Anthony Bouchard, who had pleaded guilty to the offence on the basis of the positive reading for the substance, has now been issued with a formal apology by the government’s chief analyst, Nicholas Hubbard. Mr Hubbard says his department has put steps in place to ensure the ‘human error’ can never happen again.
During an appeal launched by Mr Bouchard against his conviction, Mr Hubbard said that a chemical reagent, used to separate drugs from each other in samples of blood and urine during the testing process, must have been contaminated with THC, the main psychoactive compound in cannabis, when it was created at his laboratory.
All criminal cases where the same batch of reagent was used during testing have since been revisited, with all samples being reanalysed. No discrepancies have been found.
Mr Bouchard was initially arrested after he was alleged to have been ‘seen driving on a road in St Helier in such a manner as to cause a member of the public to telephone the police’.
He also had Diazepam in his blood but this was below the level which would warrant prosecution.
In a Royal Court judgment from Mr Bouchard’s appeal, Deputy Bailiff Robert MacRae said the court would only entertain an appeal against a conviction where a guilty plea was entered in ‘exceptional circumstances’.
‘There was, in fact, no THC in the appellant’s blood. It was this finding that led him to plead guilty. The plea was entered on the basis of evidence that was simply false, although relied upon in good faith by the prosecuting authorities. Although the appellant was a cannabis user, his use of cannabis was not, on his evidence and the evidence as a whole, sufficient to have affected his driving on this occasion.
‘Indeed, there may have been no cannabis present in his system at the time.’
He added: ‘…we were satisfied that in these particular circumstances, namely where the appellant elected to plead guilty exclusively by reference to expert evidence that, in fact, was entirely wrong, and demonstrated to be so, thus undermining the entire basis of the conviction, that the Court has a jurisdiction to consider an appeal against conviction. In these circumstances we elected to permit the appellant to appeal his conviction and quashed the same.’
