Military Drug Crimes and Positive Urinalysis
Your career isn’t over!
Service Members call us every week and ask one basic question: “Is my career over because I popped hot?” The answer to this question is a resounding no! It is not illegal to fail a drug test. It is not illegal to have remnants of a drug in your urine or body. It is only illegal if you wrongfully ingested the drug.
The Attorneys at Capovilla and Williams have represented hundreds of service members accused of wrongfully using drugs. We understand that simply because a substance is in your system does not mean the law was broken. We know that the military can taint samples, spill samples, or even write the wrong names on samples. We know that just a few years, there was a major leakage issue at a primary DoD testing lab. We have seen all of this before and we are ready to fight for you.
How to Save Your Career
Drug Testing Errors:
Here are the facts: the DoD drug tests nearly 60,000 Service Members a month and those samples are sent to several different federal laboratories across the DoD to be tested. The process is supposed to be a simple one: the UPL collects the sample, seals it, marks it, and eventually transfers that sample to your installations ASAP director or office. From there, the sample is sent to a DoD lab for testing. Let us make this clear – the samples are literally packed in a box, sent through the mail, and delivered to a lab. Any deviation from those instructions lead to a serious mistake that may put your military career in jeopardy.
A lot can go wrong in this process. Most UPLs will admit that the entire system is based on humans not making mistakes. If there is a mistake, does your current attorney know what to look for? Does he or she have years of experience litigating military drug cases? Here at Capovilla & Williams we have litigated hundreds of drug cases in the military. We know the process like we know the back of our hands and we pay CLOSE attention to the details. Details, my friends, often serve as the difference between a conviction and an acquittal.
Accidental Drug Ingestion:
Again, it is not illegal to have a controlled substance in your body; it is only illegal to wrongfully ingest that controlled substance. Remember, the Government must do more in trial than simply produce your positive urinalysis — they must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you knowingly and wrongly ingested the illegal substance. Here at Capovilla & Williams we have successfully defended service members who innocently ingested a controlled substance. We have seen cases where the service member was illegally drugged against his will, tricked into eating marijuana brownies, accidentally took a spouses medication, got contaminated with cocaine through contact with a known user, and we have had clients prescribed the wrong prescription medications, which lead to a false positive on their test. We know what to do! We know how to win! Are you ready to act?
