Chemist caught faking positive drug tests, sending 40k black folkd to prison...
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Annie Dookhan, chemist at Mass. crime lab, arrested for allegedly mishandling over 60,000 samples
3:06 PM EST CRIMESIDER
BY CRIMESIDER STAFF / CBS NEWS
Annie Dookhan, center, is escorted to a cruiser outside her home in Franklin, Mass., Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Dookhan is accused of faking drug results, forging signatures and mixing samples a state police lab. State police say Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples involving 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the lab. Defense lawyers and prosecutors are scrambling to figure out how to deal with the fallout.AP Photo/Bizuayehu Tesfaye
Annie Dookhan, center, is escorted to a cruiser outside her home in Franklin, Mass.AP Photo/Bizuayehu Tesfaye
(CBS/AP) BOSTON - Police arrested Annie Dookhan on Friday for allegedly faking drug results, forging paperwork and mixing samples at a state police lab in a scandal that has lawyers scrambling to figure out how to handle the 1,140 inmates who were convicted using possibly tainted evidence.
Dookhan, 34, was arrested at her home in Franklin, about 40 miles southwest of Boston. She is scheduled to be arraigned in Boston Municipal Court on Friday afternoon.
Dookhan's alleged mishandling of drug samples prompted the shutdown of the Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Boston last month and resulted in the resignation of three officials, including the state's public health commissioner.
Police said Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples involving 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the lab. Since the lab closed, more than a dozen drug defendants are back on the street while their attorneys challenge the charges based on Dookhan's misconduct.
Many more defendants are expected to be released. Authorities said 1,140 inmates are currently serving time in cases in which Dookhan was the primary or secondary chemist.
The two obstruction charges accuse Dookhan of lying about drug samples she analyzed at the lab in March 2011 for a Suffolk County case, and for testifying under oath in August 2010 that she had a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Attorney General Martha Coakley said at a news conference Friday.
The only motive authorities have found so far is that Dookhan wanted to be seen as a good worker, the state attorney general said.
"Her actions totally turned the system on its head," Coakley said. She said Dookhan could face more charges as the investigation continues. "People absolutely deserve a system they can trust...We have to get to the bottom of this, and we will," Coakley said.
Dookhan's supervisors faced harsh criticism for not removing her from lab duties and for not alerting prosecutors and police after her co-workers raised their suspicions about her several years ago.
"I think that all of those who are accountable for the impact on individual cases need to be held accountable," Gov. Deval Patrick said Thursday.
Dookhan was the most productive chemist in the lab, routinely testing more than 500 samples a month, while others tested between 50 and 150. But one co-worker told state police he never saw Dookhan in front of a microscope. A lab employee saw Dookhan weighing drug samples without doing a balance check on her scale.
In 2010, a supervisor did an audit of Dookhan's paperwork, but didn't retest any of her samples. The audit found nothing wrong.
That same year, a chemist found seven instances where Dookhan incorrectly identified a drug sample as a certain narcotic when it was something else. He told state police he told himself it was an honest mistake.
In an interview with state police late last month, Dookhan allegedly admitted faking test results for two to three years. She told police she identified some drug samples as narcotics simply by looking at them instead of testing them, a process known as "dry labbing." She also said she forged the initials of colleagues and deliberately turned a negative sample into a positive for narcotics a few times.
She was eventually suspended from lab duties in June 2011 after getting caught forging a colleague's initials on paperwork. She resigned in March as the Department of Public Health investigated. The lab was run by the department until July 1, when state police took over as part of a state budget directive.
After the lab's shutdown, police asked a lab supervisor why Dookhan would take samples from an evidence room without logging them out. Elizabeth O'Brien told investigators that Dookhan was going through personal problems that included a miscarriage in 2009.
"Annie was going through personal problems, then court, and Melendez-Diaz was tough at first on her. In 2009 she had a miscarriage and other personal problems. Perhaps she was trying to be important, by being the `go-to person,' " O'Brien told state police.
Dookhan said she just wanted to get the work done and never meant to hurt anyone.
"I screwed up big-time," she is quoted as saying in a state police report. "I messed up bad; it's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."
More on Crimesider
Sept. 25, 2012 - Mass. lab mishandling may mean 1,140 inmates convicted using tainted evidence, report says
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3:06 PM EST CRIMESIDER
BY CRIMESIDER STAFF / CBS NEWS
Annie Dookhan, center, is escorted to a cruiser outside her home in Franklin, Mass., Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Dookhan is accused of faking drug results, forging signatures and mixing samples a state police lab. State police say Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples involving 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the lab. Defense lawyers and prosecutors are scrambling to figure out how to deal with the fallout.AP Photo/Bizuayehu Tesfaye
Annie Dookhan, center, is escorted to a cruiser outside her home in Franklin, Mass.AP Photo/Bizuayehu Tesfaye
(CBS/AP) BOSTON - Police arrested Annie Dookhan on Friday for allegedly faking drug results, forging paperwork and mixing samples at a state police lab in a scandal that has lawyers scrambling to figure out how to handle the 1,140 inmates who were convicted using possibly tainted evidence.
Dookhan, 34, was arrested at her home in Franklin, about 40 miles southwest of Boston. She is scheduled to be arraigned in Boston Municipal Court on Friday afternoon.
Dookhan's alleged mishandling of drug samples prompted the shutdown of the Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Boston last month and resulted in the resignation of three officials, including the state's public health commissioner.
Police said Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples involving 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the lab. Since the lab closed, more than a dozen drug defendants are back on the street while their attorneys challenge the charges based on Dookhan's misconduct.
Many more defendants are expected to be released. Authorities said 1,140 inmates are currently serving time in cases in which Dookhan was the primary or secondary chemist.
The two obstruction charges accuse Dookhan of lying about drug samples she analyzed at the lab in March 2011 for a Suffolk County case, and for testifying under oath in August 2010 that she had a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Attorney General Martha Coakley said at a news conference Friday.
The only motive authorities have found so far is that Dookhan wanted to be seen as a good worker, the state attorney general said.
"Her actions totally turned the system on its head," Coakley said. She said Dookhan could face more charges as the investigation continues. "People absolutely deserve a system they can trust...We have to get to the bottom of this, and we will," Coakley said.
Dookhan's supervisors faced harsh criticism for not removing her from lab duties and for not alerting prosecutors and police after her co-workers raised their suspicions about her several years ago.
"I think that all of those who are accountable for the impact on individual cases need to be held accountable," Gov. Deval Patrick said Thursday.
Dookhan was the most productive chemist in the lab, routinely testing more than 500 samples a month, while others tested between 50 and 150. But one co-worker told state police he never saw Dookhan in front of a microscope. A lab employee saw Dookhan weighing drug samples without doing a balance check on her scale.
In 2010, a supervisor did an audit of Dookhan's paperwork, but didn't retest any of her samples. The audit found nothing wrong.
That same year, a chemist found seven instances where Dookhan incorrectly identified a drug sample as a certain narcotic when it was something else. He told state police he told himself it was an honest mistake.
In an interview with state police late last month, Dookhan allegedly admitted faking test results for two to three years. She told police she identified some drug samples as narcotics simply by looking at them instead of testing them, a process known as "dry labbing." She also said she forged the initials of colleagues and deliberately turned a negative sample into a positive for narcotics a few times.
She was eventually suspended from lab duties in June 2011 after getting caught forging a colleague's initials on paperwork. She resigned in March as the Department of Public Health investigated. The lab was run by the department until July 1, when state police took over as part of a state budget directive.
After the lab's shutdown, police asked a lab supervisor why Dookhan would take samples from an evidence room without logging them out. Elizabeth O'Brien told investigators that Dookhan was going through personal problems that included a miscarriage in 2009.
"Annie was going through personal problems, then court, and Melendez-Diaz was tough at first on her. In 2009 she had a miscarriage and other personal problems. Perhaps she was trying to be important, by being the `go-to person,' " O'Brien told state police.
Dookhan said she just wanted to get the work done and never meant to hurt anyone.
"I screwed up big-time," she is quoted as saying in a state police report. "I messed up bad; it's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."
More on Crimesider
Sept. 25, 2012 - Mass. lab mishandling may mean 1,140 inmates convicted using tainted evidence, report says
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Sept. 28, 2012?
Co sign what’s the update? That bitch still in prison?
It's not just the white man or people....them arabs are just as devilish if no more especially against their own so what do you think think about you???right
This has been happening. Happened over in San Francisco too.
Nine months ago, the San Francisco Police Department Crime Laboratory — a capacious, hangarlike building fronted with palm trees in the old Hunters Point naval shipyard — was rocked by the revelation that a rogue technician, Debbie Madden, had skimmed cocaine evidence from the narcotics unit for personal use. In May, SFPD Chief George Gascón announced the lab's drug section would be closed permanently, and all narcotics testing outsourced.
https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfr...ted-by-concealed-mistakes/Content?oid=2179816
Nine months ago, the San Francisco Police Department Crime Laboratory — a capacious, hangarlike building fronted with palm trees in the old Hunters Point naval shipyard — was rocked by the revelation that a rogue technician, Debbie Madden, had skimmed cocaine evidence from the narcotics unit for personal use. In May, SFPD Chief George Gascón announced the lab's drug section would be closed permanently, and all narcotics testing outsourced.
https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfr...ted-by-concealed-mistakes/Content?oid=2179816
What's the update on this?
she is a human waste...
hope them prison ladies treated her as such every minute of every day.
hope them prison ladies treated her as such every minute of every day.
on parole
Annie Dookhan
Chemist
Annie Dookhan is a former chemist of a Massachusetts crime lab who admitted to falsifying evidence, affecting up to 34,000 cases. Wikipedia
Born: 1977, San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago
Spouse: Surrendranath Dookhan (m. 2004)
Conviction(s): November 22, 2013 (pleaded guilty)
Criminal penalty: Three to five years in prison, two years' probation
Criminal status: On parole
Criminal charges: Obstruction of justice, Perjury
People also search for
Chemist
Annie Dookhan is a former chemist of a Massachusetts crime lab who admitted to falsifying evidence, affecting up to 34,000 cases. Wikipedia
Born: 1977, San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago
Spouse: Surrendranath Dookhan (m. 2004)
Conviction(s): November 22, 2013 (pleaded guilty)
Criminal penalty: Three to five years in prison, two years' probation
Criminal status: On parole
Criminal charges: Obstruction of justice, Perjury
People also search for
What's the update on this?
i got you fam
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...than-20000-drug-cases/?utm_term=.9e7367161a85
How a lab chemist went from ‘superwoman’ to disgraced saboteur of more than 20,000 drug cases
The injustice orchestrated by lab chemist Annie Dookhan was first revealed five years ago, after she had been working for the Massachusetts state drug lab for nearly a decade to help prosecutors, in her words, get drug dealers “off the streets.” Then the lab chemist once called “superwoman” for her exceptional speed running tests told state police that she had “screwed up big-time.”
In the year that followed, authorities would call into question the convictions of tens of thousands of drug cases handled by Dookhan in the Massachusetts state drug lab.
Her motivation, according to her attorney, reflected the overachiever mentality she had exhibited throughout her life: to be “the hardest working and most prolific and most productive chemist.”
But the full consequences of her crimes became clear only this week when prosecutors in eight Boston-area counties announced they would dismiss 21,587 drug cases tainted by Dookhan’s misconduct.
On Thursday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made those dismissals official. The American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts called it the largest dismissal of convictions in U.S. history.
“Today is a major victory for justice, fairness, and the tens of thousands of people who were wrongfully convicted based on fabricated evidence,” ACLU executive director Carol Rose said in a statement.
[Prosecutors dismiss more than 21,500 drug cases in wake of Mass. lab chemist’s misconduct]
It appears Dookhan has remained mum since her own conviction in 2013 for these deceptions, which the Supreme Judicial Court once said “cast a shadow over the entire criminal justice system.”
Her silence is not surprising. Profiles by the Boston Globe and Associated Press from years ago, when Dookhan was first arrested, portray the Trinidad-born immigrant as soft-spoken, work-obsessed and deeply private.
She was a go-getter so anxious to please, former friends and colleagues said, that she made a habit of stretching the truth — and sometimes outright lying — to inflate her personal narrative.
By the end of 2009, the Globe reported that other chemists had completed an average of 1,981 tests.
Dookhan had run 6,321.
That year, she also told police she started to “dry-lab” to further increase her productivity so she could keep up. Dry-labbing is essentially identifying the drugs as what they were suspected to be. If a sample was returned to her after a retest revealed it wasn’t what she said it was, she would contaminate it so it matched.
[When a state’s drug chemist lies for years, should all her cases be thrown out?]
At an unassuming 4 feet 11 inches, Dookhan had gotten the nickname “Little Annie.” But “Little Annie” turned out to be a big liar.
One of Annie Dookhan’s first known fibs played out on her résumé 20 years ago, according to the Globe, when she claimed she had graduated from her prestigious Boston prep school, Boston Latin Academy, “magna cum laude.”
But that distinction, according to the school, did not exist.
She peddled other exaggerations and lies — about her parents’ job titles, her job titles, her salary and divorce proceedings.
Most damning though, beyond the tampered drug tests, was the lie she told about advanced degrees she never earned, which ultimately resulted in additional charges. She once swore under oath she earned a master’s degree, which she hadn’t.
“She wanted to be able to say that she was an accomplished person,” Anthony Parham, Dookhan’s former supervisor at a vaccine lab where she had previously worked, told the Globe.
“She grew up very isolated, without many people of her background around her,” said Parham, who is African American. “I understand what it is like to be a minority in America. I think that experience reinforced her determination to show that she was just as good, or even better.”
[Mass. supreme court orders prosecutors to review 24,000 cases tainted by ‘rogue’ chemist]
Dookhan started working for the state drug lab in 2004, and in her first full year on the job tested 9,239 drug samples, three times more than other chemists in the lab. The following year, that number jumped to 11,232, four times the average chemist and nearly double the second-most productive person behind her.
The year she started at the state lab, Dookhan married Surrendranath Dookhan, who would years later send frantic text messages to a district attorney his wife had befriended.
At work, colleagues began to question the lab’s most unrealistically productive chemist, and in 2010, supervisors conducted a paperwork audit of her work but found no problems, reported the Associated Press. They did not retest her samples.
In June 2011, she was suspended from lab duties after she was caught forging a colleague’s initials.
It wasn’t until March 2012, after nearly a decade on the job, that Dookhan resigned.
That’s when she said “I screwed up big-time,” according to a state police report. “I messed up bad. It’s my fault.”
[Mass. crime chemist admits daily drug use in lab, sparking a second scandal]
The court has asked prosecutors to decide which cases to retry and which to drop.
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Stories that will be the talk of the morning.
Meanwhile, authorities in Massachusetts are now dealing with a second major scandal at the Massachusetts state drug lab stemming from the disclosure last year that another chemist, Sonja Farak, was actively stealing and using seized drug samples while analyzing them. She pleaded guilty in 2014. The consequences of Farak’s case are still to be calculated.
How a lab chemist went from ‘superwoman’ to disgraced saboteur of more than 20,000 drug cases
The injustice orchestrated by lab chemist Annie Dookhan was first revealed five years ago, after she had been working for the Massachusetts state drug lab for nearly a decade to help prosecutors, in her words, get drug dealers “off the streets.” Then the lab chemist once called “superwoman” for her exceptional speed running tests told state police that she had “screwed up big-time.”
In the year that followed, authorities would call into question the convictions of tens of thousands of drug cases handled by Dookhan in the Massachusetts state drug lab.
There was a reason she was so fast, it turned out: She eventually told investigators she tripled the productivity rates of her colleagues by not actually testing all the drugs that came before her, forging her co-workers’ initials and mixing drug samples so that her shoddy analysis matched the results she gave prosecutors.
Her motivation, according to her attorney, reflected the overachiever mentality she had exhibited throughout her life: to be “the hardest working and most prolific and most productive chemist.”
But the full consequences of her crimes became clear only this week when prosecutors in eight Boston-area counties announced they would dismiss 21,587 drug cases tainted by Dookhan’s misconduct.
On Thursday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made those dismissals official. The American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts called it the largest dismissal of convictions in U.S. history.
“Today is a major victory for justice, fairness, and the tens of thousands of people who were wrongfully convicted based on fabricated evidence,” ACLU executive director Carol Rose said in a statement.
[Prosecutors dismiss more than 21,500 drug cases in wake of Mass. lab chemist’s misconduct]
It appears Dookhan has remained mum since her own conviction in 2013 for these deceptions, which the Supreme Judicial Court once said “cast a shadow over the entire criminal justice system.”
Her silence is not surprising. Profiles by the Boston Globe and Associated Press from years ago, when Dookhan was first arrested, portray the Trinidad-born immigrant as soft-spoken, work-obsessed and deeply private.
She was a go-getter so anxious to please, former friends and colleagues said, that she made a habit of stretching the truth — and sometimes outright lying — to inflate her personal narrative.
The turning point, the reports suggest, may have come in 2009, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts that defendants in drug cases have a right to confront the chemists who test the drugs. Chemists, as a result, wound up spending a lot more time in court and a lot less time in their labs.
While the productivity of Dookhan’s fellow chemists dropped off, Dookhan’s continued to skyrocket.
By the end of 2009, the Globe reported that other chemists had completed an average of 1,981 tests.
Dookhan had run 6,321.
That year, she also told police she started to “dry-lab” to further increase her productivity so she could keep up. Dry-labbing is essentially identifying the drugs as what they were suspected to be. If a sample was returned to her after a retest revealed it wasn’t what she said it was, she would contaminate it so it matched.
[When a state’s drug chemist lies for years, should all her cases be thrown out?]
“My colleagues call me ‘superwoman’ and say that I do too much for the lab and everyone else, in general,” Dookhan wrote in an email to an assistant district attorney, reported the Globe. “I am not a workaholic, but it is just in my nature to assist in any way possible.”
At an unassuming 4 feet 11 inches, Dookhan had gotten the nickname “Little Annie.” But “Little Annie” turned out to be a big liar.
One of Annie Dookhan’s first known fibs played out on her résumé 20 years ago, according to the Globe, when she claimed she had graduated from her prestigious Boston prep school, Boston Latin Academy, “magna cum laude.”
But that distinction, according to the school, did not exist.
She peddled other exaggerations and lies — about her parents’ job titles, her job titles, her salary and divorce proceedings.
Most damning though, beyond the tampered drug tests, was the lie she told about advanced degrees she never earned, which ultimately resulted in additional charges. She once swore under oath she earned a master’s degree, which she hadn’t.
There was no doubt about her intelligence. Classmates, professors at the University of Massachusetts, bosses and colleagues all attested to that in interviews with the Globe. She would come to work early and leave late, never resting for lunch or snacks and often taking work home with her.
“She wanted to be able to say that she was an accomplished person,” Anthony Parham, Dookhan’s former supervisor at a vaccine lab where she had previously worked, told the Globe.
“She grew up very isolated, without many people of her background around her,” said Parham, who is African American. “I understand what it is like to be a minority in America. I think that experience reinforced her determination to show that she was just as good, or even better.”
[Mass. supreme court orders prosecutors to review 24,000 cases tainted by ‘rogue’ chemist]
Dookhan started working for the state drug lab in 2004, and in her first full year on the job tested 9,239 drug samples, three times more than other chemists in the lab. The following year, that number jumped to 11,232, four times the average chemist and nearly double the second-most productive person behind her.
The year she started at the state lab, Dookhan married Surrendranath Dookhan, who would years later send frantic text messages to a district attorney his wife had befriended.
In them, he told the former assistant Norfolk County district attorney George Papachristos that his chemist wife was “looking for sympathy and attention.”
“This is Annie’s husband do not believe her, she’s a liar, she’s always lying,” one text message said.
Papachristos later resigned from his district attorney job after news reports of his personal friendship with Dookhan.“This is Annie’s husband do not believe her, she’s a liar, she’s always lying,” one text message said.
At work, colleagues began to question the lab’s most unrealistically productive chemist, and in 2010, supervisors conducted a paperwork audit of her work but found no problems, reported the Associated Press. They did not retest her samples.
In June 2011, she was suspended from lab duties after she was caught forging a colleague’s initials.
It wasn’t until March 2012, after nearly a decade on the job, that Dookhan resigned.
That’s when she said “I screwed up big-time,” according to a state police report. “I messed up bad. It’s my fault.”
[Mass. crime chemist admits daily drug use in lab, sparking a second scandal]
In 2013, Dookhan pleaded guilty to 27 counts of misleading investigators, tampering with evidence and filing false reports. She was sentenced to three years in prison, plus probation.
A year ago this month, Dookhan was released.
A year ago this month, Dookhan was released.
The court has asked prosecutors to decide which cases to retry and which to drop.
Morning Mix newsletter
Stories that will be the talk of the morning.
Meanwhile, authorities in Massachusetts are now dealing with a second major scandal at the Massachusetts state drug lab stemming from the disclosure last year that another chemist, Sonja Farak, was actively stealing and using seized drug samples while analyzing them. She pleaded guilty in 2014. The consequences of Farak’s case are still to be calculated.
She still got paid whether or not the test came back negative or positive. So why lie? What's to gain?
It seems like this is a bigger person than just one person.
It seems like this is a bigger person than just one person.
This is old but these are the two things Black folks need to take away from this. She faked the test but they didn't free the black folks involved. Do they really think she is the only one faking Blacks test?
Hey Boston, Thanks to Annie Dookhan Your Streets Will Soon Be Flooded with Drug Criminals
Annie Dookhan was just your average state employee, punching the clock at the Hinton State Laboratory in Boston. In her nine years at the lab she tested evidence for an estimated 34,000 drug cases that led to the convictions of some of Boston’s most...
Oct 27 2012, 9:30am
(Photo from MyFox25)
Annie Dookhan was just your average, over-worked state employee, punching the clock at the Hinton State Laboratory in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Her duties, testing drug evidence for cases that were bound for criminal prosecution, were well within her qualifications. She held a Master’s Degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, and she was fast, capable, and driven. In her nine years at the lab she tested evidence for an estimated 34,000 drug cases that led to the convictions of some of Boston’s most dangerous criminals. What could possibly have gone wrong?
Well, for one, she was lying about her Master’s Degree. UMASS has no record of Annie Dookhan taking graduate classes there. But that bit of creative resume building is pretty tame compared to allegations that forced her resignation, shuttered the laboratory, and ousted the state’s public health commissioner.
According to state prosecutors, Annie Dookhan falsified tests and mishandled evidence for years. And she admitted to it when police first questioned her in August. To make matters worse, she cannot remember which cases she shat the bed on. This calls into question every conviction that relied on evidence that Annie signed off on.
We spoke to Scott Allen, Senior Assistant Metro Editor at the Boston Globe, and one of a handful of investigative reporters covering this unfolding story. The case of Annie Dookhan, or as some papers have dubbed her, “the rogue chemist,” is poised to become one of the most dangerous and expensive government screw up in years.
VICE: So what’s the deal with Annie Dookhan? Who is she? How did she specifically mishandle this evidence, and why?
Scott Allen: She’s of a great deal of fascination around here in Massachusetts. On first blush, she’s a bright young woman from Barbados, who wanted to do a good job. At least that’s what she told people. And she’s not particularly menacing looking—she’s small, and petite, and pretty, and college educated, and she was the most hard-working person in the lab. But she had terrible work habits. When the state police came to her house and interviewed her about concerns that had been raised in the lab, she basically confessed to sometimes recording drug evidence as positive when they were negative. She would take a whole bunch of drug samples and only test one or two of them, and then say, “Well, based on that, all the rest of them are also positive,” just based on sight. She took samples out of the evidence room without signing it out. She appeared to be doing favors for certain prosecutors, at least insofar as she was taking their cases more quickly, and breaking all the rules about handling evidence.
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And tainted evidence is a huge problem when convictions are challenged.
As you know, in a criminal prosecution, making sure the evidence is always secure is vital and making sure there’s no question of bias is also vital. So she’s just running roughshod over all of the rules, and she admitted to doing this for a few years. She was there for nine years, and so people now say you can’t trust anything she did or any test that was conducted while she worked at Hinton labs. All counted, that’s 190,000 cases.
Will Boston’s streets be flooded with drug convicts that were sprung because of Annie Dookhan?
Well, yes, it certainly looks that way. All 34,000 cases that Annie Dookhan handled are now under a cloud, and they’re all being reviewed. Already at least 100 people have been released because Dookhan analyzed their evidence. And everybody expects the numbers to grow and grow and grow. In fact, a lot of us are thinking one of the big stories next year is going to be the re-arrest of all of these people who are now being let go.
Isn’t there a double jeopardy situation that would be encountered by re-arresting these newly sprung convicts?
I see what you’re saying, but what we’re anticipating is new crimes. If you look at like the first wave of prisoners who were released in the Boston area, you’re talking about a lot of drug dealers, people with long criminal histories. They’re not like kids, 19- or 20-year olds caught on possession. We’re talking about a lot of people whose business is selling drugs. So, you put them back on the streets and that’s their profession. So a lot of them are going to go back to it. It’s just a matter of time.
So how are these cases being handled? Are they just digging through old files and letting people go?
There’s now a special “drug court” set up here to handle all of these so-called “Dookhan defendants,” and every day there’s a fresh list of people coming in front of judges. Their defense attorneys are saying, “Your Honor, my client should be exonerated” or “My client should be released because the evidence was handled by Annie Dookhan.” There’s a long list of them. I have a database full of all of these people, some of whom have six-, eight-, ten-page rap sheets, and even if you threw out the evidence in this particular case, there’s not much question that they’ve had a long history with drug sales.
Do you expect there to be an increase in violence?
The Boston police are very worried about that. There are a number of cases where the real interest in the defendant was a gang shooting or murder, and they didn’t have the evidence to convict them on those charges. But they had the evidence to convict them on drugs. Sometimes drug defendants are easier to prosecute—you catch somebody with cocaine over a certain threshold, you say, “Well, you had intent to sell,” and there it is, sort of cut-and-dry. If there’s a gang murder, it’s often hard to get witnesses to testify truthfully to secure a conviction.
So there’s a great fear that there are violent criminals that are about to be set free, or already have been set free. Certainly, looking at the rap sheets of the first 20 or so that went out the door from Suffolk County, which is where Boston is, it included people with histories of assault, rape, and other things in addition to drugs.
Have innocent people been wrongfully convicted from Annie’s false testing?
There’s this one particular case where this guy, who was a real sleaze ball, was selling fake cocaine. So he’s going around selling fake cocaine to drug users, and he’s caught by the police and arrested for selling fake cocaine. But when Annie Dookhan tests it, she says, “No, that’s real cocaine.”
That’s unbelievable.
So the guy got put away for actual cocaine, not just fake cocaine. So how many cases are out there like that? It’s hard to feel too sorry for a person in that situation—he kind of put himself there—but defense attorneys focus very hard on miscarriage of justice. They go after cases where there’s been a miscarriage of justice.
So there’s been 190,000 drug cases in the nine years Annie worked there. Is that a lot? Are drug labs overburdened?
It was a recurring theme within that lab that they didn’t have the resources to do their job, and they really felt pressed. Annie Dookhan was held in high regard by her supervisors because she was a fast worker. She was actually testing these drugs two or three times faster than all of her colleagues, so instead of viewing her as a suspicious person who might be mishandling evidence, they instead viewed her as a special asset because she worked so quickly. So it’s definitely true that they felt short-handed and over-stressed, but I don’t think that justifies rampant disregard for lab protocol.
Marcus Pixley, one of the first defendants to hit the streets because of evidence tainted by Dookhan, landed back in jail within days. (Photo: Suffolk County D.A.)
Was she part of a bigger conspiracy to taint drug samples or alternatively to convict as many people as possible?
It is conceivable there’s something bigger going on. Annie is sort of an enigmatic figure. Apparently she’d been having some personal problems the last several years of her life. She said that her marriage was breaking up, she suffered a miscarriage in 2009, and it was around that time that she started having this inappropriate email relationship with one of the prosecutors that she did drug analysis for. It appears that she developed a crush on him, and she sort of poured her heart out to him. The impression you get is a sort of fragile person who is not doing well in her life and is indulging in sort of a fantasy relationship with a prosecutor.
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But then you start thinking about the prosecution’s point of view and the police’s point of view. Having a chemist inside the state drug lab who is willing to do favors for you is very valuable on more than one level. First, she’ll do the work quickly for you. If you’ve got a case coming up, she’ll take care of it. Second, maybe she tilts the weight in your favor. Maybe she finds things in your favor.
Even if you’re talking about an emotionally damaged and vulnerable person who’s like crossing some lines of propriety with prosecutors, it’s fairly easy to imagine prosecutors taking advantage of that weakness. And she had close relationships with several prosecutors and several drug officers. They called her all the time on her cellphone. So, to go back to your question, could it be something larger? That’s conceivable, but it’s also possible that what you have is a weak link in the chain that prosecutors and police saw they could take advantage of. And they did.
So what’s next? What’s going to happen over the next two or three months? What should we be paying attention to?
Well, we’re just now getting down to how much is it going to cost to fix all of these problems? Let’s talk about the 190,000 cases. If you agree to actually pull the files on 190,000 cases and review them, it is going to cost an enormous amount of money. Governor Deval Patrick’s administration is now collecting estimates of how much it’s going to cost to clean up this mess from the various different agencies, like prosecutors, police, and defense lawyers. But, right now, the estimate is something in the area of $40 million, and that’s just the beginning. You could easily have a price tag that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars to undo all the damage.
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Wow. So we should stay tuned to this, right? This story’s got legs.
Yeah it does. As time goes on, it doesn’t get better. It gets worse. You can clear the books of a lot of these, but you put more and more and more of these people back on the streets. And if you look at instances of rape among hard-core drug dealers, it’s very, very high. So you’re talking about people going back to what they did before, so it’s almost like you and I can start planning for a crime wave
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...eets-will-soon-be-flooded-with-drug-criminals
Annie Dookhan was just your average state employee, punching the clock at the Hinton State Laboratory in Boston. In her nine years at the lab she tested evidence for an estimated 34,000 drug cases that led to the convictions of some of Boston’s most...
Oct 27 2012, 9:30am
(Photo from MyFox25)
Annie Dookhan was just your average, over-worked state employee, punching the clock at the Hinton State Laboratory in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Her duties, testing drug evidence for cases that were bound for criminal prosecution, were well within her qualifications. She held a Master’s Degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, and she was fast, capable, and driven. In her nine years at the lab she tested evidence for an estimated 34,000 drug cases that led to the convictions of some of Boston’s most dangerous criminals. What could possibly have gone wrong?
Well, for one, she was lying about her Master’s Degree. UMASS has no record of Annie Dookhan taking graduate classes there. But that bit of creative resume building is pretty tame compared to allegations that forced her resignation, shuttered the laboratory, and ousted the state’s public health commissioner.
According to state prosecutors, Annie Dookhan falsified tests and mishandled evidence for years. And she admitted to it when police first questioned her in August. To make matters worse, she cannot remember which cases she shat the bed on. This calls into question every conviction that relied on evidence that Annie signed off on.
We spoke to Scott Allen, Senior Assistant Metro Editor at the Boston Globe, and one of a handful of investigative reporters covering this unfolding story. The case of Annie Dookhan, or as some papers have dubbed her, “the rogue chemist,” is poised to become one of the most dangerous and expensive government screw up in years.
VICE: So what’s the deal with Annie Dookhan? Who is she? How did she specifically mishandle this evidence, and why?
Scott Allen: She’s of a great deal of fascination around here in Massachusetts. On first blush, she’s a bright young woman from Barbados, who wanted to do a good job. At least that’s what she told people. And she’s not particularly menacing looking—she’s small, and petite, and pretty, and college educated, and she was the most hard-working person in the lab. But she had terrible work habits. When the state police came to her house and interviewed her about concerns that had been raised in the lab, she basically confessed to sometimes recording drug evidence as positive when they were negative. She would take a whole bunch of drug samples and only test one or two of them, and then say, “Well, based on that, all the rest of them are also positive,” just based on sight. She took samples out of the evidence room without signing it out. She appeared to be doing favors for certain prosecutors, at least insofar as she was taking their cases more quickly, and breaking all the rules about handling evidence.
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And tainted evidence is a huge problem when convictions are challenged.
As you know, in a criminal prosecution, making sure the evidence is always secure is vital and making sure there’s no question of bias is also vital. So she’s just running roughshod over all of the rules, and she admitted to doing this for a few years. She was there for nine years, and so people now say you can’t trust anything she did or any test that was conducted while she worked at Hinton labs. All counted, that’s 190,000 cases.
Will Boston’s streets be flooded with drug convicts that were sprung because of Annie Dookhan?
Well, yes, it certainly looks that way. All 34,000 cases that Annie Dookhan handled are now under a cloud, and they’re all being reviewed. Already at least 100 people have been released because Dookhan analyzed their evidence. And everybody expects the numbers to grow and grow and grow. In fact, a lot of us are thinking one of the big stories next year is going to be the re-arrest of all of these people who are now being let go.
Isn’t there a double jeopardy situation that would be encountered by re-arresting these newly sprung convicts?
I see what you’re saying, but what we’re anticipating is new crimes. If you look at like the first wave of prisoners who were released in the Boston area, you’re talking about a lot of drug dealers, people with long criminal histories. They’re not like kids, 19- or 20-year olds caught on possession. We’re talking about a lot of people whose business is selling drugs. So, you put them back on the streets and that’s their profession. So a lot of them are going to go back to it. It’s just a matter of time.
So how are these cases being handled? Are they just digging through old files and letting people go?
There’s now a special “drug court” set up here to handle all of these so-called “Dookhan defendants,” and every day there’s a fresh list of people coming in front of judges. Their defense attorneys are saying, “Your Honor, my client should be exonerated” or “My client should be released because the evidence was handled by Annie Dookhan.” There’s a long list of them. I have a database full of all of these people, some of whom have six-, eight-, ten-page rap sheets, and even if you threw out the evidence in this particular case, there’s not much question that they’ve had a long history with drug sales.
Do you expect there to be an increase in violence?
The Boston police are very worried about that. There are a number of cases where the real interest in the defendant was a gang shooting or murder, and they didn’t have the evidence to convict them on those charges. But they had the evidence to convict them on drugs. Sometimes drug defendants are easier to prosecute—you catch somebody with cocaine over a certain threshold, you say, “Well, you had intent to sell,” and there it is, sort of cut-and-dry. If there’s a gang murder, it’s often hard to get witnesses to testify truthfully to secure a conviction.
So there’s a great fear that there are violent criminals that are about to be set free, or already have been set free. Certainly, looking at the rap sheets of the first 20 or so that went out the door from Suffolk County, which is where Boston is, it included people with histories of assault, rape, and other things in addition to drugs.
Have innocent people been wrongfully convicted from Annie’s false testing?
There’s this one particular case where this guy, who was a real sleaze ball, was selling fake cocaine. So he’s going around selling fake cocaine to drug users, and he’s caught by the police and arrested for selling fake cocaine. But when Annie Dookhan tests it, she says, “No, that’s real cocaine.”
That’s unbelievable.
So the guy got put away for actual cocaine, not just fake cocaine. So how many cases are out there like that? It’s hard to feel too sorry for a person in that situation—he kind of put himself there—but defense attorneys focus very hard on miscarriage of justice. They go after cases where there’s been a miscarriage of justice.
So there’s been 190,000 drug cases in the nine years Annie worked there. Is that a lot? Are drug labs overburdened?
It was a recurring theme within that lab that they didn’t have the resources to do their job, and they really felt pressed. Annie Dookhan was held in high regard by her supervisors because she was a fast worker. She was actually testing these drugs two or three times faster than all of her colleagues, so instead of viewing her as a suspicious person who might be mishandling evidence, they instead viewed her as a special asset because she worked so quickly. So it’s definitely true that they felt short-handed and over-stressed, but I don’t think that justifies rampant disregard for lab protocol.
Marcus Pixley, one of the first defendants to hit the streets because of evidence tainted by Dookhan, landed back in jail within days. (Photo: Suffolk County D.A.)
Was she part of a bigger conspiracy to taint drug samples or alternatively to convict as many people as possible?
It is conceivable there’s something bigger going on. Annie is sort of an enigmatic figure. Apparently she’d been having some personal problems the last several years of her life. She said that her marriage was breaking up, she suffered a miscarriage in 2009, and it was around that time that she started having this inappropriate email relationship with one of the prosecutors that she did drug analysis for. It appears that she developed a crush on him, and she sort of poured her heart out to him. The impression you get is a sort of fragile person who is not doing well in her life and is indulging in sort of a fantasy relationship with a prosecutor.
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But then you start thinking about the prosecution’s point of view and the police’s point of view. Having a chemist inside the state drug lab who is willing to do favors for you is very valuable on more than one level. First, she’ll do the work quickly for you. If you’ve got a case coming up, she’ll take care of it. Second, maybe she tilts the weight in your favor. Maybe she finds things in your favor.
Even if you’re talking about an emotionally damaged and vulnerable person who’s like crossing some lines of propriety with prosecutors, it’s fairly easy to imagine prosecutors taking advantage of that weakness. And she had close relationships with several prosecutors and several drug officers. They called her all the time on her cellphone. So, to go back to your question, could it be something larger? That’s conceivable, but it’s also possible that what you have is a weak link in the chain that prosecutors and police saw they could take advantage of. And they did.
So what’s next? What’s going to happen over the next two or three months? What should we be paying attention to?
Well, we’re just now getting down to how much is it going to cost to fix all of these problems? Let’s talk about the 190,000 cases. If you agree to actually pull the files on 190,000 cases and review them, it is going to cost an enormous amount of money. Governor Deval Patrick’s administration is now collecting estimates of how much it’s going to cost to clean up this mess from the various different agencies, like prosecutors, police, and defense lawyers. But, right now, the estimate is something in the area of $40 million, and that’s just the beginning. You could easily have a price tag that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars to undo all the damage.
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Wow. So we should stay tuned to this, right? This story’s got legs.
Yeah it does. As time goes on, it doesn’t get better. It gets worse. You can clear the books of a lot of these, but you put more and more and more of these people back on the streets. And if you look at instances of rape among hard-core drug dealers, it’s very, very high. So you’re talking about people going back to what they did before, so it’s almost like you and I can start planning for a crime wave
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...eets-will-soon-be-flooded-with-drug-criminals
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...r-cases-be-thrown-out/?utm_term=.7aa54b7776d0
DAs say Dookhan drug-tampering case nearing an end
DAVID L RYAN/GLOBE STAFF/FILE 2012
Annie Dookhan served three years in prison on perjury and evidence-tampering charges before her release last year.
By Shawn Musgrave GLOBE CORRESPONDENT MARCH 25, 2017
The vast majority of drug cases potentially tainted by former state chemist Annie Dookhan will be vacated by mid-April, with just a few hundred convictions out of 24,000 remaining on the books, according to district attorneys.
The prosecutors have been working on a 90-day deadline issued in January by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to produce shortened lists of Dookhan convictions they believe must stay in place and are getting close to concluding.
“Without putting numbers on it, it’s in the ballpark that the court was looking for,” said Robert J. Bender, a Middlesex County assistant district attorney, at a March 16 meeting with SJC Justice Margot Botsford. “Hundreds of cases, not thousands of cases.”
Even if district attorneys keep 1,000 of the convictions intact, that would be less than 5 percent of the statewide total of approximately 24,000.
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The estimate includes all seven district attorney offices that handled Dookhan cases — the Bristol, Essex, Cape & Islands, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk districts, Bender said.
Read Story
SJC struggles with resolution to Dookhan crime lab scandal
Several Supreme Judicial Court justices appeared hesitant to embrace a proposal to dismiss all the cases tied to Annie Dookhan.
Since Dookhan’s misconduct came to light in 2012, defense advocates have called for erasing convictions in any case she touched. They argued that the scale of her tampering made case-by-case appeals unworkable because the process would require far too many public defenders.
The January SJC ruling pushed prosecutors toward dismissing Dookhan cases in bulk, but declined to wipe all defendants’ slates clean. The court gave DAs in all seven districts an April 18 deadline to determine which convictions to dismiss and which to keep.
The court made clear that prosecutors were to “reduce substantially” the number of defendants who might challenge their convictions because of Dookhan’s crimes.
It is not the “global” dismissal defense advocates sought, but some said they were pleased that as many as 95 percent or more of Dookhan cases may be vacated.
“Even the possibility that this might happen means that anyone who cares about criminal justice in Massachusetts ought to be paying attention to April 18,” said Matthew Segal, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, whose clients’ lawsuit led to the SJC ruling.
The court reserved the right in its ruling to dismiss additional cases if the prosecutors do not dismiss enough cases.
But with less than four weeks until the deadline, prosecutors predict both the court and the defense will be satisfied with how short the lists of remaining convictions will be.
“I think the court will be happy with the numbers,” said Susanne M. O’Neil, a Norfolk County assistant district attorney who also attended the meeting.
Prosecutors in all seven districts declined comment on how many defendants would be on their dismissal lists, because some cases are still under consideration.
“We are in the middle of an arduous review of our Dookhan cases and are unable to give you a progress report at this point,” said Carrie Kimball-Monahan, spokeswoman for the Essex district attorney’s office.
Essex County has approximately 4,200 cases affected by Dookhan, second only to Suffolk with 8,600 cases.
In January, a public defender with the Committee for Public Counsel Services warned that any caseload above “four digits” would strain the agency’s resources and budget considerably. Nancy Caplan, who heads the CPCS unit that represents Dookhan defendants, said at the March 16 meeting that keeping the number of cases low “would make CPCS very happy.”
Caplan also told attendees at a legal workshop on Friday that her office anticipates the maximum number of non-dismissed Dookhan cases will be 1,000.
The unanswered questions are which convictions will remain in effect and whether individual Dookhan defendants with standing cases will appeal in court.
According to one data analysis conducted by the ACLU of Massachusetts and cited by the SJC, a majority of Dookhan defendants were convicted on drug possession charges alone. Approximately 90 percent of convictions were misdemeanors or minor felonies for which defendants had already served their time, that data indicated.
District attorneys say their top priority in reviewing cases is public safety, and they might try to preserve some convictions under non-felony charges in lower courts if that means they can keep a violent offender behind bars.
But prosecutors face a tough evidentiary burden to keep convictions in any cases handled by Dookhan.
For all undismissed cases, the district attorneys must certify they could prove the defendant’s guilt without using evidence that was tainted by Dookhan’s dubious testing or testimony. That would be particularly difficult for older cases in which drug samples were destroyed years ago, or cases where the defendant pleaded guilty only after receiving results from Dookhan’s analysis.
All defendants whose convictions remain in place must be notified by mid-May, under the SJC’s order.
DAs say Dookhan drug-tampering case nearing an end
DAVID L RYAN/GLOBE STAFF/FILE 2012
Annie Dookhan served three years in prison on perjury and evidence-tampering charges before her release last year.
By Shawn Musgrave GLOBE CORRESPONDENT MARCH 25, 2017
The vast majority of drug cases potentially tainted by former state chemist Annie Dookhan will be vacated by mid-April, with just a few hundred convictions out of 24,000 remaining on the books, according to district attorneys.
The prosecutors have been working on a 90-day deadline issued in January by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to produce shortened lists of Dookhan convictions they believe must stay in place and are getting close to concluding.
“Without putting numbers on it, it’s in the ballpark that the court was looking for,” said Robert J. Bender, a Middlesex County assistant district attorney, at a March 16 meeting with SJC Justice Margot Botsford. “Hundreds of cases, not thousands of cases.”
Even if district attorneys keep 1,000 of the convictions intact, that would be less than 5 percent of the statewide total of approximately 24,000.
Get Fast Forward in your inbox:
Forget yesterday's news. Get what you need today in this early-morning email.
The estimate includes all seven district attorney offices that handled Dookhan cases — the Bristol, Essex, Cape & Islands, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk districts, Bender said.
Read Story
SJC struggles with resolution to Dookhan crime lab scandal
Several Supreme Judicial Court justices appeared hesitant to embrace a proposal to dismiss all the cases tied to Annie Dookhan.
- Read: Annie Dookhan released from prison
- Read: By the numbers: The toll of the Annie Dookhan case
- Read: Annie Dookhan pursued renown along a path of lies
Since Dookhan’s misconduct came to light in 2012, defense advocates have called for erasing convictions in any case she touched. They argued that the scale of her tampering made case-by-case appeals unworkable because the process would require far too many public defenders.
The January SJC ruling pushed prosecutors toward dismissing Dookhan cases in bulk, but declined to wipe all defendants’ slates clean. The court gave DAs in all seven districts an April 18 deadline to determine which convictions to dismiss and which to keep.
The court made clear that prosecutors were to “reduce substantially” the number of defendants who might challenge their convictions because of Dookhan’s crimes.
It is not the “global” dismissal defense advocates sought, but some said they were pleased that as many as 95 percent or more of Dookhan cases may be vacated.
“Even the possibility that this might happen means that anyone who cares about criminal justice in Massachusetts ought to be paying attention to April 18,” said Matthew Segal, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, whose clients’ lawsuit led to the SJC ruling.
The court reserved the right in its ruling to dismiss additional cases if the prosecutors do not dismiss enough cases.
But with less than four weeks until the deadline, prosecutors predict both the court and the defense will be satisfied with how short the lists of remaining convictions will be.
“I think the court will be happy with the numbers,” said Susanne M. O’Neil, a Norfolk County assistant district attorney who also attended the meeting.
Prosecutors in all seven districts declined comment on how many defendants would be on their dismissal lists, because some cases are still under consideration.
“We are in the middle of an arduous review of our Dookhan cases and are unable to give you a progress report at this point,” said Carrie Kimball-Monahan, spokeswoman for the Essex district attorney’s office.
Essex County has approximately 4,200 cases affected by Dookhan, second only to Suffolk with 8,600 cases.
In January, a public defender with the Committee for Public Counsel Services warned that any caseload above “four digits” would strain the agency’s resources and budget considerably. Nancy Caplan, who heads the CPCS unit that represents Dookhan defendants, said at the March 16 meeting that keeping the number of cases low “would make CPCS very happy.”
Caplan also told attendees at a legal workshop on Friday that her office anticipates the maximum number of non-dismissed Dookhan cases will be 1,000.
The unanswered questions are which convictions will remain in effect and whether individual Dookhan defendants with standing cases will appeal in court.
According to one data analysis conducted by the ACLU of Massachusetts and cited by the SJC, a majority of Dookhan defendants were convicted on drug possession charges alone. Approximately 90 percent of convictions were misdemeanors or minor felonies for which defendants had already served their time, that data indicated.
District attorneys say their top priority in reviewing cases is public safety, and they might try to preserve some convictions under non-felony charges in lower courts if that means they can keep a violent offender behind bars.
But prosecutors face a tough evidentiary burden to keep convictions in any cases handled by Dookhan.
For all undismissed cases, the district attorneys must certify they could prove the defendant’s guilt without using evidence that was tainted by Dookhan’s dubious testing or testimony. That would be particularly difficult for older cases in which drug samples were destroyed years ago, or cases where the defendant pleaded guilty only after receiving results from Dookhan’s analysis.
All defendants whose convictions remain in place must be notified by mid-May, under the SJC’s order.
Boston huh......
When a state’s drug chemist lies for years, should all her cases be thrown out?
By Tom Jackman September 29, 2016
using the drugs she was testing, it uncovered another chemist in 2012 who admitted she had been falsifying some of her drug testing results for more than eight years. Both chemists were arrested, pleaded guilty and served prison time.
So what should happen to the tens of thousands of cases processed by Sonja Farak in the Amherst lab and Annie Dookhan in the Boston lab? In Dookhan’s case from 2012, county prosecutors produced data in May of this year showing that her test results were involved in more than 24,000 convictions. The number of Farak cases has not yet been determined but is likely to be high as well. Now the American Civil Liberties Union and the Massachusetts public defender are asking that, in light of the failed war on drugs and the damage these cases have already done to mostly low-level drug users, all 24,000 of the Dookhan-related convictions should be thrown out.
No way, say the prosecutors in the eight counties around Boston where Dookhan handled drug evidence. They want each case individually reviewed, in the interests of justice and the fact that Dookhan was rarely the sole source of evidence against a drug defendant. They say they have already processed about 1,500 cases from defendants who came forward after news of Dookhan’s misconduct first emerged, and there’s no need for a blanket amnesty now.
It’s another blow to the crime lab business, already reeling from federal criticism of their long-trusted sciences like bullet and tread analysis, reports of sloppy work at the FBI crime lab, and now massive misconduct by a top state chemist. And then another. In the same state.
[Mass. crime chemist admits daily drug use in lab, sparking a second scandal]
Temperatures rose further in the Dookhan case earlier this month when the prosecutors sent out a mass form letter to about 20,000 defendants in the 24,000 cases (some people had more than one case), over the ACLU state public defender’s strong objection and even after a request from the Supreme Judicial Court justice handling the case “that the letter not be sent before we have a hearing.” The letter informed defendants that they had the right to challenge their convictions and could not face any greater punishment than already received, but the ACLU said an accompanying Spanish translation was poorly done and that the lack of any official letterhead and a return address in Philadelphia did more harm than good.
The prosecutors and defense bar had been working together on the letter until May, when the government revealed that Dookhan was involved in the cases of 24,000 defendants. The defense bar called that “a jaw-dropping number” and one which made “case-by-case litigation…impossible as a practical matter” because there simply weren’t enough public defenders and court-appointed lawyers to handle 24,000 new cases, particularly as the other crime lab scandal by Farak loomed. Offering defendants an opportunity to revisit their convictions individually negated the need for a dismissal of all cases, which the ACLU public defender saw as an end-run around their court case, filed in 2014 when prosecutors were refusing to provide lists of affected “Dookhan defendants.”
So even though the Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts’ highest court, ruled in 2015 that a blanket dismissal of all cases was not appropriate “at this time,” the ACLU this week returned to the high court to renew their call for a “global remedy.” The defense wants all 24,000 convictions either dismissed permanently or dismissed with the option for prosecutors to retry cases where there exists sufficient untainted evidence for another conviction. Carrie Kimball-Monahan, a spokeswoman for the Essex County district attorney, said in every case retried so far in Essex, the drug evidence was confirmed as Dookhan had tested it originally.
Sonja Farak, left, during her arraignment in Massachusetts in January 2013 from stealing drugs and tampering with evidence from a state crime lab. She later pleaded guilty, the second crime lab chemist to do so. The number of cases she affected has not yet been determined. (AP/The Springfield Union News, Don Treeger)
Dookhan misanalyzed, contaminated or didn’t analyze an unknown number of drug samples sent to the lab by police around eastern Massachusetts from 2003 to 2012, though her cases stopped in 2011. “It was a systemic lapse, of epic proportions,” the defense bar brief argues, “which permitted her to fabricate and falsify evidence … the unprecedented number of human beings who have been directly hurt remains shocking.” The lawyers added, “If this status quo prevails, the Dookhan crisis will come to a close by allowing thousands of tainted convictions to stand unaddressed. That is not justice.”
The state’s prosecutors believe they have been seeking justice ever since Dookhan’s misdeeds were discovered in 2012. “Individuals in society at large,” said Jake Wark, the spokesman for Suffolk County district attorney Daniel F. Conley, “are best served when any criminal cases of any type are assessed on their individual merit. This issue has essentially been decided by the state’s highest court. The CPCS [Massachusetts public defender] and the ACLU are calling it a global remedy, but it is no remedy at all.”
Kimball-Monahan said in Essex County “we went right to work to identify these people” in 2012. “The priority was those who were incarcerated,” she said. “In many cases, it was ‘time served, time served, time served.’ The trial court set up special sessions. We started handling it. The only entity dragging their feet on notifying and making a list of individuals potentially harmed was the public defender. They claim they still don’t know. They want to stop us from sending out the letters? It shows me their interest is not in protecting their people or the integrity of the system.”
Matthew Segal of the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts said after Dookhan was arrested in 2012, prosecutors refused to provide a list of cases she had worked on. After two years, the ACLU sued the Suffolk and Essex prosecutors in 2014 on behalf of two convicted street-level cocaine dealers and one crack user. Though the court said Suffolk and Essex then worked diligently to provide such a list, the other counties did not move so quickly, and “it was a consequence of this litigation that they generated the list” in May, Segal said, four years after the scandal erupted.
Once the defense learned how many cases were potentially affected, things changed. Most of the defendants were poor, and “the indigent defense system has no more capacity to litigate all these cases than it does to build a rocket ship and fly it to Jupiter,” the defense brief claims. The brief notes that the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender, already struggles to keep up with its current caseload, and takes between eight to 16 weeks to find court-appointed lawyers to handle post-conviction cases. Even if the public defender could expand its capacity by one-third and find 500 more court-appointed lawyers per year, “it would take 48 years, i.e. until 2064, to assign certified lawyers for the 24,000 cases tainted by Dookhan’s misconduct.”
The prosecutors strongly disagree. “That is either gross hyperbole or disturbing dysfunction within the defense bar,” said Wark, the Suffolk County spokesman. “There are hundreds of attorneys in public defender offices and thousands of court-appointed attorneys…A handful of state prosecutors has handled the drug lab crisis since day one. They have beaten back the entire backlog of affected cases and the small number that now trickle in are resolved in the ordinary course of business.”
Wark also noted that drug analysis certificates were far from the only evidence in drug cases. Police and witness testimony, drug buys, search warrants, surveillance and phone records are used in most cases, so that jury verdicts or decisions to plead do not rise or fall entirely on a chemist’s analysis, he said. Boston or Salem, Mass., police officers directly witnessed drug use or made drug buys from the three defendants in the pending Supreme Court case, court records show.
Statistics showed that 91 percent of the Dookhan cases were resolved in district, or lower, court, and that 62 percent involved only simple possession. In most possession cases, Wark noted that prosecutors regularly agree to plea bargains with little or no time served. But about one-quarter of the Dookhan cases were distribution cases with mandatory minimum sentences, the defense bar noted. And even with minor convictions, some defendants have been deported based on Dookhan convictions, while others have lost driver’s licenses, housing, student loans and job opportunities. Convictions in Dookhan cases sometimes served as prior convictions for heavier sentencing in later cases. And it is not known how many people might still be incarcerated because of Dookhan evidence.
“Approximately 96 percent of the individuals who have been harmed” by the Dookhan scandal, said Benjamin Keehn of the public defender’s office, “have not had their cases addressed. Unless the Supreme Judicial Court adopts a comprehensive remedy, these individuals will never get justice.” He said his office typically handles or assigns about 1,500 post-conviction cases per year, and would be overwhelmed by 24,000 cases. “Every person harmed by this scandal deserves to receive justice,” Keehn said. “If we take the case-by-case route, they won’t.”
Dismissing the cases but allowing prosecutors to retry them would be “the opposite of a shortcut,” Wark said. “If the defense bar believes it will take 48 years to handle [now], discovery and refiling will keep them busy until the next millennium. There is a very clearly established procedure for defendants who wish to withdraw pleas or vacate their convictions. There’s no reason the defense bar can’t follow that.”
Massachusetts does not have a time limit on when a convicted defendant can return to court with a motion to withdraw their original guilty plea or seek to overturn a jury verdict. And many defendants did that when they learned through the news media of Dookhan’s malfeasance. Wark and Kimball-Monahan noted that special judges and prosecutors were detailed to handle the influx of new post-trial motions. “We weren’t crying lack of resources,” Kimball-Monahan said. “That’s our job. We used considerable resources in IT to datamine a database to identify the Dookhan cases. We provided that to them. It was prosecutors doing their job.”
But who would notify the rest of the 24,000 roughly 20,000 defendants there was a significant new development in their case, and they had a right to an appeal? The two sides differed, again. Wark said, “This is the biggest crime story in Massachusetts since the Boston Strangler. The notion that there was a convicted drug defendant that didn’t know about Dookhan, it strains credulity. Nonetheless, if notice was to be sent, it was clear that the defense bar was the appropriate entity to send it.”
Segal of the ACLU responded, “There is no world in which that is correct.” He said the Supreme Judicial Court, particularly through supervising Justice Margot Botsford, “has made it clear…that it is decidedly the responsibility of prosecutors to identify and notify people who may have been wrongfully convicted.” He said it was not the media’s job to notify defendants, “it is the prosecutor’s job to seek justice for the people it may have, even inadvertently, wrongfully convicted.”
The two sides worked together on a proposed notice letter to Dookhan defendants, saying that the defendants may be able to use appointed counsel to challenge their cases. Then in May, the lawyers learned there were 24,000 defendants cases. At that point, the defense bar concluded that offering each defendant an opportunity to appeal individually was unrealistic, since there weren’t enough lawyers to handle them. They opposed the letter and stopped working on it. The DAs continued with the letter, deleting mention of an appointed attorney, and sent it to the defense and the justice in late August. Justice Botsford quickly emailed the prosecutors “to request that the letter not be sent before we have a hearing or in any event conversation about the letter and its relationship to the case pending before the full court,” court documents show. But the prosecutors felt they had the legal right to do so, and proceeded.
The notice is one half-page in English, and one half in Spanish, headlined, “IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING A CLOSED CRIMINAL CASE.” There is no letterhead or government seal. The letter states that “it has been determined that chemist Annie Dookhan tested the drugs in your case(s)…Ms. Dookhan admitted to misconduct in her work at the drug lab” and that the recipient has the right to challenge the conviction. If the challenge succeeds, “your case will be returned to active status,” the letter states, and advises the recipient to “contact your original lawyer” and for more information, contact the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. The return address on the envelope is a P.O. box in Philadelphia for the contractor who mailed the letters.
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The Spanish version of the letter was more troubling to the defense bar. Michael O’Laughlin, the director of the interpreter training program at Boston University, said in an affidavit the Spanish letter was incomplete, inaccurate and filled with grammatical errors. He said it uses the Spanish word “crimen” which is a violent felony, normally a murder, though no murders are involved here. “A recipient of this notice who spoke Spanish, but not English, would have great difficulty understanding several of the sentences as translated,” O’Laughlin wrote.
“The notice that the District Attorneys have started sending out is truly awful,” Keehn of the public defender wrote in a motion seeking to have the letter stopped. He said it effectively pledged to recipients there would be public defenders available to represent them, and there were not enough lawyers. “The burdens of a systemic lapse are not to be borne by the defendants who are its victims,” he wrote.
Wark said the defense bar’s refusal to cooperate after May cost them the chance to review the translation, and “it was translated by a native Spanish speaker who didn’t learn English until she was 16.”
The high court declined to stop the prosecutors from sending the notice, but instructed them to keep copies of the letters and any responses they received. Segal said the letter irreparably damaged the process of case-by-case appeals. Wark and Kimball-Monahan said prosecutors stand ready to handle any appeals which come in. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments from both sides in November.
NOTE: This post has been updated to note that there are 24,000 cases involving Dookhan, not 24,000 defendants, and that the public defender, not the ACLU, moved to stop the mailing of the letter to the defendants.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...r-cases-be-thrown-out/?utm_term=.7aa54b7776d0
By Tom Jackman September 29, 2016
using the drugs she was testing, it uncovered another chemist in 2012 who admitted she had been falsifying some of her drug testing results for more than eight years. Both chemists were arrested, pleaded guilty and served prison time.
So what should happen to the tens of thousands of cases processed by Sonja Farak in the Amherst lab and Annie Dookhan in the Boston lab? In Dookhan’s case from 2012, county prosecutors produced data in May of this year showing that her test results were involved in more than 24,000 convictions. The number of Farak cases has not yet been determined but is likely to be high as well. Now the American Civil Liberties Union and the Massachusetts public defender are asking that, in light of the failed war on drugs and the damage these cases have already done to mostly low-level drug users, all 24,000 of the Dookhan-related convictions should be thrown out.
No way, say the prosecutors in the eight counties around Boston where Dookhan handled drug evidence. They want each case individually reviewed, in the interests of justice and the fact that Dookhan was rarely the sole source of evidence against a drug defendant. They say they have already processed about 1,500 cases from defendants who came forward after news of Dookhan’s misconduct first emerged, and there’s no need for a blanket amnesty now.
It’s another blow to the crime lab business, already reeling from federal criticism of their long-trusted sciences like bullet and tread analysis, reports of sloppy work at the FBI crime lab, and now massive misconduct by a top state chemist. And then another. In the same state.
[Mass. crime chemist admits daily drug use in lab, sparking a second scandal]
Temperatures rose further in the Dookhan case earlier this month when the prosecutors sent out a mass form letter to about 20,000 defendants in the 24,000 cases (some people had more than one case), over the ACLU state public defender’s strong objection and even after a request from the Supreme Judicial Court justice handling the case “that the letter not be sent before we have a hearing.” The letter informed defendants that they had the right to challenge their convictions and could not face any greater punishment than already received, but the ACLU said an accompanying Spanish translation was poorly done and that the lack of any official letterhead and a return address in Philadelphia did more harm than good.
The prosecutors and defense bar had been working together on the letter until May, when the government revealed that Dookhan was involved in the cases of 24,000 defendants. The defense bar called that “a jaw-dropping number” and one which made “case-by-case litigation…impossible as a practical matter” because there simply weren’t enough public defenders and court-appointed lawyers to handle 24,000 new cases, particularly as the other crime lab scandal by Farak loomed. Offering defendants an opportunity to revisit their convictions individually negated the need for a dismissal of all cases, which the ACLU public defender saw as an end-run around their court case, filed in 2014 when prosecutors were refusing to provide lists of affected “Dookhan defendants.”
So even though the Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts’ highest court, ruled in 2015 that a blanket dismissal of all cases was not appropriate “at this time,” the ACLU this week returned to the high court to renew their call for a “global remedy.” The defense wants all 24,000 convictions either dismissed permanently or dismissed with the option for prosecutors to retry cases where there exists sufficient untainted evidence for another conviction. Carrie Kimball-Monahan, a spokeswoman for the Essex County district attorney, said in every case retried so far in Essex, the drug evidence was confirmed as Dookhan had tested it originally.
Dookhan misanalyzed, contaminated or didn’t analyze an unknown number of drug samples sent to the lab by police around eastern Massachusetts from 2003 to 2012, though her cases stopped in 2011. “It was a systemic lapse, of epic proportions,” the defense bar brief argues, “which permitted her to fabricate and falsify evidence … the unprecedented number of human beings who have been directly hurt remains shocking.” The lawyers added, “If this status quo prevails, the Dookhan crisis will come to a close by allowing thousands of tainted convictions to stand unaddressed. That is not justice.”
The state’s prosecutors believe they have been seeking justice ever since Dookhan’s misdeeds were discovered in 2012. “Individuals in society at large,” said Jake Wark, the spokesman for Suffolk County district attorney Daniel F. Conley, “are best served when any criminal cases of any type are assessed on their individual merit. This issue has essentially been decided by the state’s highest court. The CPCS [Massachusetts public defender] and the ACLU are calling it a global remedy, but it is no remedy at all.”
Kimball-Monahan said in Essex County “we went right to work to identify these people” in 2012. “The priority was those who were incarcerated,” she said. “In many cases, it was ‘time served, time served, time served.’ The trial court set up special sessions. We started handling it. The only entity dragging their feet on notifying and making a list of individuals potentially harmed was the public defender. They claim they still don’t know. They want to stop us from sending out the letters? It shows me their interest is not in protecting their people or the integrity of the system.”
Matthew Segal of the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts said after Dookhan was arrested in 2012, prosecutors refused to provide a list of cases she had worked on. After two years, the ACLU sued the Suffolk and Essex prosecutors in 2014 on behalf of two convicted street-level cocaine dealers and one crack user. Though the court said Suffolk and Essex then worked diligently to provide such a list, the other counties did not move so quickly, and “it was a consequence of this litigation that they generated the list” in May, Segal said, four years after the scandal erupted.
Once the defense learned how many cases were potentially affected, things changed. Most of the defendants were poor, and “the indigent defense system has no more capacity to litigate all these cases than it does to build a rocket ship and fly it to Jupiter,” the defense brief claims. The brief notes that the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender, already struggles to keep up with its current caseload, and takes between eight to 16 weeks to find court-appointed lawyers to handle post-conviction cases. Even if the public defender could expand its capacity by one-third and find 500 more court-appointed lawyers per year, “it would take 48 years, i.e. until 2064, to assign certified lawyers for the 24,000 cases tainted by Dookhan’s misconduct.”
The prosecutors strongly disagree. “That is either gross hyperbole or disturbing dysfunction within the defense bar,” said Wark, the Suffolk County spokesman. “There are hundreds of attorneys in public defender offices and thousands of court-appointed attorneys…A handful of state prosecutors has handled the drug lab crisis since day one. They have beaten back the entire backlog of affected cases and the small number that now trickle in are resolved in the ordinary course of business.”
Wark also noted that drug analysis certificates were far from the only evidence in drug cases. Police and witness testimony, drug buys, search warrants, surveillance and phone records are used in most cases, so that jury verdicts or decisions to plead do not rise or fall entirely on a chemist’s analysis, he said. Boston or Salem, Mass., police officers directly witnessed drug use or made drug buys from the three defendants in the pending Supreme Court case, court records show.
Statistics showed that 91 percent of the Dookhan cases were resolved in district, or lower, court, and that 62 percent involved only simple possession. In most possession cases, Wark noted that prosecutors regularly agree to plea bargains with little or no time served. But about one-quarter of the Dookhan cases were distribution cases with mandatory minimum sentences, the defense bar noted. And even with minor convictions, some defendants have been deported based on Dookhan convictions, while others have lost driver’s licenses, housing, student loans and job opportunities. Convictions in Dookhan cases sometimes served as prior convictions for heavier sentencing in later cases. And it is not known how many people might still be incarcerated because of Dookhan evidence.
“Approximately 96 percent of the individuals who have been harmed” by the Dookhan scandal, said Benjamin Keehn of the public defender’s office, “have not had their cases addressed. Unless the Supreme Judicial Court adopts a comprehensive remedy, these individuals will never get justice.” He said his office typically handles or assigns about 1,500 post-conviction cases per year, and would be overwhelmed by 24,000 cases. “Every person harmed by this scandal deserves to receive justice,” Keehn said. “If we take the case-by-case route, they won’t.”
Dismissing the cases but allowing prosecutors to retry them would be “the opposite of a shortcut,” Wark said. “If the defense bar believes it will take 48 years to handle [now], discovery and refiling will keep them busy until the next millennium. There is a very clearly established procedure for defendants who wish to withdraw pleas or vacate their convictions. There’s no reason the defense bar can’t follow that.”
Massachusetts does not have a time limit on when a convicted defendant can return to court with a motion to withdraw their original guilty plea or seek to overturn a jury verdict. And many defendants did that when they learned through the news media of Dookhan’s malfeasance. Wark and Kimball-Monahan noted that special judges and prosecutors were detailed to handle the influx of new post-trial motions. “We weren’t crying lack of resources,” Kimball-Monahan said. “That’s our job. We used considerable resources in IT to datamine a database to identify the Dookhan cases. We provided that to them. It was prosecutors doing their job.”
But who would notify the rest of the 24,000 roughly 20,000 defendants there was a significant new development in their case, and they had a right to an appeal? The two sides differed, again. Wark said, “This is the biggest crime story in Massachusetts since the Boston Strangler. The notion that there was a convicted drug defendant that didn’t know about Dookhan, it strains credulity. Nonetheless, if notice was to be sent, it was clear that the defense bar was the appropriate entity to send it.”
Segal of the ACLU responded, “There is no world in which that is correct.” He said the Supreme Judicial Court, particularly through supervising Justice Margot Botsford, “has made it clear…that it is decidedly the responsibility of prosecutors to identify and notify people who may have been wrongfully convicted.” He said it was not the media’s job to notify defendants, “it is the prosecutor’s job to seek justice for the people it may have, even inadvertently, wrongfully convicted.”
The two sides worked together on a proposed notice letter to Dookhan defendants, saying that the defendants may be able to use appointed counsel to challenge their cases. Then in May, the lawyers learned there were 24,000 defendants cases. At that point, the defense bar concluded that offering each defendant an opportunity to appeal individually was unrealistic, since there weren’t enough lawyers to handle them. They opposed the letter and stopped working on it. The DAs continued with the letter, deleting mention of an appointed attorney, and sent it to the defense and the justice in late August. Justice Botsford quickly emailed the prosecutors “to request that the letter not be sent before we have a hearing or in any event conversation about the letter and its relationship to the case pending before the full court,” court documents show. But the prosecutors felt they had the legal right to do so, and proceeded.
The notice is one half-page in English, and one half in Spanish, headlined, “IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING A CLOSED CRIMINAL CASE.” There is no letterhead or government seal. The letter states that “it has been determined that chemist Annie Dookhan tested the drugs in your case(s)…Ms. Dookhan admitted to misconduct in her work at the drug lab” and that the recipient has the right to challenge the conviction. If the challenge succeeds, “your case will be returned to active status,” the letter states, and advises the recipient to “contact your original lawyer” and for more information, contact the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. The return address on the envelope is a P.O. box in Philadelphia for the contractor who mailed the letters.
Local Headlines newsletter
Daily headlines about the Washington region.
The Spanish version of the letter was more troubling to the defense bar. Michael O’Laughlin, the director of the interpreter training program at Boston University, said in an affidavit the Spanish letter was incomplete, inaccurate and filled with grammatical errors. He said it uses the Spanish word “crimen” which is a violent felony, normally a murder, though no murders are involved here. “A recipient of this notice who spoke Spanish, but not English, would have great difficulty understanding several of the sentences as translated,” O’Laughlin wrote.
“The notice that the District Attorneys have started sending out is truly awful,” Keehn of the public defender wrote in a motion seeking to have the letter stopped. He said it effectively pledged to recipients there would be public defenders available to represent them, and there were not enough lawyers. “The burdens of a systemic lapse are not to be borne by the defendants who are its victims,” he wrote.
Wark said the defense bar’s refusal to cooperate after May cost them the chance to review the translation, and “it was translated by a native Spanish speaker who didn’t learn English until she was 16.”
The high court declined to stop the prosecutors from sending the notice, but instructed them to keep copies of the letters and any responses they received. Segal said the letter irreparably damaged the process of case-by-case appeals. Wark and Kimball-Monahan said prosecutors stand ready to handle any appeals which come in. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments from both sides in November.
NOTE: This post has been updated to note that there are 24,000 cases involving Dookhan, not 24,000 defendants, and that the public defender, not the ACLU, moved to stop the mailing of the letter to the defendants.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...r-cases-be-thrown-out/?utm_term=.7aa54b7776d0
3 fuckin years in jail!!! 
3 fuckin years in jail!!!
good lawd the legal system on this country is complete bullshit.
That's a Fuckin shame3 fuckin years in jail!!!
Beyond insane man.
just think about the man who SHOT Trayvon
and people locked up over weed
or crack
or hell TRAFFIC VIOLATIONS
CHILD SUPPORT
tax evasion
this woman DESTROYED THOUSANDS OF LIVES AND FAMILIES
and COMPLETELY UNDERMINED THE FEDERAL COURT SYSTEM
and got 3 years
and you got dudes out her hoping the feds gonna handle Trump?
And she aint EVEN WHITE!!!
Good lawd if a BLACK lab worker had done this to WHITE people?
Remember,people of color should stick together to fight white supremacy.....
she was tryin so hard to please her white massas...
the funny shit is, I bet she got busted because her associates felt some kind of way, since she was busting out two to three times more workload then they were,
shittin on thier productivity......if she wasnt Od'n on the productivity that bitch wouldve most likely stayed under the radar...
the funny shit is, I bet she got busted because her associates felt some kind of way, since she was busting out two to three times more workload then they were,
shittin on thier productivity......if she wasnt Od'n on the productivity that bitch wouldve most likely stayed under the radar...
Shits crazy!!just think about the man who SHOT Trayvon
and people locked up over weed
or crack
or hell TRAFFIC VIOLATIONS
CHILD SUPPORT
tax evasion
this woman DESTROYED THOUSANDS OF LIVES AND FAMILIES
and COMPLETELY UNDERMINED THE FEDERAL COURT SYSTEM
and got 3 years
and you got dudes out her hoping the feds gonna handle Trump?
And she aint EVEN WHITE!!!
Good lawd if a BLACK lab worker had done this to WHITE people?
Where the FUCK is she at now?
- I don't curse often, but FUCK THIS BITCH
horse shit lies.. its because of single parenting why those 40,000 people went to jail