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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
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.
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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A decent defense lawyer would have had an independent lab retest the samples.
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.
Not pardoned, but their conviction should be thrown out.
And the entire legal system of Massachusetts should be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up, firing EVERYONE who was anything higher than a mid-level manager.
Although honestly, this travesty of justice makes me think that even more drastic action is needed. I'm thinking we release all non-violent prisoners and hold a constitutional convention. The system is fucked up in a fundamental way, and we need to rebuild it so that it isn't.
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)
To be fair, witnesses should have zero credibility.
Start here: Intro to Eyewitness Identification, still ongoing. Then go back to the beginning, it's a good read.
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no Gen Pop and make sure EVERYBODY knows who she is.
oh and use the assets forfeiture to pay the lost income of the persons jailed in error
Thanks to CSI I was found not guilty of a murdering ten people in a public place because an enhanced eye reflection showed I was having vacation in Europe at the time.
Obviously you're one of those people who doesn't recognize sarcasm...
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The post said that " the state of Massachusetts still can't figure out how to repair the damage SHE wrought almost single-handedly."
How about blaming the state of Massachusetts for assigning a level of confidence and faith to her judgments that were in no way justified. The state wanted to get convictions to increase the profits for the political class.That is what she gave them. Now the state is saying they had no idea. I call bullshit. I mean If I give a monkey a gun and tell it to fight terrorists and it latter turns out that the monkey not only didn't do a good job of defending the country against terrorists, but it actually killed so called innocents. Is the monkey ultimately to blame or should I blame myself for giving a gun to a monkey and telling it to fight terrorists. Of coarse I am referring to George Bush and the war we went along with to get us out of our collective boredom. but the point remains. The blame always falls to the lowest ranking individuals and those at top say. Gosh we had no idea. We should write some more laws to keep this thing from happening again.
A fish rots from it's head not from the tail.
What do they mean, "can't figure out how to repair the damage." This is total nonsense. It's pretty easy to figure out what to do but likly complicated in execution. Everyone that was convicted on the basis of any test performed by the crime lab should have their record cleared and if still incarcerated, released. Next, compensation for any lost income, with interest, should be paid, including legal fees. For those who lost a job or could not get a job because of a phony criminal record should likewise be compensated. Folks who were brought to trial or otherwise inconvenienced but not convicted should also be compensated. It's going to be hard to figure compensation for other kinds of damage to people such as psychological damage, broken marriages, etc. Now, some truly guilty who may or may not have been convicted will benefit from this process, but that's better than not being fair to those unfairly treated. Note, I wrote that persons convicted on the basis of a lab test should be cleared but for some cases other evidence may have been more important for prosecution.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
This is not an easy "but." Most cases generate aggregate billing across all facets of the case at a rate of five or six figures monthly, and it is already easy to make the claim that the finance limits in every case are the most direct limits on just outcomes.
Who is going to pay the significant costs? And at the expense of what other part of the case that might have had them instead? There are many victims and defendants that would argue that the first thing that ought to be paid for is increased time for the prosecutor or defense attorney in a case to pay attention to the case, since in most instances the parties feel as though the attention of their legal representatives is being catastrophically rationed.
And what about other tests or forms of forensic expertise? Is it better to pay for two tests or, if funds exist, to pay for one of the other forms of corroborating expertise and testing that are otherwise unavailable due to cost constraints?
Access to truth and law are significantly cost-constrained on both sides. Adding one additional confirming test does little to change this, and just as importantly, it's not clear—given this constraint—just how even this one more test will be paid for without drawing resources from some other dimension of a given case that could be equally important in a system in which it's impossible to predict just which dimensions of a case will be definitive until case post-mortems and debriefings are being carried out.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
OK, this story is disturbing and calls in question our whole criminal justice system. But, where is the "getting worse" in the headline from? This is old news. While this may be one case of many, where are the links to others news items making this a trend? Maybe this is an isolated incident. Maybe not. No place on Slashdot as it is.
> Anyone convicted on the basis of a test she could have conducted should be pardoned.
I agree with your sentiment. I see enormous practical difficulties. Sorting out which convictions were "on the basis of a test" is a nightmare, especially when the victims of poor testing plea bargained to a lower sentence. And what of people convicted of violence while in prison, violence that might not have occurred if they'd been free?
The Slate article is worth reading. Scandal 1: The lying, conscienceless lab workers and the short (2 and 3 year) prison terms they received for their crimes, compared to those they convicted. Scandal 2: The Massachusetts State Attorney General that knew they were using falsified evidence and covered it up. Scandal 3: Each of the wrongly convicted 30,000 to 60,000 individual prisoners has to hire an attorney to fight for his own release. Which is difficult to do without any sort of income. Scandal 4: The feds have the same problem on the same scale with hair evidence analysis that is based on non-existent science. Scandal 5: Others states have similar issues.
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.
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The trial was a pig circus. He never stood a chance.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That can't be! I was in Europe the whole time and I can't remember seeing you!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Red Dwarf CSI spoof.
Some of the finest legal minds come from prison.
That will happen anyway. Maybe it's time to automate the process so that this type of issue becomes very remote. What's MIT's phone number?
I guess your passport wasn't admissible? Why?
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
After sitting through a jury selection process, I have figured out that even this, supposedly fair process, is deeply broken in favor of the prosecution. If you are honest and don't agree with an overly harsh mandatory sentencing law, or don't trust cops implicitly, or are willing to accept that you may have one of many biases, which research shows we ALL have; then you will be disqualified.
Sitting there, observing the people who quickly figured out the exact right things to say to NOT be disqualified, especially after hearing how those same people talked while we were waiting outside of the courtroom, I can't help but believe those are the people who are eager to vote "guilty." I met several others who came to this same conclusion.
So, once a cop has decided to arrest you, large parts of the system seem to have been "gerrymandered" in a way to drastically increase the probability of conviction. I call it, "The law of secretly intended consequences."
I was in the jury on an assault case. The incident happened about 6 months prior. Not only didn't the witnessss agree with each other but they disagreed with the police reports about what they said.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
We need to rehash all the posts from almost 3 years ago?
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).
And the rest should be there.
Learn to love Alaska
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Put that Bitch in prison for 35 thousand consecutive 5 year sentences. Just to keep the prosecutor's track record intact.
Have gnu, will travel.
Since all 34,000 cases were tainted have the 34,000 convictions been reversed and the victims made whole? And why the heck is a three year sentence issued for such a radical and harmful criminal in the lab work? Or worse yet does this imply that all lab work done in all law enforcement agencies is suspect and should be a matter for appeals courts for every conviction whether for murder or drug crimes?
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.
I would suggest that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts pay more attention on how to repair the damage their drug laws have wrought (alas, not single handledly); by comparison, Ms Dookhan's damages are a drop in the ocean. I have no doubt that three decades from now the Commonwealth will be arguing over this. As a starter, how about freeing everyone convicted of a marijuana offense, overturning their convictions, and returning (or recompensing) any seized property?
What is the state of the samples?
If the sample integrity has been maintained retesting is possible.
My bias is that the war on drugs has become vastly worse than the drugs themselves.
Given my bias and opinion based cost analysis all drug offenders should be released
with time served rubber stamps. The war on drugs has caused astounding social
damage in the US and much of the world. Can we say "war zone" children.
The WOD money would better be spent on the social and medical needs and consequences.
Addiction is very serious but once money is removed all of the associated crimes involved in
the financing of addiction are vastly reduced both domestic and international. Addiction does
cause harm to individuals. The WOD causes harm to communities and even nations.
The bigger fish involving truck loads of stuff and money are unlikely to be impacted.
Crack and meth are so evil that each citizen should be required to cultivate a marijuana
plant of old green simply to make a less harmful choice available.
Drug addiction is real and a problem --- the WOD is worse.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Criminal Scam Implementors?
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...
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it just depends on what part of society you're from. If you're in the upper class drug laws are great. They keep the poors out of your neighborhood, schools and parks.
Let me explain. Almost every poor person at least knows someone who takes drugs. In the absence of access to medical care you're going to self medicate. Now, remember that all our drug laws make you guilty by association. If they find your buddy's pot in your car you still lose your car. That means if you're poor you learn to avoid the police. You especially learn to avoid giving them "probably cause" to search you and your friends. And what better way to give the cops probably cause than by showing up in a neighborhood you obviously can't afford?
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Single handedly? sorry, she was considered the Go-To Person to test your samples by many DA's in Mass.
It's ludicrous to think that any person can be the go-to person unless they deliver the results you want - which is a conviction - even if it's forged. DA's are elected, and have you ever seen one that wasn't "Tough on Crime". or bragged about their conviction rate in their election campaigns?
They knew - they just didn't care.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Wrong, you turn every single person free.
When the evidence is tainted, the case gets thrown out.
I think that's throwing the baby out with the bath water. Perhaps a more reasonable approach would be to see if the conviction would stand without the fake evidence. For a sample group as large as this there are bound to be many *seriously bad* criminals that it would be a very bad idea to release. Of course, if you're willing to put your money where your mouth is how about we release these people but make you liable for crimes they commit. Kind of like co-signing. Mayhem is all fun and games until it happens in your own neighborhood ;-)
Make false convictions essentially a career ender for everyone in the chain and watch how quick things shape up.
False positives replaced by wall to wall false negatives out of fear of MAYBE convicting a wrong person, so better safe than sorry... so everyone walks.
Now watch how quick THAT shapes up into an "unexplainable crime wave" AND a Wild West situation where everyone caters to their own "justice" WHILE cops start shooting people "just in case" cause it was "the only way to be sure".
Hey... everyone's gonna walk anyway cause everyone in the chain is now afraid that SOMEONE in the chain already made that career ending mistake, causing everyone to end up in jail. Unless...
You're basically suggesting that an administrative error like a typo that turns Tuttle into Buttle should get a person into more trouble than killing both Buttle and Tuttle.
After all, it MAY NOT have been your bullets from your gun fired by you that ended up in their brains.
Maybe someone else made an error while collecting or filing evidence and because they can't find their ass with a map and candle, now EVERYONE in the chain will be hung out to dry?
Safer for everyone to just mark all evidence as "no match". And let's scrub the database, just in case.
Phew! That was a close one. What's next? Jill Layton getting shot, AGAIN?!
See? This is the kind of thing that will end us all one day. Some idiot double-filing something. Better get down to filing and clean up there too.
Or just burn the whole building and blame it all on terrorists... there being no terrorists, the person to blame won't really exist... and everyone will literally be chasing no one.
Holy shit, that's brilliant!
There are reasons why the chain is used as a metaphor for command and management structures where a pyramid or a path or a tree would and could work as well - at a first glance.
One of them is that a link in a chain can be singled out, reforged, removed or replaced (maybe with more links this time) without throwing the entire chain to scrap iron and replacing it with a new one on account of a single weak link.
Can't slice off a middle part of the pyramid and add two more levels or reassemble the complete pyramid out of remaining parts.
Can't just make a new path if the faulty link is a broken bridge or a tunnel.
Can't cut off a branch, fix it, and put it back on the tree, or just make the tree grow another one, just like the old one.
And then there's that whole thing where no person should be liable for something someone else did and there being more outcomes to making an error than just "suffer forever" and "go free".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Actually, so long as the people we hold responsible for the flaws are in fact responsible for them, subjecting them to the "justice" system is, ironically, perfect justice.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
At first I thought I detected it, but a second test showed that there were less than 50 PPM in the sample.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
FTFY
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Well, since our judicial system is SUPPOSED to give the benefit of the doubt to defendants, any case touched by either corrupt techs should be presumed to be vacated. If the DA believes there might be a case without the forensic evidence, he may file charges.
> any case touched by either corrupt techs should be presumed to be vacated.
That presumption is unlikely to be borne out: from what I see of the Jennie Doohan case in MA, few convictions were overturned. Many defendants in drug cases plea bargain to lesser offenses, and I'd expect _none_ of those cases to be revisited, even if the defendant pled out to avoid hash penalties they were likely to receive, especially with federally mandated sentencing guidelines. Some cases doubtless had other evidence or testimony, which may have been _corroborated_ by the tainted forensic analysis, but which prosecutors will have great reasons to claim are valid. And getting such cases re-heard and re-examined is an intense, expensive, and for prosecutors an embarrassing They have strong bureaucratic and professional reasons to avoid any revisiting of these cases.
And that is why I and a growing number of Americans have become increasingly skeptical of the criminal "justice" system in the U.S.
While the evidence seems to show she was guilty as charged, do you really believe that her management didn't know or have reason to know?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sorry, but while the first step you propose is correct (and allow them to sue the individuals involved in railroading them for false imprisonment), the rest doesn't work.
The system as designed is basically flawed. Probably by intent. Punishment, while a necessary component, becomes destructive of rehabilitation when overdone, as it is in every prison I've ever heard described.
But the right approach wouldn't be cheap. First you need a thorough physical examination to deal with any problems.
Then there should be a period of complete isolation. And complete means both that you can't talk to anyone, nobody can hear you, and the guards don't come in and beat you up (i.e., this is NOT solitary confinement as currently implemented). This needs to be broken after a couple of weeks by visits from a trained clinician...trained in, probably, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Then small group workshops in an appropriate trade. Appropriate here means appropriate for their personality, not for earning a living. Auto mechanics will probably often be a good choice, or wood working, or home economics. Then develop along any "major" that they are willing to commit themselves to. During this time they need to be continually protected both from injuring someone else and from someone injuring them. Consider that they are "as if" young children living in the bodies of adults. And children can be vicious until they have learned better. Eventually they should be trained for release. I'd like to say trained for a job, and placed by a placement agency, but with unemployment as high as it is, and projected to increase substantially, I see no way that this is plausible. And I don't know what release training is plausible.
The course I propose is, of course, totally illegal. It involves cutting off all communications with their past for a period of time in a way that is only legal for the military, and in other ways it is similar to basic training. OTOH, it's quite different in other ways...and I hope that the parts I've left out aren't crucial, but they may be. One of the things left out is believable threat of death, but many traditions find this to be an essential component. Perhaps it's necessary to cut the ties to the prior life, and bind them to the new one.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I can agree with that. I mainly didn't want to can everyone because there is a lot of expertise at those levels, and the corruption in the system inevitably drips down from the top, or is allowed to continue by those in charge a la The Lucifer Effect.
Just because one piece of evidence was tainted, does not mean that all of the evidence in a case was tainted. Most court cases hinge on many pieces of evidence, some of which is DNA evidence. If the DNA evidence is thrown out, the rest of the evidence still might prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Each case would need to be reviewed to determine the strength of the non-DNA evidence before being thrown out entirely.
Because they found it with an illegal search.
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What she has done is false accusation and giving false testimony. And that's not orthogonal to the case, that is tantamount to it. She was presenting the evidence that actually got the cases to court. And there was no chance for the jury or the judge to question her evidence, It had to be taken at face value as she was the expert witness.
She destroyed the lives of almost certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent people and all she gets is three years? Our "justice" system is insane, hold up a 7-11 with a toy gun and get thrown jail for longer than that, steal billions from millions of people and you see no time at all. Shoot someone kicking through your front door at 3am (without a badge) and get convicted of murder, shoot an 84 year old grandma in bed (with a badge) and its called an "accident" and left unpunished.
But now that the whole scheme's been uncovered, it was all her, alone, the whole time. Bad, bad apple.
Wink, wink ;^)
What amazes me is the stupidity of these people. Aside from her giving them the results they wanted most or all of the time, there were some mathematical issues of the number of tests she was doing.
It was inevitable they would get caught.
And she was stupid enough to think that when exposed, that she wouldn't be the first person thrown under the bus.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's an aggressive defense. The Defendant doesn't allow a piece of evidence that would exonerate the Defendant?
It is not recorded for the same reason that the FBI does not (or did not until recently) record interviews. The officer's report and testimony is assumed to be trustworthy by the court and this presents an avenue to fabricate testimony and discredit inconvenient witnesses. The delay also allows officers to decide together on what to write so they do not contradict each other; they can make up reasons for reasonable suspicion and probable cause after the fact.
they can't just leave their class. The days of easy peasy teaching jobs are long gone. At least for grade school teachers. If their kids don't pass the standardized tests their quickly fired. There's only so much the unions can do when a multi-billion dollar industry is out to get you. Subs don't cut it. They don't have the resources or experience (teaching is harder than you think). We're sabotaging them on purpose so we can privatize the whole she-bang and let a lucky few assclowns skim 10-30% off the top.
So no, the teacher is going to do the same thing: Get out of jury duty. Mission accomplished.
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All these people should be released without bail to await a new trial, period. There should be no exceptions since it is clear that all these trials were tainted. If they cannot be convicted again without the evidence that was tainted then they should not be in jail. If the local prosecution cannot handle all the extra cases, well, tough shit, they made their bed and it is time to lay in it. There should also be investigations into all the prosecutors, police, and judges involved, because I highly doubt they were not in on this.