WRONG MAN, WRONG WAR

A Case Of Mistaken Identity In The War On Drugs, And Not An Isolated Case,
Either.

Last summer, when Siddharth Patel stepped off the plane in Newark Airport
on the way back from his honeymoon in India, a team of federal agents was
waiting for him. They snatched the surprised newlywed from the customs gate
and spirited him down in handcuffs to a detention cell where they told him
he was under arrest. He asked to know what he had done wrong, but the
arresting officials refused to tell him. Over the next twelve days, Patel
would be transported to and from several prisons across the country, often
unable to talk to his family or even his attorneys for days at a time.
Discussing it after the fact, his tone is still heavy with bewilderment: "I
had no idea what was going on."

Patel, a U.S. citizen, had been snared in the dragnet of "Operation Meth
Merchant," and undercover federal sting operation designed to crack down on
the manufacturing of illegal methamphetamines in the state of Georgia. As
his luck would have it, he was quickly being cast as yet another unhappy
player in the perverse drama that is the federal war on drugs.

At the time of his arrest, Patel had never even heard of meth, the drug
that prosecutors were citing in connection to his incarceration. "The only
drugs I knew about were marijuana or cocaine," he says. "I had no clue what
[meth] was. I had to wait until after I got released to find out more about
it." Patel's attorneys, once he was able to secure them, quickly explained
that the Meth Merchant sting did not actually target drug producers,
dealers, or buyers. Instead, it was directed against convenience-store
clerks who were selling over-the-counter items - matches, charcoal, camping
fuel, cold medicine to customers who might then user them to manufacture meth.

As Patel eventually learned, it is illegal to sell a product to a person if
you now or should know that he is going to use it to produce illicit drugs.
In the meth production process, various chemical ingredients can be
extracted from household products. Red phosphorus, for example, is a key
meth component that can be taken from matchbook scratchpads.

So the feds thought Patel was a convenience-store clerk in Georgia who had
sold products to people who he had reason to believe were drug producers.
For this, they sought to lock him away, refusing to release him on bond for
almost two weeks and threatening him with up to 20 years in jail and
$200,000 in fines. They claimed to have undercover audio and video evidence
of the sales, along with testimony from a confidential informant who swore
that he had made illicit purchases from Patel.

The only problem, Patel kept protesting, was that he wasn't a
convenience-store clerk; he hadn't been in the store in question on the day
the feds said he was; in fact, he hadn't even been in the state of Georgia
that day. He had been in his new hometown of Hicksville, N.Y. where he had
recently moved from Georgia working at his sister's Subway sandwich shop.
The feds' undercover tapes must have had someone else on them.

One of Patel's defense attorneys, McCracken Poston, knew that the
misidentification of his client was not just an isolated mistake. Another
of his clients, Malvika Patel (no relation to Siddharth), had also been
misidentified, mistakenly arrested, and wrongfully jailed in the Meth
Merchant mess. Poston had already helped Malvika corroborate he alibi and
get her charges dropped, and eventually he was able to do the same for
Siddharth but not before the hapless defendant had to spend $55,000 in
legal fees and endure twelve days of incarceration.

It is still not entirely clear how the misidentifications of Siddharth and
Malvika occurred. The former had both a Georgia driver's license and a car
registered in the state. Defense attorney's have speculated that federal
informants identified the Meth Merchant suspects by looking at
driver's-license photographs, but the U.S. district attorney's office in
the Northern District of Georgia did not return repeated phone calls from
National Review to address this point, or any other.

As Poston tells it, the travails of Malvika and Siddharth are
representative of the overall sloppiness and confusion that have pervaded
Operation Meth Merchant from its inception. "Everything about this stinks,"
he says, laying out the tale of a law-enforcement campaign that has been
almost as flawed in its execution as it was misguided in its grand design.

In order to be guilty of providing material support to drug producers, the
accused store clerks would have had to know or have reason to
believe that they were selling products that would be used to manufacture
illegal drugs. Yet 44 out of the 49 defendants in this operation are of
Indian descent, and in many cases their English falls short of fluency. As
Anjuli Verma of the ACLU points out, many of them simply lack the
conversational and cultural aptitude necessary to determine when a customer
might be planning to cook up some meth.

I called one store where an employee was still facing charges for selling
matches and two bottles of pseudoephedrine an over-the-counter cold
medicine to an undercover informant. I spoke with the storeowner and the
accused employee, both Indian immigrants who asked not to be identified.
(An attorney for the store's corporation says a plea deal is in the works,
in which the corporation may pay a fine in exchange for the charges' being
dropped against the employee.)

About the employee, the storeowner says, "He speaks English enough just to
do the transactions [at the cash register]. He came from India maybe three
years ago, and has been working maybe twelve hours per day since then."
When I ask whether he thinks his employee understood what meth was at the
time of his arrest, the owner responds, "He has never been involved in any
type of drugs, so how is he supposed to know about any methamphetamine?"

I ask the owner to put his employee on the phone, and he reluctantly
agrees. "But speak slowly," he says, "and he will maybe understand a
little." Speaking slowly and repeating myself a few times, I ask the
employee to describe what went on in the transaction for which he is being
prosecuted. He recalls a customer who came into his store: "He just told
me, 'I need a case of matches.' So I said okay, and I just gave [it] to
him. … Then he [asked] for a case of ephedrine medicine, and I said no. My
manager [said] only sell two bottles. He was asking for [a] case four or
five times, I am saying no, no, no."

I ask, "Did you think the customer had the intention of making illegal
drugs?" "No, nothing he talk about that thing." "Had you ever heard of the
drug called meth before?" "No, I had never heard about any thing called
meth." When I press him further, he admits the customer said something
about having a "good cook going on" a phrase that, according to
prosecutors, is commonly known to refer to the meth production process. But
when I ask the accused employee about this, he says, "People come in and
say they are having a cook, cooking something, ask[ing] for matches. I
[was] thinking he was having [a] barbecue."

Such is the state of the ongoing war on drugs, where a sales clerk's
misunderstanding can land him in the crosshairs of a federal task force.
Add this to the burden of costs that our country has borne for the sake of
drug prohibition. We have put up with wasted tax dollars, broken families,
swollen prisons, and swamped police forces. Now shopkeepers are being
hounded by federal agents for selling legal products that have the
alchemical potential to be transmuted into street drugs. And, on top of
that, the feds can't even pick the right shopkeepers to hound. As these
outrages multiply, and the costs keep piling up, why do we continue to
tolerate it?