There is no way of knowing of that "strengthened" evidence was the difference between any given person walking or going to jail. They all need to be retried, and imprisoning them until that can happen is an injustice. Give them all the opportunity to make bail again until new trials can be arranged.

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 it's far more sensible than imprisoning innocents.

I think all these cases should be worked within a very brief period or the convictions should be suspended until they are.

> “[Dookhan] was mis-testing evidence, dry-labbing evidence, saying she had ‘conducted tests’ when she had not, deliberately tainting drugs,”

I have absolutely no idea how you can interpret that as "not fabricating evidence"!

Article One of the United States Constitution guarantees the writ of habeas corpus. If their conviction was based on the "strengthened" evidence, I believe not releasing them would be unlawful detention and be unconstitutional.

I am not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar.

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

If that's the true number, then yes, absolutely.

they do deserve a new trial.

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.

How many of those 190,000 pose a risk of harm to other people? How many of them were violent, or sexual[1], offenders?

[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).

Yes, all 190,000 of them.

Every single fucking one.

If you have an alternate argument, I'd like to hear it.