State Power California parole board denies incarcerated man a hearing based on ‘potential false-positive’ substance test
By Glen Stellmacher
Two weeks before Roque Martinez was set to go before the California Board of Parole Hearings, in June 2024, he was notified that he’d tested positive for opiates.
“I have not used,” Martinez, 55, told Prism, “so it was a huge deal to me. It was almost like going into panic mode.” On advice from his lawyer, the positive drug test forced Martinez to remain behind bars for three more years and postpone his parole hearing until June 2027, after almost 21 years already served.
But while Martinez has been waiting, he received a letter from California Correctional Health Care Services (CCHCS), viewed by Prism, informing him that he’d been screened for opiates during a period when Quest Diagnostics had changed the reagent, a critical component used in its drug tests, resulting in an abnormal surge of positive test results across California prisons.
The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian and San Quentin News reported on a testing regime thought to have yielded almost 6,000 false-positive test results across California’s population in state custody.
“I’ve already postponed—so to speak—my freedom because of a false positive,” Martinez said. He decided to petition to move up the date of his parole hearing.
But the parole board denied his request in October 2025. In the letter explaining its decision, viewed by Prism, the parole board justified its denial by noting that Martinez had tested positive for a different substance: alcohol. Martinez told the state corrections department that he had not consumed any alcohol, he told Prism.
The parole board’s deputy commissioner who reviewed his file found that Martinez’s own doctor described the result as a “potential false positive.” Martinez did not know his doctor made that comment.
After UnCommon Law worked with reporter Glen Stellmacher over many months to help bring attention to this issue after a previous investigation, nearly 5,000 incarcerated people in the MAT program were identified as potentially impacted by false-positive opiate test results tied to a reagent change by the state’s contracted lab provider. The reporting raised broader concerns about how these tests are being used in parole proceedings. Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) is a highly effective treatment for substance use disorders and can be life-saving for people in state prisons.