The Civic-Minded Cocaine Cooker
It was October 1993 in a Georgia town when Tyrell Church was in the kitchen cooking up his specialty . . . cocaine. He had been doing that for a good thirty years, but he had never seen any that cooked up like this batch. Something was wrong.
“I had never seen powder cocaine that turned red when you cooked it up,” Church explained. So, being concerned for his own welfare as well as that of the public at large, Tyrell Church did what any fool would do. He took the suspicious concoction to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab for analysis.
The lab ran four separate tests. The substance proved to be cocaine after all. And Church was promptly arrested and charged with possession of the same. He opted to serve as his own lawyer in what to him seemed a ridiculous trial.
“Had I known I was going to be arrested,” he argued, “I wouldn’t have taken it over to the lab.”
So why did Church take his cocaine to the lab?
“If kids get hold of something like this,” he said, “it might hurt them or poison them. I took it over there to have it tested to see if it had been cut or mixed with any dangerous substances.”
The civic-minded cooker went on to say that if something had been wrong with the cocaine, he could have warned the public.
Church insisted that he had often had his cocaine tested in New York, where he once lived.
“What’s the sense in having a crime lab,” he asked, bewildered, “if a person can’t take anything over there?”
He also requested that the substance be retested, a request which the judge denied.
“I’m not a habitual user,” the cooker complained in his final statement. “I use cocaine for my arthritis. It’s a waste of the taxpayers’ time for this kind of case to come to court. The grand jury shouldn’t have even bothered.”
“I do not think a violation of the cocaine law is a waste of time,” the district attorney countered.
The jury couldn’t have agreed more. It took just seven minutes for them to return a guilty verdict.