[Mrs_Esterhouse]

Yep. They sure did. Just imagine how many lives Dookhan and her crime lab destroyed.

https://www.rt.com/usa/385224-massachusetts-drug-tampering-cases/

Massachusetts may be facing the largest mass dismissal of criminal convictions in US history. Around 20,000 drug-related convictions are expected to be overturned. The cases all involve a former state chemist who falsified evidence.

Tuesday is the deadline for district attorneys in Massachusetts to tell the state's Supreme Judicial Court which of the estimated 24,000 or so tainted cases could be ordered back to trial with evidence that was not handled by former state drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan, who was found to have tampered with or falsified evidence related to thousands of drug cases.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts believes around 20,000 of those cases will be thrown out, an amount that would be unparalleled in the US. The ACLU, the Massachusetts public defender's office and private attorneys have worked on the dismissals for more than four years since revelations of Dookhan's actions.

 

[moe mensale]

In addition to falsifying evidence, she admitted to lying about her job qualifications as well, all in an effort to appear highly productive.

I wonder if there was an affirmative action angle to her hiring?

 

[Nemo]

Kinda makes me smile a bit thinking about-- that might be qualified as an illegal gun so you go to jail, because guns are bad.

Nemo

 

[gunsmoker]

Yep

ACLU did good.
This has happened a few other times in my adult lifetime-- chemists or lab techs with a law enforcement crime lab falsifying test reports to make everybody look guilty.

BATF had a clerk or administrative person (or an agent?) who also lied about having checked the NFA transfer records and found that a particular gun or silencer was not registered to a particular defendant. She didn't actually check anything. She just assumed that if the cops arrested somebody for having a sawed-off shotgun, and the defendant didn't offer any proof that he legally possessed a registered NFA weapon, it must be an unregistered and illegal one. This was maybe a dozen years ago, and her perjury put many people in federal prison (all of them were probably guilty anyway, but the point is, it was her job to CHECK the database!).

And we've all heard of medical lab scientists and staff members falsifying tests for cancer and other diseases, just to get through their assigned workload faster and to earn more money when they're paid per-test instead of per hour or on a fixed salary. This happens every now and then, that somebody at the medical laboratory gets caught skipping the tests and just writing down "negative" to the test results.

 

[AtlPhilip]

Perjury and/or falsifying evidence that results in negative consequence, including merely detention, should cause the bad actor to suffer the same penalty as the person they affected. In this person's case they would be facing the sum of 20,000 sentences.

 

[Nemo]

In this person's case they would be facing the sum of 20,000 sentences.

At minimum the actual served days of those sentences.

Nemo

 

[Mrs_Esterhouse]

Imagine the number of divorces, child custody losses, job losses, vehicle repossessions, foreclosures and bankruptcies that resulted from Dookhan's treachery.

I heard on NPR that the ACLU and Massachusetts state investigators are looking into a second crime lab suspected of doing the same thing.

 

[Fallschirmjäger]

I wonder if there was an affirmative action angle to her hiring?

Probably not, born 1977 in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, as Annie Sadiyya Khan. Her family moved to the United States when she was a child and she eventually became a citizen. -per Wikipedia.

Served roughly 2 and a half years, between November 2013 and April 2016 even though she had affected tens of thousands of lives and cost the state millions of dollars spent to control the chaos she had willfully created.

 

[68908]

They do some good