A Pennsylvania state trooper arrested two suspects after he found a bag of cocaine in their car that they claimed was just soap. After languishing in jail for a month, the suspects were released–because the substance was indeed just soap.
The officer pulled over Annadel Cruz and Alexander Bernstein for speeding on a highway in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. The pair had come from New York City, and Cruz admitted to smoking pot before beginning the drive. She also consented to a search of the car, where the officer found two strange bags with a white substance inside them.
The suspects insisted that the bag contained only homemade soap, but the trooper performed an on-site drug test that wrongly identified the substance as cocaine.
Cruz and Bernstein were arrested for drug trafficking and sent to prison for a month. Later, a police laboratory determined that the substance inside the bags was soap after all, and they were released, according to The Morning Call.
Attorneys for Cruz and Bernstein believe the initial test was either improperly conducted or skipped altogether. They also suspect that Cruz, who is Latina, was racially profiled.
Initially, Cruz’s soap defense was laughed at by the cops and the media. The Huffington Post ran a story about Cruz a few weeks ago in which it made fun of her for giving such a stupid excuse:
A woman who was trying to make a clean getaway allegedly told an officer that four pounds of white powder in her car was homemade soap. It’s a good thing the officer didn’t take a whiff to see if it smelled nice.
The substance, of course, did indeed smell like soap, since it was soap, just like Cruz claimed.