
Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil - darkmethod
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/14/174269211/mass-crime-lab-scandal-reverberates-across-state
======
chimeracoder
> "It's unsettling and maddening, because you're now going to have a lot of
> people get released to the street prematurely," says Middlesex County
> District attorney Gerry Leone, one of many hoping the state supreme court
> will curb the releases.

That's a pretty bad way of looking at this, because it assumes that those
people _deserved_ to be behind bars to begin with, and ignores those that
didn't.

How about, "It's unsettling and maddening, because we now realize we have a
lot of people behind bars without the [proper] due process they deserved"?

~~~
lvs
Worse:

>"We tell them, 'Listen, we know what you were doing before and we're watching
you. And if you go back into the life, that Dookhan's not there anymore. So
when you go [back] in on this charge, it's gonna stick,'" Davis says.

So, Ed Davis is sending officers to threaten people who, from a legal
perspective, have not been convicted of a crime and have been erroneously
jailed for years. Lovely. That's really icing on the cake.

I'm not happy about putting potential dealers back on the street, but we are a
nation of laws, and these people will be freed by our courts. You can't have
the police commissioner sending people to threaten them.

~~~
marrs
How is he threatening them? He was telling repeat offenders that the police
are going to be keeping a close eye on them. That's their job, isn't it? Or
would you rather he tell them that the police will be away on holiday all next
week, "but please call our support centre if you plan on committing any crime
and we'll get our duty officer to log a ticket"?

~~~
Shivetya
they aren't repeat offenders if the evidence used against them was fraudulent.
If that evidence was the basis of their conviction they should be free and
this prosecutor should be out of a job for such threats.

Look, he only does this because his position is mostly safe for him to abuse.
He has already declared all these people guilty, sadly I bet he is more upset
the chemist was caught than the possibility people were wrongfully convicted.

------
judk
[http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/indicted-
drug-analyst-annie-dookhan-mails-reveal-her-close-personal-ties-
prosecutors/A37GaatHLKfW1kphDjxLXJ/story.html)

The DA is already covering up and defending the prosecutor's involvement,
saying there is nothing wrong with prosecutors telling Dhookan what test
results they needed to get their convictions, in clear violation of proper
experimental procedures.

~~~
malandrew
There should be a chinese wall between the crime lab and the DA. All the DA
should be able to do is submit evidence and any matching of that evidence to
the accused should be a complete black box as far as the DA is concerned.

~~~
pretense
If you read some of the other articles in this thread, there is specific
mention of a recent supreme court case ruling in 2009, "Melendez-Diaz v.
Massachusetts", where it was found that the accused are entitled to face
expert witnesses as their accusers. This means forensic analysts are forced to
appear in court more often.

The forensic analysts are government employees. This means that they are
almost always providing evidence that implicates the accused in the commission
of a crime.

When a case goes to trial, the prosecution only includes evidence that proves
guilt. At the very least, if it proves neither guilt nor innocence, they
exclude it from their exhibits as irrelevant. Prosecutors don't even look for
opportuinities to prove innocence. That's not their job. That's up to the
defence. They deliberately engage in tunnel vision, biased only in favor of
guilt. If they have evidence that exonerates the accused, they simply drop the
case. They have to. But that outcome is deeply undesirable to the prosecution,
because it opens the door to wrongful arrests, police harassment and other
liabilities.

The disturbing part here is that she was rubber stamping evidence in favor of
guilt.

What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction
using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus
provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then
reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?

If she were playing a role in that capacity, this would represent a far more
serious problem than a single "rogue" chemist... She would merely be a patsy,
a useful idiot, taking the fall for a much larger institutional debacle.

~~~
VladRussian2
>What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction
using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus
provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then
reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?

that would explain why she went down without talking to FBI/etc and taking
down all the DAs with (or even instead of :) her (as this just couldn't have
happened at that scale without all the DAs involvement)

Took one for the team, and will land softly somewhere after the time on the
"farm" (again with such cover it wouldn't be general prison population which
she helped to populate).

~~~
vijayr
What is a farm?

------
danso
The OP is a bit outdated...Dookhan has since been sentenced to 3 to 5 years in
prison:

[http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/22/annie-dookhan-
fo...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/22/annie-dookhan-former-state-
chemist-who-mishandled-drug-evidence-agrees-plead-
guilty/7UU3hfZUof4DFJGoNUfXGO/story.html)

The system is indeed in turmoil as it has to continue to review a massive
number of cases. One of the worser case scenarios has since happened: a man
who was freed because of possibly tainted evidence went on to allegedly murder
someone

[http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/17/man-freed-
becaus...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/17/man-freed-because-
annie-dookhan-case-charged-brockton-murder/8bWlbdDMmRef2l6yW2KVEL/story.html)

~~~
alexeisadeski3
I'd say that imprisoning innocent people was already the worst case scenario.

------
tokenadult
Minnesota Public Radio reported often about systemic problems in the St. Paul,
Minnesota crime lab over the last few years.

[http://blogs.mprnews.org/cities/2013/08/st-paul-police-
crime...](http://blogs.mprnews.org/cities/2013/08/st-paul-police-crime-lab-
back-up-and-running-after-scandal/)

It seems those problems are now mostly cleaned up, and there is no particular
implication here that a similar problem exists in the state crime lab, but it
is a very good idea for citizens to press law enforcement administrators to
make sure that crime lab procedures are validated and standardized and checked
and rechecked.

When I started reading the skeptical literature a decade or so ago, I was
astonished to discover that even fingerprint identification is not a well
standardized or well validated procedure. And I used to believe that defense
attorneys (I am a lawyer by training, although I don't practice law) were
mostly willfully ignorant of science when they cast doubt on DNA evidence. But
now I heartily approve the side-effect of our adversary system of justice,
which when it works best should have the "other side" questioning every form
of evidence and putting it to the test of rigorous validation. I think too
often people trying to solve the problem of crime through the criminal justice
system look for quick answers rather than exact answers.

AFTER EDIT: This background article link

[http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/19/annie-dookhan-and-
th...](http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/19/annie-dookhan-and-the-
massachusetts-drug-lab-crisis)

from the NPR affiliate in Boston updates the story and is more current than
the NPR link kindly submitted here (which is from March 2013 rather than May
2013).

~~~
Zigurd
> _It seems those problems are now mostly cleaned up, and there is no
> particular implication here that a similar problem exists in the state crime
> lab_

Except that the incentives are still massively perverse. It doesn't take an
organizational dynamics genius to know it's a safe bet these are not the only
two state crime labs with this problem.

------
theg2
All sorts of "fun" stuff going on here:

Another chemist found with no credentials -
[http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/11/26/mass-chemist-
academi...](http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/11/26/mass-chemist-academic-
credentials)

How fast did Dookhan work contrasted to case load:
[http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-
drug-t...](http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-testing-
productivity)

------
malandrew
I would love to see every single email by DAs that include her name
subpoenaed.

    
    
        "The report shows that the Hinton lab leaned heavily on 
        Dookhan’s productivity. Supervisors lauded her work ethic 
        and assigned her an increasing share of tests."[0]
    

We should know what her supervisors and DA were saying in private about her
work to her and to one another. There is no way that someone is so much more
productive, without anyone ever suspecting wrongdoing and turning a blind eye
to all this. Anyone who had ever expressed suspicion of her work, but never
raised the issue should be liable for criminal negligence here.

[0] [http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-
drug-t...](http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-testing-
productivity)

~~~
DannyBee
Outside of political fallout, nothing will happen to the prosecutors. Nobody
will charge them criminally, and civilly, prosecutors have absolute immunity
in most cases, sadly.

(There are limits to when they are given absolute immunity, generally limited
to to advocative functions, but they are often hard to separate out)

------
malandrew
In one of the threads about this scandal someone said that it would be
valuable to send known negative samples to a lab and check which ones come
back positive, so that we can investigate whether misconduct was involved.
This is basically equivalent to unit testing, since they are known
assert(false) tests. Unit tests can be devised to test crime labs, district
attorneys, law enforcement officers, judges, etc.

This makes me think if maybe this wouldn't be a worthwhile test for the
justice system in general. Hire actors to pose as criminals in the system
where the person is not guilty, but where most evidence supports a guilty
verdict with a few smaller pieces of evidence that prove innocent. With this
we find out how many prosecutors take the case all the way to conviction by
willingly choosing to ignore evidence suggesting guilt and which decide to
drop the case because they believe the person to be innocent. This would be
the equivalent of acceptance testing the justice system.

~~~
Oculus
The problem is no one, especially not the Justice or Police System, want to
show all the flaws that they have when it's so easy to cover for themselves
currently.

------
vsviridov
34000 tainted cases is not "messed up big time". It's deliberate and
malicious. And she gets 3-5 years? Bullshit.

~~~
nimble
Actually, 3-5 years sounds pretty reasonable. If you think about it, you
should be glad that she didn't get a crazy "send a message" punishment of 20
years or life in prison. She'll never work in that capacity again, so it's not
like there's a need to separate her from society for the protection of
society.

A better question to address is how a single rogue person could do so much
damage. This is institutional failure. Just going after this woman misses the
big problem.

~~~
jfim
> This is institutional failure.

Indeed. I wonder how hard it would be to have random testing of the chemists'
work.

~~~
Crito
I believe part of the accusations are that she actually tainted evidence. So
testing her results would not be sufficient, you would need to test samples
that she never had access to in the first place.

------
gms
I assume nothing will happen to the prosecutors she worked with.

~~~
analog31
Are they elected?

~~~
bmelton
Only the actual district attorney is elected, and the DA is seldom responsible
for the actual trying of cases. The DA is usually pretty far removed from the
minutia of actual casework.

~~~
malandrew
Social network analysis using known tampered cases should be enough to
highlight all the DAs that could require further scrutiny. I would not be
surprised if SNA shows that a few DAs in particular show up over and over and
over again in these tampered cases. AFAIK, the DAs are the civil servants with
the most to gain and lose from conviction rates and therefore are the most
likely to have been involved, assuming others collaborated or were at least
complicit.

------
tjaerv
Previously:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Laboratory#Controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Laboratory#Controversy)

------
chris_wot
According to Dookhan's lawyer, she says that she did it because she wanted to
get a 8 hour pay-check, that there was "too much red tape" but very loose
protocol.

But - she's _not_ a rogue chemist! Oh no.

When chemists do lab tests, are they blind to the criminal circumstances
themselves?

[http://www.wbur.org/2013/11/29/dookhan-
lawyer](http://www.wbur.org/2013/11/29/dookhan-lawyer)

What I find really awful, is that in many cases, jobs were lost, families
destroyed, and sentences were stiffer because of false results by this
chemist.

------
dyscrete
Could she have been manipulated by prosecutors? Yes she should be held
accountable for her actions, but I have a hunch that prosecutors had something
more to do with this.

------
michaelfeathers
I'm curious what percentage of testing goes through that lab.

~~~
jonlucc
This is a good question. I think most cities have one lab. They probably have
multiple analysts in the lab, but I think it's still a pretty high percentage
of the total cases.

~~~
sigstoat
sadly, no, most cities don't have their own tox/drug chemistry lab. there are
entire states with just 1 lab.

i'm not familiar with massachusetts, but i wouldn't be surprised if most of
the relevant testing for the state was going through there.

~~~
michaelfeathers
Another travesty of monoculture.

------
w_t_payne
I am shocked and horrified that a loyal servant of the system should be
discarded so casually. After all, falsifying convictions is just a part of how
the system works, isn't it?

You have to keep the lower orders scared to keep them loyal - otherwise they
might start getting ideas above their station, mightn't they? It's like
holding a wolf by the ears: release it, and we would all be in trouble.

------
Yeah_Sure
Story looked familiar. This is back in March.

------
laveur
Being a Mass. Resident this is really really really really old news! How the
hell is this just not getting here?

------
yeukhon
what is her motive?

~~~
wcummings
"Putting drug dealers in jail", to only very loosely paraphrase her words. She
was working with the prosecutors.

The news loves to call her a "rogue chemist" to misdirect.

[http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/indicted-
drug-analyst-annie-dookhan-mails-reveal-her-close-personal-ties-
prosecutors/A37GaatHLKfW1kphDjxLXJ/story.html)

~~~
middleclick
Reminds me of this:

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/11/kids-for-
cash-j...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/11/kids-for-cash-judge-
pennsylvania)

"'Kids for cash' judge gets 28 years in Pennsylvania bribery case"

