Mistrial Declared In Washington County Counselors Claims

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Dana Jones counseled drug offenders on how to stay away from drugs. As the only male counselor for the Washington/Madison County Drug Court Treatment Center, he also tested dozens of men for drugs every day for two years.

On May 10, 2010, Jones was abruptly fired after apparently testing positive for Ecstasy, or MDMA. Stunned, he carried out his supplies and office plant, walking past his clients.

Jones’ drug test report, it was later discovered, was wrong.

At A Glance

The Lawsuit

Melissa Henderson and Dana Jones vs. GlobalLab Solutions, Advanced Toxicology Network and Tyler Freeman

• Judge Jimm Hendren of the U.S. District Court’s Western District of Arkansas, Fayetteville Division, presided.

• Henderson and Jones sued for lost wages, lost benefits and damages for mental anguish.

Advanced Toxicology Network performed the drug test and settled out of court last year. Freeman and GlobalLab were hired to double-check positive results.

Henderson and Jones argued the error was caused by negligence. After four days of testimony and deliberation, a jury of 12 couldn’t come to a unanimous agreement. Hendren declared a mistrial Thursday.

Source: Staff Report

He and Melissa Henderson, a counselor who was fired the same day for the same reason and also was innocent, eventually sued the lab and medical review company that handled their tests for damages, saying the mistake could’ve been prevented.

The lawsuit is ongoing. U.S. District Court Judge Jimm Hendren declared a mistrial Thursday after a jury couldn’t agree who was most responsible. Henderson and Jones must try again with a new jury.

Two days of testimony from several witnesses repeatedly raised the same question: Has this happened before?

“I’m sure I’ve sent clients to jail because their drug tests came back positive,” Jones told the jury. “I relied strictly on the drug tests. I don’t feel good about that.”

His experience wasn’t the first time a person’s life was disrupted by faulty drug test reporting.

The newborn baby of Elizabeth Mort, a Pennsylvania woman, was taken into protective custody last summer after Mort tested positive in a drug test. The culprit was a poppy seed bagel, and Mort, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, settled out of court. No national organization appears to gather comprehensive statistics on such cases.

Jones and Henderson’s case is distinct because the lab tests accurately found no illegal drugs. The results were instead mixed up somewhere between the lab and their supervisor. It shows the drug testing process still carries risks, said Rita Sklar, executive director of ACLU of Arkansas.

“Since schools, companies and the government started doing drug testing of employees or students, the ACLU has been extremely concerned,” she said in a phone interview. “We think it’s a flawed thing to rely on. Things can go wrong, and there’s somebody’s life that’s at stake.”

Perhaps the bottom line from these incidents is employers should be careful with how they react to positive drug tests, said Charles Washington, who owns N Out Screening Services in Rogers, which provides employee and private drug testing and contracts with other labs as well.

Employers should consider double-checking the sample, he said — something Henderson and Jones’ boss didn’t do. Certain lab procedures are 100 percent accurate, Washington said, but can cost more, meaning some employers don’t opt for it.

“You want to go to the nth degree to cover all your bases,” Washington said. “It’s the Golden Rule. It’s not a budget issue for the person you’re about to put in jail.”

Randy Hargrove, a spokesman for Walmart, said a positive result would prompt a review process, to check if an employee takes a prescription medication that would trigger the test, for example. He said false positives were too rare to be a major concern.

A Tyson spokesman declined to comment.

The nonprofit treatment center where Jones and Henderson worked no longer exists. The Washington/Madison drug court, which includes more than 200 participants, now gets its drug counseling and testing from the Department of Community Corrections in Fayetteville.

Testing is done in-house, Judge Cristi Beaumont said, instead of being sent to another company. If participants dispute a positive result, they can get their own drug test and provide those results. It’s unclear if these changes had anything to do with Jones and Henderson’s experience.

“Obviously if someone tests positive, they could lose their freedom. We take it very seriously,” Beaumont said.

Advanced Toxicology Network, the Tennessee-based lab that performed the tests and was sued by the two counselors, was acquired last year by Quest Diagnostics. Based in New Jersey, Quest Diagnostics is one of the world’s largest providers of medical diagnostic testing.

During the trial last week, Dale Gravatt, who worked at Toxicology Network, testified Henderson and Jones’ tests showed only they had drunk alcohol sometime in the previous four days. He said the computer code noting alcohol was vague at the time, perhaps contributing to the mistake.

The network’s website said it performs more than 8,000 drug tests per day, making it “one of the largest single site drug testing laboratories in the country.”

Quest Diagnostics didn’t return a call requesting comment on whether more people were affected by the computer mistake. The toxicology network, however, settled with the two counselors outside of court last year.