Mankato Free Press – by Dan Nienaber
MANKATO — A Mankato man who sat in jail for weeks awaiting trial for possessing a large amount of powder amphetamine was released recently after the charges were dismissed.
It turns out his story about the powder actually being vitamins was true.
Joseph Ray Burrell, 31, said he isn’t happy that it took as long as it did for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension crime lab’s findings to be processed. He said evidence records show about a month passed before prosecutors sent the powder in to be tested and more than a month passed after that before the results were returned.
In the meantime, Burrell sat in jail waiting to go to trial for two felony counts each of third- and fifth-degree drug possession. He was released after the charges were dismissed Feb. 4. His trial was scheduled to start the following day.
“I had been sitting in the jail since November with my bail set at $250,000,” Burrell said. “Then, two days before trial, they dropped the charges and let me go.”
Chris Rovney, assistant Blue Earth County attorney, said an initial field test of a bag of powder found in a car Burrell was driving on Nov. 14 tested positive for amphetamine. A more expensive and more accurate test completed by the BCA showed the powder did not contain anything illegal, so the charges were dismissed, he said.
A Mankato police officer stopped Burrell in the parking lot of the Riverfront Drive Hy-Vee grocery because he was driving out of the lot without his lights on. There was a warrant for his arrest for failing to appear in St. Louis County District Court for a charge of fleeing an officer on foot.
The car was searched and the officer reported finding a plastic bag containing a half ounce of crystal shards. The initial field test said the shards contained amphetamine, according to the criminal complaint that was filed.
Burrell, who admits he has used drugs in the past, said he had just finished in-patient treatment at New Beginnings before he was stopped in Mankato. New Beginnings is a drug treatment center near the small town of Waverly west of the the Twin Cities.
The jail makes money off the guy. The longer he is in the more money the jail makes.
yep — justice in this country is a bad joke, and cops only exists to add more victims to the legalized slavery system.
A quarter million dollar bail for vitamin pills? Cops who rape children are let out on $10,000 bail.
He’s lucky that while he was sitting in there, doing time for his vitamins, that they didn’t find some lame excuse to add a few years to his “sentence”.
How was he assumed to be guilty the whole time when he’s innocent until proven guilty? So everybody who doesn’t want to take the whole container of Creatine to the gym with them and puts it in a baggy needs to spent time behind bars until it’s proven it’s not an outlawed molecule?