Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

http://www.npr.org/2013/03/14/174269211/mass-crime-lab-scandal-reverberates-across-state

by darkmethod • 13 years ago

174 93 13 years ago

I'm curious what percentage of testing goes through that lab.

wcummings2• 13 years ago

She did a lot more tests than her coworkers, and it was a big lab. She also had close ties to prosecutors, which has unsettling implications.

jonlucc• 13 years ago

This is a good question. I think most cities have one lab. They probably have multiple analysts in the lab, but I think it's still a pretty high percentage of the total cases.

sigstoat5• 13 years ago

sadly, no, most cities don't have their own tox/drug chemistry lab. there are entire states with just 1 lab.

i'm not familiar with massachusetts, but i wouldn't be surprised if most of the relevant testing for the state was going through there.

vsviridov3• 13 years ago

34000 tainted cases is not "messed up big time". It's deliberate and malicious. And she gets 3-5 years? Bullshit.

Estragon• 13 years ago

I volunteer with a nonviolent communication program at a local prison, and I would guess that sentence would completely shatter her, at least if she was male. Every fellow inmate will identify with her victims and in a male prison they would be vengeful. Not sure how it will work out in a female prison.

vsviridov3• 13 years ago

Probably. But that's the karmic justice, I guess.

What is even more horrible, is that she'll do the time, but all the prosecutors, whose careers she boosted, would walk away from this clean...

paulftw• 13 years ago

34000 over nearly a decade career. It's 9.3 cases per day for 10 years, without weekends, vacations or holidays. And 45 minutes of work per case. Provided she had 7hr working day and a lunch break. And she occasionally testified in courts. How is that even possible?

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

I had to think about how it could be plausible to anyone, and then I remembered what my late father (a chemistry major who later worked as an industrial engineer) used to tell me about working in chemistry labs. Sometimes you have to sit around and wait while an assay runs, but I suppose an efficient person (who has enough equipment) could run more than one assay at a time, and monitor each result in turn. I have no specialized knowledge about what a normal rate of doing tests would be in a well administered state crime lab.

mturmon• 13 years ago

I like that you ran the numbers, and think you have a good question.

One remark in the original article said she had access to files and samples for many cases that she was not primary on. Perhaps that's the issue -- the ability to taint results across the whole departmental workload.

malandrew8• 13 years ago

Excellent question and one that raises another one. Could she possibly have tainted that many cases working alone? If not, we should be looking at every one around her including the DA.

Simple network analysis of every person (arresting officer, DA and other crime lab technicians) involved in these ~34k cases should be able to come up with a dozen or so people that warrant additional scrutiny.

nimble• 13 years ago

Actually, 3-5 years sounds pretty reasonable. If you think about it, you should be glad that she didn't get a crazy "send a message" punishment of 20 years or life in prison. She'll never work in that capacity again, so it's not like there's a need to separate her from society for the protection of society.

A better question to address is how a single rogue person could do so much damage. This is institutional failure. Just going after this woman misses the big problem.

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

She'll never work in that capacity again

How do you know? Getting rehired is routine for misbehaving cops.

jfim• 13 years ago

This is institutional failure.

Indeed. I wonder how hard it would be to have random testing of the chemists' work.

nrmilstein• 13 years ago

I agree. Without knowing much about penology, punishment for the sake of punishment seems overused in the US. Her prison sentence is short relative to all those given out because of her acts, but I think prison sentences in the US are too long to begin with.

bmelton3• 13 years ago

If she were sentenced 1 day's prison time for each of the occurrences, it would add up to ~40,000 days in prison, or ~109 years.

I don't disagree that there's an institutional failure, and that perhaps there are others to blame, but she has negligently affected countless lives by disregarding her oaths to uphold the law, and I believe that sort of thing should carry more penalty, not less. Also, we really, really need to start making our civil servants accountable to flagrant violations of the law, lest we have more of them lying before Congress without fear of actual penalty.

malandrew8• 13 years ago

I'm fine with 3-5 years so long as everyone else responsible in this situation, including DAs are subject to due process as well. There is no way that one person is responsible for almost 34k tampered cases all on her own without many other people being involved or at least aware.

I'm not a fan of our overly aggressive justice system, but if it is going to be overly aggressive, it needs to apply equally aggressively to the watchers as well. Any asymmetry in application of the current practices leaves far more room for abuse in the future than one that is applied equally to all parties. Justice is blind. If she is going to aggressively wield her sword, both your standard street thugs and corrupt government officials should have equal chance of getting struck by her sword.

We can't let the entire system throw her under the bus for 20+ years, while many other guilty parties get away after having been complicit or actively colluded.

yeukhon• 13 years ago

what is her motive?

wcummings2• 13 years ago

"Putting drug dealers in jail", to only very loosely paraphrase her words. She was working with the prosecutors.

The news loves to call her a "rogue chemist" to misdirect.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in...

middleclick• 13 years ago

Reminds me of this:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/11/kids-for-cash-j...

"'Kids for cash' judge gets 28 years in Pennsylvania bribery case"

malandrew8• 13 years ago

Yup, standard throw her under the bus tactic as misdirection.

honzzz• 13 years ago

I can only speculate about her motives. But the system that is set in such a way that prisons can be privately owned and prisoners exploited for personal gain is a recipe for disaster. Stakeholders making profit from prisoners have a strong incentive to somehow ensure that as many people as possible get sent to prison for as long as possible no matter whether they are guilty or not. Some might decide to achieve this by bribing someone in the chain of obtaining/evaluating evidence. In a penal system like this it's just a matter of time before something like this happens.

BTW, it might also be a nice way to explain why punishments tend to be so much harsher than for example in Europe - in the US can being 'tough on crime' be profitable.

Symmetry• 13 years ago

Massachusetts doesn't have private prisons, so I doubt that's the problem here. It's more that putting people behind bars is politically good for prosecutor with ambitions. Martha Coakly was almost elected Senator despite or maybe because of her role in a literal witch hunt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fells_Acres_Day_Care_Center_pre...

danso• 13 years ago

The OP is a bit outdated...Dookhan has since been sentenced to 3 to 5 years in prison:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/22/annie-dookhan-fo...

The system is indeed in turmoil as it has to continue to review a massive number of cases. One of the worser case scenarios has since happened: a man who was freed because of possibly tainted evidence went on to allegedly murder someone

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/17/man-freed-becaus...

alexeisadeski3• 13 years ago

I'd say that imprisoning innocent people was already the worst case scenario.

theg2• 13 years ago

All sorts of "fun" stuff going on here:

Another chemist found with no credentials - http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/11/26/mass-chemist-academi...

How fast did Dookhan work contrasted to case load: http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-t...

judk2• 13 years ago

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in...

The DA is already covering up and defending the prosecutor's involvement, saying there is nothing wrong with prosecutors telling Dhookan what test results they needed to get their convictions, in clear violation of proper experimental procedures.

Crito6• 13 years ago

Forensic science in general is an absolute joke. It makes a mockery of the very concept of science. There are a few isolated pockets where the techniques and procedures used are sound, but for the most part the scientific method and rigor are nowhere to be seen.

Zmetta• 13 years ago

Care to cite anything about this? From a Biochemist's perspective, when done properly, chemical analysis is extremely accurate and provides a great deal of information.

malandrew8• 13 years ago

There should be a chinese wall between the crime lab and the DA. All the DA should be able to do is submit evidence and any matching of that evidence to the accused should be a complete black box as far as the DA is concerned.

pretense• 13 years ago

If you read some of the other articles in this thread, there is specific mention of a recent supreme court case ruling in 2009, "Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts", where it was found that the accused are entitled to face expert witnesses as their accusers. This means forensic analysts are forced to appear in court more often.

The forensic analysts are government employees. This means that they are almost always providing evidence that implicates the accused in the commission of a crime.

When a case goes to trial, the prosecution only includes evidence that proves guilt. At the very least, if it proves neither guilt nor innocence, they exclude it from their exhibits as irrelevant. Prosecutors don't even look for opportuinities to prove innocence. That's not their job. That's up to the defence. They deliberately engage in tunnel vision, biased only in favor of guilt. If they have evidence that exonerates the accused, they simply drop the case. They have to. But that outcome is deeply undesirable to the prosecution, because it opens the door to wrongful arrests, police harassment and other liabilities.

The disturbing part here is that she was rubber stamping evidence in favor of guilt.

What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?

If she were playing a role in that capacity, this would represent a far more serious problem than a single "rogue" chemist... She would merely be a patsy, a useful idiot, taking the fall for a much larger institutional debacle.

eru• 13 years ago

And they should also get some known-innocent control samples. (Of course, properly blinded.)

Elrac3• 13 years ago

I call it "going through the motions of science" in order to be able to claim scientific objectivity.

There certainly is a science of forensics, but I think that what happens in a crime lab relates to that science like plumbing relates to hydrodynamics: it's technology, not science.

Done right, this technology leads to results that are generally more reliable than eyewitnesses and other forms of circumstantial evidence. But it's a mistake to consider a technology infallible just because it's based on science. The Scientific Method cannot rule out accident, human error, and malice.

gms• 13 years ago

I assume nothing will happen to the prosecutors she worked with.

analog31• 13 years ago

Are they elected?

bmelton3• 13 years ago

Only the actual district attorney is elected, and the DA is seldom responsible for the actual trying of cases. The DA is usually pretty far removed from the minutia of actual casework.

dyscrete• 13 years ago

Could she have been manipulated by prosecutors? Yes she should be held accountable for her actions, but I have a hunch that prosecutors had something more to do with this.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

Minnesota Public Radio reported often about systemic problems in the St. Paul, Minnesota crime lab over the last few years.

http://blogs.mprnews.org/cities/2013/08/st-paul-police-crime...

It seems those problems are now mostly cleaned up, and there is no particular implication here that a similar problem exists in the state crime lab, but it is a very good idea for citizens to press law enforcement administrators to make sure that crime lab procedures are validated and standardized and checked and rechecked.

When I started reading the skeptical literature a decade or so ago, I was astonished to discover that even fingerprint identification is not a well standardized or well validated procedure. And I used to believe that defense attorneys (I am a lawyer by training, although I don't practice law) were mostly willfully ignorant of science when they cast doubt on DNA evidence. But now I heartily approve the side-effect of our adversary system of justice, which when it works best should have the "other side" questioning every form of evidence and putting it to the test of rigorous validation. I think too often people trying to solve the problem of crime through the criminal justice system look for quick answers rather than exact answers.

AFTER EDIT: This background article link

http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/19/annie-dookhan-and-th...

from the NPR affiliate in Boston updates the story and is more current than the NPR link kindly submitted here (which is from March 2013 rather than May 2013).

Zigurd5• 13 years ago

It seems those problems are now mostly cleaned up, and there is no particular implication here that a similar problem exists in the state crime lab

Except that the incentives are still massively perverse. It doesn't take an organizational dynamics genius to know it's a safe bet these are not the only two state crime labs with this problem.

Yeah_Sure• 13 years ago

Story looked familiar. This is back in March.

chimeracoder• 13 years ago

"It's unsettling and maddening, because you're now going to have a lot of people get released to the street prematurely," says Middlesex County District attorney Gerry Leone, one of many hoping the state supreme court will curb the releases.

That's a pretty bad way of looking at this, because it assumes that those people deserved to be behind bars to begin with, and ignores those that didn't.

How about, "It's unsettling and maddening, because we now realize we have a lot of people behind bars without the [proper] due process they deserved"?

girvo3• 13 years ago

That is not how the police work nor think about cases, though. One of the many reasons I dislike them.

drjesusphd• 13 years ago

He's not a cop though, he's a district attorney.

ensignavenger• 13 years ago

All suspects a guilty, period. Or else they wouldn't be suspects, now would they?

Taniwha• 13 years ago

no, all suspects are innocent until proven guilty - the problem here is that the proving has been done in error so they are still innocent until proven guilty

scotch_drinker• 13 years ago

At the risk of painting with a very wide brush, DAs aren't incentivized to make sure people get due process. They are incentivized to convict as many people as possible. In multiple cases here in Texas where later DNA evidence overturned rape and murder charges, the DA argued right up until the moment of reversal that they believed totally in the guilt of the accused. They have to, it's their job and to have public doubt in the people they are trying will only result in them looking for a new job pretty quickly.

Not saying it's right, just how it is.

Zigurd5• 13 years ago

How likely this went on as long as it did without the collaboration of prosecutors?

lvs• 13 years ago

Worse:

"We tell them, 'Listen, we know what you were doing before and we're watching you. And if you go back into the life, that Dookhan's not there anymore. So when you go [back] in on this charge, it's gonna stick,'" Davis says.

So, Ed Davis is sending officers to threaten people who, from a legal perspective, have not been convicted of a crime and have been erroneously jailed for years. Lovely. That's really icing on the cake.

I'm not happy about putting potential dealers back on the street, but we are a nation of laws, and these people will be freed by our courts. You can't have the police commissioner sending people to threaten them.

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

In other words, all you need to say to the officer is - "Actually, you don't know what I was doing. Because it was nothing".

marrs• 13 years ago

How is he threatening them? He was telling repeat offenders that the police are going to be keeping a close eye on them. That's their job, isn't it? Or would you rather he tell them that the police will be away on holiday all next week, "but please call our support centre if you plan on committing any crime and we'll get our duty officer to log a ticket"?

weixiyen• 13 years ago

or both?

tjaerv• 13 years ago

Previously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Laboratory#Controversy

malandrew8• 13 years ago

I would love to see every single email by DAs that include her name subpoenaed.

    "The report shows that the Hinton lab leaned heavily on 
    Dookhan’s productivity. Supervisors lauded her work ethic 
    and assigned her an increasing share of tests."[0]

We should know what her supervisors and DA were saying in private about her work to her and to one another. There is no way that someone is so much more productive, without anyone ever suspecting wrongdoing and turning a blind eye to all this. Anyone who had ever expressed suspicion of her work, but never raised the issue should be liable for criminal negligence here.

[0] http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-t...

DannyBee• 13 years ago

Outside of political fallout, nothing will happen to the prosecutors. Nobody will charge them criminally, and civilly, prosecutors have absolute immunity in most cases, sadly.

(There are limits to when they are given absolute immunity, generally limited to to advocative functions, but they are often hard to separate out)

malandrew8• 13 years ago

In one of the threads about this scandal someone said that it would be valuable to send known negative samples to a lab and check which ones come back positive, so that we can investigate whether misconduct was involved. This is basically equivalent to unit testing, since they are known assert(false) tests. Unit tests can be devised to test crime labs, district attorneys, law enforcement officers, judges, etc.

This makes me think if maybe this wouldn't be a worthwhile test for the justice system in general. Hire actors to pose as criminals in the system where the person is not guilty, but where most evidence supports a guilty verdict with a few smaller pieces of evidence that prove innocent. With this we find out how many prosecutors take the case all the way to conviction by willingly choosing to ignore evidence suggesting guilt and which decide to drop the case because they believe the person to be innocent. This would be the equivalent of acceptance testing the justice system.

Oculus• 13 years ago

The problem is no one, especially not the Justice or Police System, want to show all the flaws that they have when it's so easy to cover for themselves currently.

Elrac3• 13 years ago

I like your idea! In an evidence based society, it might be picked up and spread like wildfire.

Of us (by majority, here) programming nerds, who wouldn't want to write better programs? Which consumer doesn't want better product safety? Which government could fail to want more truth-based justice?

But the USA is far from an evidence based society. It's a society where, in the interest of perpetuating religions, intellect is trumped by superstition and evidence by authority. As a side effect, justice is predicated on vengeance rather than reform.

w_t_payne• 13 years ago

I am shocked and horrified that a loyal servant of the system should be discarded so casually. After all, falsifying convictions is just a part of how the system works, isn't it?

You have to keep the lower orders scared to keep them loyal - otherwise they might start getting ideas above their station, mightn't they? It's like holding a wolf by the ears: release it, and we would all be in trouble.

chris_wot8• 13 years ago

According to Dookhan's lawyer, she says that she did it because she wanted to get a 8 hour pay-check, that there was "too much red tape" but very loose protocol.

But - she's not a rogue chemist! Oh no.

When chemists do lab tests, are they blind to the criminal circumstances themselves?

http://www.wbur.org/2013/11/29/dookhan-lawyer

What I find really awful, is that in many cases, jobs were lost, families destroyed, and sentences were stiffer because of false results by this chemist.

laveur• 13 years ago

Being a Mass. Resident this is really really really really old news! How the hell is this just not getting here?

Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

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