The Suffolk Superior Court ruled against the Massachusetts Department of Correction, prohibiting prison officials from using field drug tests without laboratory confirmation to punish people who are incarcerated. The opinion noted, “The overwhelming evidence before this Court is that the NARK II Test, by itself, is a highly unreliable means of determining whether a particular mail item actually contains any illicit [substances],” and that the reported false positive rate is “only marginally better than a coin-flip, and exponentially worse than the false positive rate that DOC itself has indicated is acceptable.”

In October 2020, more than a dozen defense attorneys said they were falsely accused of sending illegal drugs to the people they represented in prison, causing those individuals to be held in solitary confinement while prison authorities awaited confirmation from outside labs. This is the basis of the class action lawsuits filed by those incarcerated by the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC) based on faulty test results and their attorneys who were falsely accused. These false accusations interfered with the incarcerated people’s right to communicate with counsel and punished them without due process. ‍One attorney was informed that legal mail he had sent to his client had tested positive for K2. His client was placed in solitary confinement, lost his prison job, and was prevented from moving to a lower-security prison, as previously planned. Four months passed before the Massachusetts DOC informed the attorney that the test had indeed been a false positive. Meanwhile, the original legal mail was never delivered to his client. An incarcerated man was told that his legal mail from an educational program had tested positive for K2 and was immediately placed in solitary confinement, where he stayed for three weeks. He was also told that even if his test came back negative from the lab, he would still have to pay a fee of $50 for additional testing. Eventually, the DOC received lab confirmation that the test had indeed been a false positive. When the incarcerated man received his legal mail, it had been so cut up that it resembled a “paper snowflake.” Even Massachusetts DOC employees were aware of the unreliability of the tests. One DOC employee said she believed the tests produced false positives up to 80% of the time.