Article from Reason by C.J. Ciaramella.

A former sheriff’s deputy in Martin County, Florida, was arrested Monday for falsely imprisoning people on bogus drug charges. He is the second Florida deputy in one month to be charged with fabricating evidence during drug-related arrests.

Former Martin County Sheriff’s Deputy Steven O’Leary, who was fired from the department in January, allegedly made three drug arrests in which the substances involved were not actually narcotics. In each case, he claimed that roadside field tests returned positive results for illegal drugs.

According to a WPTV report:

A Regional Crime Lab determined one of the substances was a powder commonly used to treat headaches, and another was a sand-based material containing no narcotics.

O’Leary had been with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office since February 2018. He was fired from the Martin County Sheriff’s Office in January when the State Attorney’s office found problems with three of O’Leary’s cases.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Tony Webster [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons