Opinion ID: 1193844
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: DEA Handling and Analysis of the Pills

Text: Shortly thereafter, DEA agents arrived at the Peace Bridge to take custody of the pills, which the Customs officers had sealed in evidence bags. The agents removed the pills from the four bags and separated them into evidence bags by color. The sorting produced a bag of pink pills and two bags of green pills. While sorting the pills, the agents did not track which pills came from each of the original four bags (or, for that matter, which came from each of the smaller baggies therein). The three evidence bags were sent to a laboratory for chemical analysis. There, the chemist first counted the pills, finding a total of 40,790 pills weighing 10.243 kilograms: 16,278 pink pills in one bag, 14,342 green pills in another, and 10,170 green pills in the last. He then removed twenty-nine pills from each of the three bags. Initial screening showed that the pills in each group contained either methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, commonly known as ecstacy) or methamphetamine. After grinding up each of the three piles of twenty-nine pills into three corresponding piles of powder, the chemist performed further tests. According to those tests, the first pile contained 28% MDMA and 5.6% d-methamphetamine; the second 15% MDMA and 6.9% d-methamphetamine; and the third 28% MDMA and 5.9% d-methamphetamine. At trial, the chemist testified that in his opinion, the results of these tests performed on the samples of pills accurately reflected the amount and percentage of MDMA and d-methamphetamine in all of the pills that had been seized.