justice Mosk -- refused to use the (fairly common) term "whizzinator" to describe the device used by Haddad to try to cheat the test, calling it instead the sterile (and generic) term "alternate urine device."