Field tests provide quick answers. But if those answers and confessions cannot be trusted, Charles McClelland, the former Houston police chief, says, officers should not be using them. During an interview in March, McClelland said that if he had known of the false positives Houston’s officers were generating, he would have ordered a halt to all field testing departmentwide. Police officers are not chemists, McClelland said. “Officers shouldn’t collect and test their own evidence, period. I don’t care whether that’s cocaine, blood, hair.”

Judges, too, have the power, and a responsibility, some argue, to slow down the gears of the system. Patricia Lykos, the Harris County district attorney from 2009 to 2013, says that when she served as a criminal-court judge in the 1980s and 1990s, she would ask the defendants questions about their lives and the crimes they were accused of committing. If she wasn’t satisfied that the defendant was guilty of the charge, Lykos says, she wouldn’t accept the plea. At times the situation is even easier to decipher, says David LaBahn, president of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. The defendant can be heard arguing his or her innocence to the appointed attorney. In such drug-possession cases, when the prosecutor doesn’t have a lab report, “if I’m that judicial officer, this case is continued” — adjourned — “until everybody can do their job,” LaBahn says.

But that means the defendant, depending on his or her custody status, could go back to jail until the case proceeds, presenting a significant dilemma. Last year, Devon Anderson, the current Harris County district attorney, prohibited plea deals in drug-possession cases before the lab has issued a report. The labs issue reports in about two weeks, but defendants typically wait three weeks before they can see a judge — enough time to lose a job, lose an apartment, lose everything. And yet since Anderson implemented the rule, case dismissals have soared 31 percent, primarily because the lab has proved defendants not guilty.

People plead guilty when they’re innocent because they see no alternative. People who have just been arrested usually don’t know their options, or even that they have an option. “There’s a fail-safe in there, and it’s called the defense lawyer,” says Rick Werstein, the attorney now representing Albritton as she seeks to finalize her exoneration. Defense lawyers can demand a lab analysis, and they exist to help defendants navigate the consequences of the jail time while they wait, even as they explain the even higher costs of a felony conviction. They are fully authorized to pursue alternative deals.

In fact, Richardson, Albritton's original court-appointed lawyer, says the prosecutor offered her a deferred adjudication, in which she may have been able to wait for the results of a lab test outside the walls of a jail cell. Richardson, who first said he had no memory of their conversations, says he told her about the offer but she refused it. Albritton says she has never heard of anything called deferred adjudication. Neither could explain what actually happened. Perhaps they simply accepted that the field test, with its promise of scientific inevitability, would eventually convict her. “The entire country works on these field-test kits, right?” Richardson asks.

In the past three years, people arrested based on false-positive field tests have filed civil lawsuits in Sullivan County, Tenn.; Lehigh County, Pa.; Atlanta, Ga.; and San Diego, Calif. Three of the four cases also named the manufacturers Safari­land Group or Sirchie as defendants. Three of the cases have already been settled. In one of them, the Sullivan County case, Safariland secured a gag order on the plaintiff, explicitly to prevent media coverage, before entering settlement negotiations. The plaintiffs in each of the suits were people who were arrested, refused to plead guilty and were detained for a month or longer. So far, we have been unable find anyone who pleaded guilty based on field-test results and later filed suit, though Werstein said he and Albritton are considering their additional legal options.

The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals overturned Albritton’s conviction in late June, but before her record can be cleared, that reversal must be finalized by the trial court in Houston. Felony records are digitally disseminated far and wide, and can haunt the wrongly convicted for years after they are exonerated. Until the court makes its final move, Amy Albritton — for the purposes of employment, for the purposes of housing, for the purposes of her own peace of mind — remains a felon, one among unknown tens of thousands of Americans whose lives have been torn apart by a very flawed test.