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

Systematic Failure

[Hasaf]

People will look at this person as a bd person, and I do not question that; but the system that allowed this to happen is the real culprit. A system that rewards people, formally or subtly, for producing the desired results, is not a system that is engineered for finding truth.

The reality is that Lae Enforcement and investigation procedures need independent oversight built directly into the system. Otherwise these issues can never be resolved.

Re:Systematic Failure

[AK Marc]

When you can cheat for so long with nobody finding out that you can ruin hundreds of thousands of lives, then the system is also broken.

She should have had to serve the time of all of her victims x 3. She got off way too easily.

And what "punishment" for a system that has allowed a single person to screw up 50,000 or so cases? The system is fine. It fucks the poor. It fucks the minorities. It fucks the people we don't like. So keep the system the way it is, and replace the broken cog in the broken machine, and let the broken machine still pump out bad results.

And 3x the time of the victims is a silly sentence. Let's say every conviction (some wrongly, some rightly) were 1 year (some shorter, some longer), that's 34,000 (current estimate, could be more) years in prison. That's purely symbolic and does nothing to prevent this from happening again, nor make any of the tainted convictions right.

What would you do with the victims of her crimes?

There should be redundancy in these tests

[JoeyRox]

Seems to me that something as important as evidence testing should be carried out by at least two separate, independent labs. The extra costs are significant but less so than the ramifications of false results being introduced into the process (intentional or not)

It's not just the criminal justice system.

[aussersterne]

The civil justice system is just as big a mess, and for the same reason as TFA implies. Strangely absent from both systems are the victims and the accused, the petitioners and the respondents, the actual citizens that the system purportedly serves.

Instead, both parties touch the system only at its very edge. Their actual cases happen more or less without them, winding their way through an impossibly large-scale system full of paid actors whose jobs, practically speaking, at the level of everyday experience, are not to think about the parties in the case, but to perform the same particularistic tasks day after day in massive volumes before handing things off to other paid actors in a massive division of labor.

It's a kind of assembly line or factory for legal activity and paperwork production. The complete details of any single case, civil or criminal, are not known by anyone within the system—even the judges, commissioners, and magistrates that hear them—even though the actual parties to the case know their own stories inside and out. There is no facility or room within the system for its paid actors to actually get to know a case, through either party's eyes. Instead, each professional focuses only on the tiny fragment of each case that they are responsible for before handing it off to the next professional.

There is essentially no oversight for any part of the system, and even if there was, plausible deniability is huge, since each professional knows and interacts with only the tiniest part of each case, yet most legal statues offer recourse only if poor or unprofessional practice are more likely than not to have actually altered the final outcomes of this division of labor involving many months, dozens or hundreds of specialists, and a significant degree of uncertainty due to the vagaries of interaction and logistics.

It is a forest-for-trees problem to the Nth power, but it's difficult to see any way to address it; to be just, the law needs to be well-documented, clear and explicit, and to have nuance and detail. This necessarily makes it large and complex. That implies the need for professionals that have been trained in it. But a professional that dedicates their life to law must be able to make a living. Most individuals cannot afford to pay an entire salary to a legal professional, much less the many that must work on a given case due to the complexity of the law, and thus, they cannot expect these professionals to dedicate themselves to a single case. Instead, the costs of the professionals' salaries must be shared amongst literally many thousands of victims, accused, petitioners, and respondents, meaning that the professionals must limit their consumption of case details to just those in which they specialize, or face mountains of information with which they can't possibly cope and the consumption of which would impact their ability to do the job in which they specialize.

As a result, for the average citizen, bringing a case or participating in a case is like playing a giant, almost comically huge game of Plinko. The case enters at one end of the machine and knocks about between pegs endlessly and seemingly at random, well out of their reach, for what seems like ages, while they stand by, breathless and helpless. At the end, the case exits somewhere, with some sort of decision, but the relationship between its final disposition and its initial circumstances are completely unpredictable and due to the nature of the machine, and it's difficult to argue that any part of the game machine is "broken" most of the time—a peg in the machine has to be severely affected (i.e. missing, malformed, completely bent) for such a claim to be viable. Minor variances throughout may influence outcomes for a very long time without being detectable, even under scrutiny. And for the most part, there is no budget, much less any avenue even for the funding and organization of a program of scrutiny.

I know that lab very well

[hey!]

I've been the Hinton Lab in Jamaica Plain dozens of times. The people I worked with there from the lowest lab tech to the middle managers were outstanding, but they were in the epidemiology end of things. The drug testing lab was segregated on its own floor, and it was walled off like a fortress. But despite that superficial formidability of the drug testing lab, there was clearly a problem: back in 2007 the director of the crime lab resigned because mishandling DNA tests, and before that the lab had been in trouble for processing DNA too slowly. There were rape kits that had been waiting to be processed for eighteen years.

Yet despite the review of the crime lab's procedures that followed this scandal, Annie Dookhan was able to continue with her antics for an other four years before she was caught. It's odd that she was even hired with her phony degrees because that was the year it came out that Ralph Timperi, the Hinton Lab's overall director, got his PhD from a diploma mill. You'd think that'd trigger a little more scrutiny.

It all makes the entire Hinton Lab sound like a hot mess, but with the exception of Timperi's phony degree all the problems were in the crime lab, which while located inside the Hinton Lab building was (IIRC) actually overseen by the Massachusetts State Police. Possibly some kind of responsibility thing was going on there. On the public health side of things the people at the state labs were among of the best public employees I've ever dealt with, and I've worked with state and county agencies across the country. It's a shame they've been tainted.

Or just poor

[rsilvergun]

For years I lived paycheck to paycheck (I had 3 major family illnesses hit me all at once, yay). I got called but was working for a company with a jury duty benefit. It only paid 2 weeks, but the trial was only 2 weeks. If I got called for a murder trial I'd have to beg the judge and hope he wasn't an asshole.

The trouble with juries is they are inherently conservative and right wing because only successful people who've never experienced any hardship can really afford to be on them. Everyone else just googles for how to get out of 'em (or asks around pre-google). That's not by accident. Every major facet of our legal system was built to protect property owners from the unwashed masses...