Kim Ogg, the District Attorney of Harris County, Texas, has made the decision to stop prosecuting cases with very small amounts of drugs, known as “trace cases.” Ogg ran on a promise to make these changes in her 2014 campaign and successful 2016 campaign for District Attorney, and hopes to make better use of resources by not spending them on these cases. This change follows the end of the use of roadside field tests by the police department in July 2017 to decide if suspicious substances were drugs.

In trace cases, the amount of drugs is small enough that they cannot be tested or even used. Hundreds of innocent people in Harris County have pled guilty to drug charges for it to be later discovered that the substances they possessed were not drugs.

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