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Crime Lab Scandals Just Keep Getting Worse (slate.com)
Many people are convicted in American courts on the basis of drug lab analysis. Just how accurate or accountable are the people and labs? schwit1 writes with an excerpt that gives a good reminder of how people can land in jail based on fake data, with the example (an outlier, surely) of Annie Dookhan, a chemist who worked at a Massachusetts state lab drug.
Dookhan was sentenced in 2013 to at least three years in prison, after pleading guilty in 2012 to having falsified thousands of drug tests. Among her extracurricular crime lab activities, Dookhan failed to properly test drug samples before declaring them positive, mixed up samples to create positive tests, forged signatures, and lied about her own credentials. Over her nine-year career, Dookhan tested about 60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases. Three years later, the state of Massachusetts still can't figure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly.
How about adding up all the time served by the people who got false convictions, then doubling it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Eye-witness testimony is nigh useless even when people aren't deliberately fabricating. The human brain is just too "flexible" for that kind of thing.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Just pass some retroactive laws legalizing drug use. Problem solved. No need for new trials. No new costs, and dramatically reduced law enforcement budget going forward. Plus revenue from tax stamps on recreational substances.
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No, she was a bad person. Just because a system allows you to cheat does not mean you should cheat and if you do cheat you are the bad person, not the system. She should have had to serve the time of all of her victims x 3. She got off way too easily.
And where was her boss during all of this? Did he give her raises by checking her performance or her conviction rate?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Why not both?
Yeah, she should be nailed to a raft by her ears and set adrift on the ocean.
But we should have a system of justice that isn't so prone to corruption by way of weak oversight.
fiigure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly." ? just put a colt 45 on her temple and shirly temple the trigger so that there is no tampering of evidence when it comes to "whose brains are these"
There's a big difference between revenge/punishment for the responsible person and making things right for all of the people that may have been convicted who were innocent. It's not like you can give them their time back. Nor can you repair the emotional and psychological damage done. Prison isn't summer camp. Spending any significant time there is going to change most people, and not for the best. Most convicted criminals come out as better criminals. I can't imagine what being in that environment would do to someone who knows they shouldn't be there to begin with.
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Take random samples from one lab and have them retested at another lab. Mistakes will be borne out.
Due to CSI and similar shows, forensic evidence is sacrosanct. If you want to go to court today, you better have some DNA test available (even if it makes no sense at all) or the jury will simply not believe you. But having something out of a lab seals the deal.
Don't get me wrong, it's a GOOD thing that people now give more credibility to material evidence than witnesses, but as usual we're overdoing it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
End the drug war. Free its non-violent victims. That'd be a great start.
As for anyone convicted due to the person's work, or convicted where this person could have been involved, they should be set free immediately and their records cleared of said convictions.
The fact that they didn't go right after this simply tells us just how corrupt the system is. "Justice", my aching ass.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Wrong, you turn every single person free.
When the evidence is tainted, the case gets thrown out.
Thats how we ensure the innocent are not put in jail, and we do so at the cost of letting some criminals free when we would have preferred not to.
But then we consider every person involved in those cases as having failed, specifically the prosecution. And we turn the arrest into a bad arrest and count that against the police.
When this shit happens, you punish the ever living shit out of everyone involved in the chain that fucked up because they put innocent people behind bars and ruined other peoples lives in their overzealousness to get a collar and conviction.
Make false convictions essentially a career ender for everyone in the chain and watch how quick things shape up. Make the population so pissed off at any lawyer or cop who allows this shit to happen that they are afraid of being lynched when they fuck up in the future.
They have no reason to fear mistakes they make, someone else suffers, it has no bearing on their life. Change that and you'll fix the problem.
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I blame management, the prosecutors, and the judges. There was a serious lack of oversight, obviously.
Let's say she worked 250 days/year, a conservative assumption. That means she was averaging ~ 6E4/(9*250) ~ 27 analyses/day. Assuming 8 hours actual work/day, that means she was completing an analysis roughly every 18 minutes. I'm a physicist. I've worked in a manufacturing facility with a chem lab that analyzed production samples. Hell, sample prep can take 20 minutes! There is no way she was completing these analyses accurately. Her boss must have known something was amiss. A reasonable assumption is that he or she knew so and had wink/nod arrangement with the prosecutors and the courts.
Our "justice" system is deeply flawed, and this is more evidence of the systemic flaws in it. Kudos to Ms. Lithwick for covering this beat.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
But that's what you get if you measure the success of a state attorney by the numbers of convictions and guilty pleas he gets from the defendants. And that's what you get when ignoring the rights of defendants during the investigation and before court is hailed as "being tough on crime". Somewhere, people are getting sloppy and start cheating just to get higher scores. And instead of justice, you just get high costs for running an extensive prison system to keep all those people, whose convictions and guilty pleas are mostly about their prosecuter's career and not so much about crimes they really committed (if any).
Police reports about what witnesses said are generally written up, by the police officers, from memory, filtered through the officer's biases and perceptions, hours or days after the incident. Why this stuff isn't being recorded, nearly 50 years after portable tape recorders became available, I have no idea.
For QC based on individual items, you might test a small percentage, for batch-based products you might also do tests on every batch as a whole at every stage of its production, plus randomised testing of individual packaged units. I used to work in a QC laboratory, doing testing of both. For some tests, we would also run known standards every time we tested an unknown sample, or set of samples to ensure that the results were always accurate, and always ran both multiple replicates of the standard and multiple replicates of each sample to ensure they were consistent within a certain standard deviation. This guards against calibration errors on the machines and errors on the part of the sample prep or operator. We would occasionally also send samples to external independent laboratories to verify the accuracy of our processes. In this case it wasn't forensics, and there was no need for anonymising the samples. For forensics, I would have hoped that they would also be running anonymous control samples through the pipeline as well (both negative and varying degrees of positive) to validate their process. The technicians don't even need to be aware of it--you simply introduce them as incoming test samples and then validate that the results matched the expectations after testing is done and logged.
...And even if there isn't any cheating, there is the possibility that the two labs would come to different conclusions honestly, due to the inherent messiness of most criminal matters.
You cite that like it is a problem with double checking results. No, that is the very feature we wish to implement. It two labs come to different conclusions, that throws them both into doubt - and then additional checking must be initiated to resolve the discrepancies. If a repeatable result is not possible, then it is not evidence. Period.
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