Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
filmingcops.com
filmingcops.com
There are no words. Agents of the law need to be held more accountable for their actions than your average citizen, not less. This is disgusting.
EDIT: The scale of her crimes is thousands of person-years of human life in jail. Some of them probably deserved it, others probably didn't. There is a serious asymmetry here, she has only 50-100 years that she can be imprisoned and that's not a strong enough message to people in the government who would think about doing the same to further their own careers as well.
If you have 40,000 cases and only say 1/4 of them get falsified and that results in on average one year of wrongful imprisonment you're at 10,000 years.
The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own hands. One class of those disputes is the government vs citizens who have violated the government's rules or the laws.
When those kinds of cases are going through the courts the government should be extra careful to be impartial because everyone can tell that it's potentially a situation ripe for corruption. The government is adjudicating a case between the government (the DA or prosecutor) and someone not in the government ("normal people").
Given the choice you wouldn't choose your wife's parents to settle a dispute between you and your wife; but this can be a very real fear when being prosecuted.
The problem here is even though you can name the different parts of the government and call them separate (courts, prosecutor, forensics, etc) ultimately we find out that forensics and the prosecutor are both "on the same team" and that when the courts get involved again to try and fix the mess, that the forensics person is still "on the same team" as the prosecutors and maybe everyone else.
If you're in the class of people called "the government" you have to be extra right, extra careful, and extra following-the-rules so that ordinary people get a fair shake when dealing with an entity that has virtually limitless funds to prosecute versus their usually meager funds to defend (unless you're in the top 1% to 0.1% or so, then it's just "lots more" rather than "infinitely more").
Here's a case where not only was the forensics person not extra careful, right and proper, not even sloppy and foolish but malicious. And not just a little bit either, she didn't tamper with one case that involved a cheating ex or something. She did it systematically over thousands of cases depriving people of their liberty wrongly. You could build a strong case that she perverted justice in a very horrific manner.
If you add up all the person-years of people's lives that she conspired to help imprison and divide by 100 year in a life (round numbers) you'd get to the point where she's effectively "taken" tens if not hundreds of lives. That makes her in a roundabout way something akin to a very impressive mass murderer. In that case I'm not sure that the death penalty is an over-reactionary knee-jerk kind of punishment.
We regularly put a price on human life in civil cases, and that price always seems to be finite and fairly low.
The last thing this planet needs is more death and killing.
By the way, very insightful discussion here!
Is that any less barbaric than denying people their freedom because some people needed their labor in order to enjoy comfortable lives? When that used to happen it was called slavery and from what I can tell it's been abolished worldwide (or nearly so) because we've mostly agreed it's savage and barbaric and the opposite of civilized.
Denying people their freedom through a fair court system is also kind-of barbaric since violence or the threat thereof is what holds the system together. But it's supposed to be "justice" in that there's a fair trial and the hope is that guilty people are properly denied their freedom and innocent ones are not. Obviously there are false positives and false negatives but everyone is supposed to act in good faith to ensure that there aren't systematic biases.
This person introduced a systematic bias which has wrongly denied people their freedom. If she had kidnapped ~600 Americans for 1.5 years she'd be called a terrorist. That's precisely what some Iranian folks who did that to American embassy workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis
How is this so vastly different?
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Does this mean that plainly barbaric things may be justifiably used as punishments? Does this perhaps suggest the possibility that "killing a man", and "killing a man after convicting him of a crime" are morally distinct? Or does this mean that a serious revamp of how we view and run our justice system is long overdue?
I think mostly what I meant is that it's theoretically (I think) illegal worldwide. There are plenty of places where it still happens through corruption or lax law enforcement.
I am a bit disappointed that the website linked to rolls child labor in with slavery and such because it weakens the number. I don't LIKE child labor but there are still places so poor that the only alternative to children working is starvation. And they don't break the 27 million number down. So it's hard to tell if the child labor portion is 1% or 80% of the full 27 million.
Again just to be clear I'm not in favor of child labor across the board. But if the alternative to a child working is starvation then I see no reason to make a law to stop him or her from working. Getting charities together to give the families food so that the kids can stop working? Great! But just passing a law and supposing/hoping that it will solve the problem? I don't know that it's the right thing to do.
I guess part of the problem is that I have no idea how many kids are working to eat and stay alive by their parents conscious choice vs how many are effectively slave laborers being exploited.
I might counter-argue that at some point there's no doubt and being permanently removed from the pool of people who are alive might be OK.
What I mean is that if someone is attempting to murder me and I manage to kill them first that it was a justifiable homicide and that I shouldn't be punished in any way. That's in the law and it even makes sense to a great many people even if they're not lawyers, and even if they don't know the finer points of the law. In that situation there is no doubt, or perhaps no reasonable doubt and the law does effectively judge people to be competent to make precisely that decision.
Part of what makes this so difficult is that she actually wielded vast power due to her position. In many ways she was far, far more powerful than a judge or a prosecutor. A judge can't just unilaterally accuse someone of a worse crime just because, nor can a prosecutor reasonably trump charges up too much without getting called out for bad behavior. But it seems that this lady did precisely that, totally perverting justice.
If an accountant cooks the books it might be professional misconduct (and criminal!) and people might lose their jobs and all of that is terrible. But that accountant can't somehow make all the employees of the company go to jail by doing something wrong.
The power that this lady had and the extent to which she abused it is simply breathtaking.
And that is the argument of why there should not be a death penalty, even for people who you are really sure that they really deserve it. It's a form of humility: To admit that there can be wrongs in the legal system, and so to be very sure not to do anything completely irreversible.
That's why people argue that the death penalty is unacceptable in any case whatsoever: the system has to be able to admit that sometimes it is wrong.
Go after the prosecutors who were involved. Conspiracy is often thrown at "peon" types, from those emails it makes sense that at least some of the prosecutors knew what was going on. You want to hammer these wastes of oxygen and make it clear that corruption will not be tolerated.
Never going to happen, of course. It's easier to just kill someone, and who's going to prosecute the prosecutors?
Someone better versed in Latin may need to double check this:
"Quis prosequiet ipsos prosecutores?"
What's worse is that the system didn't detect the problem for such a long time. Why isn't laboratory analysis blinded? We already spend truckloads of money funding an elaborate appeals process, why isn't there a check on lab analysis? With the drug industry imploding, chemists (real chemists) are struggling to find work, so they could even call it a jobs program if need be.
How can a voter rock the boat over an issue so far down on the political issue list?
there is a big difference between working as a chemist, and working as a forensic chemist. getting drug into trials and treated like shit by both sides in the case isn't any fun, and it's hard to find people who'll actually stick with it.
Exactly my thought. The chemists doing the analysis shouldn't have any way of finding out who the defendant or prosecutor in the case is until they've given their report. Similarly, the parties in the trial shouldn't know what chemist will be doing the analysis in advance.
The part of the story where a prosecutor was practically begging the chemist for a particular result is mindblowing. I hope the feds come in and clean house.
It will be interesting to see how many wrongful imprisonment suits this ends up causing.
I think the time served should be very long, given that most of our violent crimes have very long terms.
That said, I think we need to revisit very long terms. I don't know the answers, but I think that taking decades for seconds of rage, etc, can be extremely harsh.
I hope we can amend this system, or eliminate the need for it, someday. To me, I'm equally or even more scared of prosecutors that have the power to destroy my life as I am of thugs on the street that have that power.
It's far scarier in cases like this, where they only risk a slap on the wrist balanced against absolutely destroying lives.
I literally cannot imagine losing years in prison, when you have so few already.
"... she needs to be held accountable for each and every
instance."
Personally, instead of having her serve a 100 year jail sentence, I would have no problem letting get a jail sentence of 1 year if it meant that everyone else complicit in these crimes also got 1 year of jail. Spreading it among all those responsible is a much bigger deterrent than throwing one person under the bus.
Going to jail for a serious crime you are guilty of is a lottery. It is a much more effective deterrent when being found guilty and spending time in jail is a likely event when a crime actually occurs."
I think they should all be held accountable, no doubt, and I don't think that was lost in the discussion here on HN, thankfully.
I personally find it more contemptible the more power those involved have. This chemist likely felt pressure from her higher-ups. No excuse for her, but disgusting of them to exert their power in that manner.
I hadn't thought much about your last sentence before, but it's very valid. It's a lottery because you're not always caught (and then in some cases, white-collar-crime, you're likely to get a slap on the wrist). I imagine that most criminals are dumb enough to convince themselves they won't be caught, making their odds to "win" seem even higher.
I think crime & punishment is such a complex problem, and our current system is barely passable, and has incredible room for improvement. I just don't want to be the answers guy, because I don't know how to improve it, and the risks are high.
That's 40,000 counts, 1 day per, continuous -- 109 years and change.
Those entrusted with protecting the law should have far more obligation to uphold its tenets than the hoi polloi, lest we start conceding that there really are two classes of citizenry and start a class war.
I reckon that all other 49 states should see this as a sign to perform their own audits. I just hope that if such audits are performed, that they don't get swept under the rug. Otherwise the problem will be solved, but many who didn't get due process will continue to rot in jail so that other states can save face.
20+ year jail sentences are already excessive for the overwhelming majority of people in jail with 20+ year sentences.
Dookhan should serve the sentences that she was responsible for, every single case. If anything, I think the death penalty is fair. Imagine all of the lives she ruined. all of the families and children who grew up thinking their dad, mother, grandparent or relative were convicted criminals. Not to mention the trouble convicted inmates have when they get out adjusting to reality and getting a job, credit, etc.
What about the main prosecutor involved here? Is he going to be subjected to a court case as well? Or will the system prove itself reliable once again and the chemist will be vilified and blamed.
This is appalling.
There's no motivation or incentive whatsoever to structure the process to decrease convictions, that is one of the unspoken but defining features of our legal system.
There is an ideal that two sides are arguing something in a neutral setting, but one side is the government, and literally everyone who should be acting impartially is also employed by the same government. How can that create a balanced process?
Only in a naive and delusional imaginary world.
This is just straight lying. Trading hundreds of years of others' lives for a modestly higher paycheck.
the states are barely willing to pay for this sort of testing in the first place, let alone having it performed repeatedly.
defendants are generally able to get the evidence retested themselves. very hand wavily, that sort of thing will tend to cost $100-$1000.
If the same rules are used for all drugs, then adding weight might not require any prohibited substances. Also, a record of something going up in weight may be odd, but probably is less interesting than it going down in weight.
Not that it negates your point. She may have just written down false weights on the data they sent to court.
going up in weight (by more than the uncertainty of the scales' measurement) is going to be a hell of a lot more interesting to anybody who actually cares, since that can't happen in the normal course of testing. certainly going down is what implies diversion, but it is also necessary for testing purposes.
(also chemists generally don't want some random guy's cocaine. they know the awful shit street drugs get cut with. once you're DEA registered, you can basically just order pure drugs from the government. that's the stuff that gets diverted, and it's also how you'd up the concentration of a defendant's sample.)
even so, that's why two people are supposed to be present for the handling, and samples should be homogenized early on and then split up for independent testing if the defendant wants it. add on lots of tamper evident tape, etc.
"and the DEA can check your records any time. they have caught at least some people (who were "diverting" cocaine up their nose) with this."
It would be trivial for any chemist to "divert" cocaine up their nose and not get caught if they put some thought into it. As you said, some already do "divert" cocaine up their nose, so obviously some chemists are interested in random guy's cocaine. If the DEA is catching people through record keeping, you can be sure there are some chemists who sensibly doctor the records at the same time.
If the chemist is interested in doctoring lab results to screw over a defendant (rather than get high).... well shit, we already know that is possible, don't we? That is the entire point of this discussion. There is really absolutely no sense in arguing that chemists cannot doctor evidence to send some guy up the river, we already know that they can.
“Any help would be greatly appreciated!” he wrote,
punctuating each sentence with a long string of
exclamation points. “Thank you!”That may be a shitty model, but it's the model we use. We have a responsibility to only punish people for things they knew to be wrong - thanking a lab tech for a favorable result doesn't cross that line.
P.s. I realize that improper conduct by both parties is probable in this case, but the quoted email certainly does not cross the line.
Allowing prosecutors to "do their job" and try to be polite or have any influence at all on what's supposed to be a purely factual system is completely and utterly wrong.
Not at people performing ANY tests on evidence.
The woman wasn't evil. But her actions really are.
It's very easy, too easy, to say that she is evil because what she did was so bad. But that's lazy, and it misses the interesting stuff. How do people get caught up in performing such horrendous acts?
There's a bunch of cognitive stuff going on, and some subtle manipulation. I suspect that something similar is how we end up with app stores full of "free" games that are full of micro-payments and ads. (Instead of the Doom model of a few free levels and a paid for full version).
In the same way that you can build a reliable system from unreliable components through clever system design, I think you can build an evil system from good but limited people.
I think a lot about the housing bubble, the popping of which has had a terrible human cost. There may be nobody on earth who is willing to say, "Yes, I helped make that happen." But there are an awful lot of borrowers, mortgage brokers, bankers, executives, and investors who are very sure that it wasn't their fault. After all, they were just doing their job or obeying the incentives.
It reminds me of "And Then There Were None": http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php
And "The Midas Plague": http://www.e-reading.co.uk/bookreader.php/1010251/Pohl_-_The...
If you say "I did the test that proves it is heroin" and you didn't, and you are smart enough to be a chemist, and you see some poor guy get put in jail, then you are evil.
But she didn't think she was being evil. She somehow persuaded herself that what she was doing was okay.
That's the interesting bit. Why do people go along with things that they know are wrong. She wasn't alone in this, there are a bunch of other people involved too. And it's similar for other frauds and deceptions.
She didn't wake up and think "Fuck it, I'm going to jail thousands of innocent people". So, what was she thinking?
Can we test for that kind of thinking in other people? How do we protect against is?
There is a difference between a person who genuinely considers what they are doing to be OK, and people who are actually rationlizing things they know deep down to be wrong.
I think your implicit assumption that anyone might have acted like she did, in her position, is wrong. Both a person's innate (not necessarily genetic) moral goodness, and the circumstances a person finds themselves in, play a role in how they are act.
In trying to avoid one kind of simplistic viewpoint, I think you are falling for the opposite one.
But is that really true or am I just rationalising with the benefit of hindsight?
There was an article on HN about a man running a family business who started defrauding money. It needed the cooperation of other people. Rather than creating any elaborate lies he simply told them, and asked them for help. (I can't remember any more about it, which is making search tricky!). But they all went along. He was a nice guy, and they were helping him, and no-one was really being hurt. Except they were all committing serious criminal offences.
At some point people have to be held accountable and called names like evil. The idea that she can talk herself into believing otherwise is a travesty, mostly because it allowed it to continue.
I think the word evil was invented to describe people exactly like this woman.
This reminds me a lot of espionage. No one sets out to betray their country, but by gradually making more and more compromises you go from being Uncle Sam to Aldrich Ames.
And Hitler, Stalin and Mao didn't?
Clue time: Nobody thinks they're the bad guy.
Concluding a person is evil does not preclude looking at any other angles on the case. So, I don't think it is lazy to consider it.
Of course, if the answer is yes, and I think that it is, then you have to ask what boundaries does a sociopath have to cross to become truly "evil". I'm willing to admit that some sociopaths are not evil, but when a person has 40,000 victims and not only taints evidence but makes up fantastic job titles and passes herself off as an expert witness in court, I think she may have crossed the threshold.
1) Most of the people probably were guilty of the crimes they were accused of. A technically faulty conviction means legal innocence, but not actual innocence.[1] Everyone deserves due process, obviously, and "probably" isn't good enough to convict someone, but it is something that can help someone like this rationalize their actions. "I'm just helping get a conviction this guy deserves anyway."
2) Like most people involved in the criminal justice system, these are not sympathetic people. Prior convictions, prior jail time, gang affiliation, etc. You can imagine her rationalizing by saying that even if the accused weren't guilty of the specific crimes against them, they were guilty of something.
Obviously I'm not trying to justify the actions of the chemist here. The criminal justice system has due process and protections and those things are important. But the fact of the matter is that most people who are brought through it are not "good people." That's just the nature of the system. The police don't arrest random law-abiding middle class people and pin crimes on them. For people who work in police work and prosecution, it's a constant parade of various degrees of unsympathetic characters. That's the psychological environment in which this chemist was working. And again, without justifying her actions, if you're trying to understand her psychology, that's where you need to start.
The Nietzsche quote is appropriate here: "And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
[1] This is something I think people have a tough time grappling with. I have friends who do work on wrongful convictions and prisoners rights. It's extremely important, valuable work. But often their work involves defective convictions, not people who are truly innocent (as a matter of actual fact, not as a matter of legal determination).
Maybe, overcome with self-interest, she didn't view her victims as actual human beings. For example, if someone wanted to cut down a forest to build a strip mall on top of the land, they'd be dooming or displacing the animals (squirrels, insects, etc) that lived there, but most people would be comfortable with that.
Maybe she had dependents to take care of, and she felt that everything she did, she "did it for the family."
What the fuck makes you say that?
Given the fact that she made up impressive job titles for herself, and testified as an expert witness in areas where she did not have expertise, she seems to fit the profile of people who are considered to be "evil".
There is more to this case than the act of tainting samples. There is the collusion of others, and there are the other acts of this chemist. The whole picture is of a person who has gone over to the dark side.
Where prosecutors either knew of or had strong reason to suspect this misbehavior, their immunity should be dissolved and they should be prosecuted. Their personal assets should also be subject to forfeiture for compensation.
the only real audit is defendants having the evidence retested by their own experts. reputable privately operated laboratories doing this sort of testing for forensic purposes do exist.
there are homicides that go undetected left and right, and a distressing number of forensically sophisticated criminals out there.
but everybody thinks the cops whip out some crazy CSI team for every case, and leave no stone unturned, and no test unperformed (hahaha!), so there's no motivation for anybody to try and get the funding necessary.
http://filmingcops.com/breaking-another-government-chemist-a...
'she took some chemistry classes in college but her degree is actually in sociology,'
Hot diggittiy.
Edit: Goes to prove that a _GOOD_ defense lawyer would have dig that up during cross exam. (if that is a thing)
sure, the defense lawyer can ask questions, but what series of questions do you think they could've asked that would've done anything here?
they would've needed to perform pre-trial investigations of the lady (such as the state police performed) to discover this. which isn't out of the question, but isn't very likely to be worth it for the defendants. (cost high, likelihood of useful information low.)
EDIT: Oath. I've been working too much recently.
in fact, the state prosecutors probably asked her that question a bajillion times, as part of qualifying her as an expert witness.
(added: in case you don't know, i'd like to clarify that qualifying expert witnesses occurs in open court. the defense, judge, jury, anyone watching the case, etc would all hear the question asked, and her answer. this would come after a copy of her CV, including relevant degrees, was submitted.)
It's an interesting question about who should bear that cost.
Because of that, I suspect the 'up to 40,000' means there are 40,000 cases that she might have affected, not that she is known to have affected.
> "Another Chemist at Dookhan’s Lab Accused of Deception, More than 180,000 Cases Need Review"
Seems your suspicion about how the counting gets done is accurate.
if their offense was not sufficient to warrant holding in jail before the trial I think they should be let out on ankle bracelets or such.
The simple matter here is, the evidence was faulty. Hopefully no prosecutors were in on it, but if the evidence was used to convict then any conviction is suspect.
Numbers don't matter when justice is determined. The government should have better means to validate its employees are doing what they are supposed to do.
I would have liked to seen the Chemist sentenced to life, or at least the cumulative number of years of all sentences with tampered evidence.
[1] Laws are different in different places, but here I'm talking about actual sex offences, not things like public urination. (Which is gross, but usually not a sexual offence).
Every single fucking one.
If you have an alternate argument, I'd like to hear it.
If the circumstances of their crime make it such that they cannot be retried (for example, all the substantial evidence was bloodwork that was corrupted and cannot be taken again, many months or years later) then they should be released. Guessing that they actually are bad guys isn't good enough.
I think all these cases should be worked within a very brief period or the convictions should be suspended until they are.
I have absolutely no idea how you can interpret that as "not fabricating evidence"!
I am not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar.
... this is not justice.
a bunch have done similar things because they were just too lazy to do the testing.
others because they were incompetently trained.
Think about all the wrongfully convicted people who are marked as felons now. They can't get a job in the legal field now. Hell, they have difficulty getting a job at a fast food restaurant.
The fact that the sociopaths who committed this travesty against justice have expensive mortgages to pay and private schools to send their kids to isn't any reason for excess gentleness.
This isn't "you suck at your job," this is "you are an evil person, and willingly have broken the law that you know so well to destroy the lives of others in an attempt to further yourself."
"Hope"? Sure. But "expect"? In what world?
But in America? What will happen?
Americans like to talk loudly about corruption in other countries but when they learn about corrupt police in many states, corrup sherriffs, corrupt prosecutors (2nd recent case in Mass.) then what do they do? Not much!
This is why the American Empire is on the way out. My family is learning Mandarin Chinese and Russian because it is clear that the two big powers of Asia will dominate the world of the 21st century.
http://www.mass.gov/ago/news-and-updates/press-releases/2012...
The only way to fix this is to set it up so that "getting a conviction" in no way whatsoever enhances a prosecutor's career.