New York Court Tosses Case against Lab Accused of Drug Test Tampering and Falsification

Case: After his court-ordered hair follicle tests came back positive for cocaine, Mr. S, a gentleman accused of child abuse sued the testing lab for fraud and mental distress. “I don’t use drugs of any kind,” he insisted, contending that the lab tinkered with the sample and falsified the results. The test lab filed a motion to dismiss all claims without a trial. Result: Motion granted. Significance: The issue wasn’t necessarily the truth of the charges. The reason the New York federal court tossed the claims is that in all three cases Mr. S’s legal theory was faulty: The fraud claim was invalid because Mr. S left a vital element of the fraud tort out of his complaint, namely, that the lab made any intentional misrepresentations to him; The intentional infliction of mental distress claim failed because even if the allegations were true, the lab’s actions didn’t amount to conduct “so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized society,” which is the standard required to prove that tort; and The negligent inflection of mental distress claim was defective […]