Picture: Vectorportal, Flickr (CC)
Although ‘scandal’ implies this is some sort of isolated incident, those who follow these sorts of stories know that problems are rife in the War on Crime and the War on (certain) Drugs, with a flawed methodology and biased ideology resulting in thinly-veiled acts of war against minorities and the impoverished classes.
Court administrators in Massachusetts are scrambling to set up special court sessions to address the cases of more than a thousand people imprisoned after being convicted of drug crimes based on lab evidence submitted by Annie Dookhan, the now disgraced former state crime lab analyst. Dookhan herself was arrested last Friday for her fraudulent work at the lab, as the scandal continues to reverberate across the state’s criminal justice system.
According to State Police reports obtained by the Boston Globe, Dookhan has admitted not performing proper lab tests on drug samples for “two or three years,” forging colleagues’ signatures, and improperly removing evidence from storage. Citing the same reports, the Boston Herald reported that Dookhan had admitted to “intentionally turning a negative sample into a positive a few times” and to “dry-labbing” samples, where she classified samples as drugs without actually testing them.
“I messed up bad, it’s my fault,” Dookhan told police, explaining that “she did what she did in order to get more work done.”
Dookhan’s misconduct, which first came to light in June 2011, has already shaken the Dept. of Public Health, whose commissioner, John Auerbach, has resigned, as have two other managers at the Hinton Laboratories facility in Jamaica Plain where the lab was located. The crime lab was consolidated earlier this year into the Dept. of Public Safety as part of a budgetary move.
The incident has also raised the question of systemic issues affecting the crime lab. In internal emails leaked to the Globe, laboratory staff went on record as far back as 2008 describing “the situation in the evidence office [as] past the breaking point.” That was before some of the now former management at Hinton took those positions, though not before Dookhan. The Globe article describes “a staff drowning in work, instances of misplaced evidence in crime cases, and mounting frustrations over the Patrick administration’s seeming indifference.”
Read more at the Drug War Chronicle.
