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.

Comments

three years?

[Black Parrot]

How about adding up all the time served by the people who got false convictions, then doubling it.

Re:three years?

[interval1066]

Here's a thing that would appear to point to a (another) big flaw in the system; prosecutors are apparently immune from their flawed actions. They're slow to remedy wrongful convictions in these cases this Annie Dookhan tainted, and they don't appear to be accountable. Many of the news articles (and there are a lot about this lab, not only was this Dookhan character tainting evidence, but a co-worker routinely dipped into the drug bin and was high during her processing) remark on the fact that the prosecutors involved refuse to do anything about the thousands sitting in jail based on these faulty tests citing they followed procedure. I can't think of a bigger flaw in a system wherein the ones in power refuse to correct the situation. The criminal justice system in this country is in dire straits. Thanks mainly to the war on drugs.

Simple way to 'repair' 'damage'

[cellocgw]

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.

Up The Ladder

[magusxxx]

And where was her boss during all of this? Did he give her raises by checking her performance or her conviction rate?

meme.jpg

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

End the drug war

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:End the drug war

[fyngyrz]

yes, you have to be hit with the stupid stick to get on a jury

You have to be hit with the asshole stick to not serve. The jury is the very last line of defense from bad law, bad cops, bad lawyers, and bad judges. Not to mention a corrupt and evil prison system, relegation to permanent bottom economic and social classes, loss of family, friends, possessions, job, credit rating, employability...

The jury is all that's left to us now. The last remaining semblance of justice within the actions of the system has been ashes for years.

When you refuse to serve, you are abandoning your fellow citizens. Both the ones that are victims of criminals, and the ones that are victims of the governement machine.

Re:Witness

[BitZtream]

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.

blame the man

[DrProton]

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.

Re: Witness

[Sique]

As the person who did the drug testing, she (and the other person mentioned in the second article) was a witness. So Annie Dookhan has given false testimony in at least 34,000 cases, and Sonja Farak in another 29,000 cases. And the former Attorney General is alleged to have known beforehand, that Sonja Farak's tests could be tainted and didn't inform the defense attorneys.

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).