The Forensic Chemistry on Courts: drug detection, fallibility, provisional and final awards in the Superior Courts and in the State Court of São Paulo

Abstract

It is essential to identify drug smuggling that the seized substances be identified as prohibited. Determining the nature of a chemical sample is not a trivial activity. Lawmakers around the world, including Brazil, refer to more accurate and less fallible techniques. The state of São Paulo (Brazil) jurisdiction corroborates the law in most cases, but it makes a lot of exceptions too. In this paper, we analyzed all Brazilian Supeior Courts and 198 judicial decisions on the facts of drug identification by the Court of Justice of the State of São Paulo. As main findings there were: there is no unanimity on the indispensability of the final awards; administrative procedures for assessing serious misconduct for possession of narcotics in prisons overlook the need for chemical analysis on the samples found; the amount of drug sample have disappeared between field tests were made and definitive reports were made (and authorities did nothing about it).