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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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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.
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
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.
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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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.
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."
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.
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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.
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.
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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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.
And that is why I and a growing number of Americans have become increasingly skeptical of the criminal "justice" system in the U.S.
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.