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Published by the Indiana Office of Court Services

Carpenter v. State, No. 77A01-1306-CR-293, __ N.E.2d __ (Ind. Ct. App., Dec. 6 ,2013).

December 12, 2013 Filed Under: Criminal Tagged With: Appeals, E. Najam

Najam, J.
. . . [T]he State presented no evidence of the time period in which Carpenter ingested phenobarbital. For example, Carpenter’s probation officer did not give Carpenter a drug screen upon the commencement of her probation to establish what drugs, if any, Carpenter may have had in her system upon entering the probationary period. Had the probation officer done so, the trial court would have been able to infer subsequent use from the later drug screen. Alternatively, Walker, the State’s witness and a pharmacist, testified that phenobarbital has a half-life of three days in the human body, and that it may be detected in a drug screen up to three weeks after it has been ingested. But the State did not present any evidence of the amount or concentration of the controlled substance it detected, which would have allowed the trial court to infer time of use. Rather, the State left the trial court to speculate that Carpenter had used phenobarbital during her probationary period, even though the State’s own evidence demonstrated that Carpenter could have ingested the phenobarbital as early as three weeks before the test, which would have been as much as ten days before she had even been arrested. While these examples are not intended to be exhaustive of how the State may have met its burden of proof, they demonstrate that the State’s evidence was not sufficient to support the revocation of Carpenter’s probation.
BAKER, J., and CRONE, J., concur.

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