Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil | Hacker News Reader

Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

npr.org

174 pointsdarkmethod100 comments

> "It's unsettling and maddening, because you're now going to have a lot of people get released to the street prematurely," says Middlesex County District attorney Gerry Leone, one of many hoping the state supreme court will curb the releases.

That's a pretty bad way of looking at this, because it assumes that those people deserved to be behind bars to begin with, and ignores those that didn't.

How about, "It's unsettling and maddening, because we now realize we have a lot of people behind bars without the [proper] due process they deserved"?

That is not how the police work nor think about cases, though. One of the many reasons I dislike them.

He's not a cop though, he's a district attorney.

Potato, potahto.

Actually, DA's are even worse as far as I'm concerned. Funny to think I actually studied Law.

All suspects a guilty, period. Or else they wouldn't be suspects, now would they?

no, all suspects are innocent until proven guilty - the problem here is that the proving has been done in error so they are still innocent until proven guilty

At the risk of painting with a very wide brush, DAs aren't incentivized to make sure people get due process. They are incentivized to convict as many people as possible. In multiple cases here in Texas where later DNA evidence overturned rape and murder charges, the DA argued right up until the moment of reversal that they believed totally in the guilt of the accused. They have to, it's their job and to have public doubt in the people they are trying will only result in them looking for a new job pretty quickly.

Not saying it's right, just how it is.

How likely this went on as long as it did without the collaboration of prosecutors?

The DA resigned when it became known he regularly communicated with the chemist.

Has he been indicted? The overall impact here is enormous, on a scale like the "cash for kids" judge. He ought to be in prison.

Seems like a mistake, not a criminal offense.

I'd want to see their emails before taking such a generous point of view. All the emails between this lab tech, police, and DAs should be released, and a special prosecutor brought in to review them.

Never put down to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.

Conclusive evidence is available. Let's see it.

Isn't it normal to see that evidence before declaring he should be indicted?

Collaboration? AFAICT we have lots of reason to suspect that it happened at the _instigation_ of the prosecutors!

By all means, throw the book at the dishonest chemist, but I want to see heads on pikes (or at least a legal equivalent) for the justice-perverting rat finks that set her up to it.

Worse:

>"We tell them, 'Listen, we know what you were doing before and we're watching you. And if you go back into the life, that Dookhan's not there anymore. So when you go [back] in on this charge, it's gonna stick,'" Davis says.

So, Ed Davis is sending officers to threaten people who, from a legal perspective, have not been convicted of a crime and have been erroneously jailed for years. Lovely. That's really icing on the cake.

I'm not happy about putting potential dealers back on the street, but we are a nation of laws, and these people will be freed by our courts. You can't have the police commissioner sending people to threaten them.

In other words, all you need to say to the officer is - "Actually, you don't know what I was doing. Because it was nothing".

How is he threatening them? He was telling repeat offenders that the police are going to be keeping a close eye on them. That's their job, isn't it? Or would you rather he tell them that the police will be away on holiday all next week, "but please call our support centre if you plan on committing any crime and we'll get our duty officer to log a ticket"?

they aren't repeat offenders if the evidence used against them was fraudulent. If that evidence was the basis of their conviction they should be free and this prosecutor should be out of a job for such threats.

Look, he only does this because his position is mostly safe for him to abuse. He has already declared all these people guilty, sadly I bet he is more upset the chemist was caught than the possibility people were wrongfully convicted.

That's their job isn't it?

No. That's called harassment. They need to focus on actual crimes being committed.

or both?

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in...

The DA is already covering up and defending the prosecutor's involvement, saying there is nothing wrong with prosecutors telling Dhookan what test results they needed to get their convictions, in clear violation of proper experimental procedures.

Forensic science in general is an absolute joke. It makes a mockery of the very concept of science. There are a few isolated pockets where the techniques and procedures used are sound, but for the most part the scientific method and rigor are nowhere to be seen.

Care to cite anything about this? From a Biochemist's perspective, when done properly, chemical analysis is extremely accurate and provides a great deal of information.

Forensic science encompasses a broad range of things, including bullet-lead analysis, arson investigation, handwriting analysis, fingerprinting, etc. Various techniques have bordered or even crossed into pseudoscience, others have wildly erratic error bars that are never properly considered. There are so many problems because the entire field does not treat their discipline as scientists do, they are too close to law enforcement for that. Techniques are used for decades before anybody bothers to properly figure out if the technique actually works.

There should be a chinese wall between the crime lab and the DA. All the DA should be able to do is submit evidence and any matching of that evidence to the accused should be a complete black box as far as the DA is concerned.

If you read some of the other articles in this thread, there is specific mention of a recent supreme court case ruling in 2009, "Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts", where it was found that the accused are entitled to face expert witnesses as their accusers. This means forensic analysts are forced to appear in court more often.

The forensic analysts are government employees. This means that they are almost always providing evidence that implicates the accused in the commission of a crime.

When a case goes to trial, the prosecution only includes evidence that proves guilt. At the very least, if it proves neither guilt nor innocence, they exclude it from their exhibits as irrelevant. Prosecutors don't even look for opportuinities to prove innocence. That's not their job. That's up to the defence. They deliberately engage in tunnel vision, biased only in favor of guilt. If they have evidence that exonerates the accused, they simply drop the case. They have to. But that outcome is deeply undesirable to the prosecution, because it opens the door to wrongful arrests, police harassment and other liabilities.

The disturbing part here is that she was rubber stamping evidence in favor of guilt.

What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?

If she were playing a role in that capacity, this would represent a far more serious problem than a single "rogue" chemist... She would merely be a patsy, a useful idiot, taking the fall for a much larger institutional debacle.

>What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?

that would explain why she went down without talking to FBI/etc and taking down all the DAs with (or even instead of :) her (as this just couldn't have happened at that scale without all the DAs involvement)

Took one for the team, and will land softly somewhere after the time on the "farm" (again with such cover it wouldn't be general prison population which she helped to populate).

What is a farm?

And they should also get some known-innocent control samples. (Of course, properly blinded.)

I call it "going through the motions of science" in order to be able to claim scientific objectivity.

There certainly is a science of forensics, but I think that what happens in a crime lab relates to that science like plumbing relates to hydrodynamics: it's technology, not science.

Done right, this technology leads to results that are generally more reliable than eyewitnesses and other forms of circumstantial evidence. But it's a mistake to consider a technology infallible just because it's based on science. The Scientific Method cannot rule out accident, human error, and malice.

The OP is a bit outdated...Dookhan has since been sentenced to 3 to 5 years in prison:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/22/annie-dookhan-fo...

The system is indeed in turmoil as it has to continue to review a massive number of cases. One of the worser case scenarios has since happened: a man who was freed because of possibly tainted evidence went on to allegedly murder someone

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/17/man-freed-becaus...

I'd say that imprisoning innocent people was already the worst case scenario.

Minnesota Public Radio reported often about systemic problems in the St. Paul, Minnesota crime lab over the last few years.

http://blogs.mprnews.org/cities/2013/08/st-paul-police-crime...

It seems those problems are now mostly cleaned up, and there is no particular implication here that a similar problem exists in the state crime lab, but it is a very good idea for citizens to press law enforcement administrators to make sure that crime lab procedures are validated and standardized and checked and rechecked.

When I started reading the skeptical literature a decade or so ago, I was astonished to discover that even fingerprint identification is not a well standardized or well validated procedure. And I used to believe that defense attorneys (I am a lawyer by training, although I don't practice law) were mostly willfully ignorant of science when they cast doubt on DNA evidence. But now I heartily approve the side-effect of our adversary system of justice, which when it works best should have the "other side" questioning every form of evidence and putting it to the test of rigorous validation. I think too often people trying to solve the problem of crime through the criminal justice system look for quick answers rather than exact answers.

AFTER EDIT: This background article link

http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/19/annie-dookhan-and-th...

from the NPR affiliate in Boston updates the story and is more current than the NPR link kindly submitted here (which is from March 2013 rather than May 2013).

> It seems those problems are now mostly cleaned up, and there is no particular implication here that a similar problem exists in the state crime lab

Except that the incentives are still massively perverse. It doesn't take an organizational dynamics genius to know it's a safe bet these are not the only two state crime labs with this problem.

All sorts of "fun" stuff going on here:

Another chemist found with no credentials - http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/11/26/mass-chemist-academi...

How fast did Dookhan work contrasted to case load: http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-t...

I would love to see every single email by DAs that include her name subpoenaed.

    "The report shows that the Hinton lab leaned heavily on 
    Dookhan’s productivity. Supervisors lauded her work ethic 
    and assigned her an increasing share of tests."[0]

We should know what her supervisors and DA were saying in private about her work to her and to one another. There is no way that someone is so much more productive, without anyone ever suspecting wrongdoing and turning a blind eye to all this. Anyone who had ever expressed suspicion of her work, but never raised the issue should be liable for criminal negligence here.

[0] http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-t...

Outside of political fallout, nothing will happen to the prosecutors. Nobody will charge them criminally, and civilly, prosecutors have absolute immunity in most cases, sadly.

(There are limits to when they are given absolute immunity, generally limited to to advocative functions, but they are often hard to separate out)

In one of the threads about this scandal someone said that it would be valuable to send known negative samples to a lab and check which ones come back positive, so that we can investigate whether misconduct was involved. This is basically equivalent to unit testing, since they are known assert(false) tests. Unit tests can be devised to test crime labs, district attorneys, law enforcement officers, judges, etc.

This makes me think if maybe this wouldn't be a worthwhile test for the justice system in general. Hire actors to pose as criminals in the system where the person is not guilty, but where most evidence supports a guilty verdict with a few smaller pieces of evidence that prove innocent. With this we find out how many prosecutors take the case all the way to conviction by willingly choosing to ignore evidence suggesting guilt and which decide to drop the case because they believe the person to be innocent. This would be the equivalent of acceptance testing the justice system.

The problem is no one, especially not the Justice or Police System, want to show all the flaws that they have when it's so easy to cover for themselves currently.

I like your idea! In an evidence based society, it might be picked up and spread like wildfire.

Of us (by majority, here) programming nerds, who wouldn't want to write better programs? Which consumer doesn't want better product safety? Which government could fail to want more truth-based justice?

But the USA is far from an evidence based society. It's a society where, in the interest of perpetuating religions, intellect is trumped by superstition and evidence by authority. As a side effect, justice is predicated on vengeance rather than reform.

34000 tainted cases is not "messed up big time". It's deliberate and malicious. And she gets 3-5 years? Bullshit.

I volunteer with a nonviolent communication program at a local prison, and I would guess that sentence would completely shatter her, at least if she was male. Every fellow inmate will identify with her victims and in a male prison they would be vengeful. Not sure how it will work out in a female prison.

Probably. But that's the karmic justice, I guess.

What is even more horrible, is that she'll do the time, but all the prosecutors, whose careers she boosted, would walk away from this clean...

Karmic justice? Extralegal justice that I dislike personally. That's like being okay with rape in prisons, cause "they get what they deserve"...

Seriously. There are reasons US prisoners keep going back in and part of it is the focus on punishment instead of rehabilitation. Haven't the US a whole amendment dedicated to not using beatings or shankings as a punishment? I wish more people would reflect on why that was considered a good idea back in the day.

Look, I don't think that incarceration works at all. But this person created a possiblity for 34 thousands of other people (assuming one case per person) to get potentially raped in the prison.

I'm not vengeful or violent mostly, but shit like that makes my blood boil a little.

Policemen who wish to carry a tazer used to get electrocuted with one, just so they have an idea what sort of punishment they will dispensing to other people.

I think that every lawyer and DA and what not should be thrown in jail, right in the thick of it, so they'd get a good idea about what they subject other people to.

34000 over nearly a decade career. It's 9.3 cases per day for 10 years, without weekends, vacations or holidays. And 45 minutes of work per case. Provided she had 7hr working day and a lunch break. And she occasionally testified in courts. How is that even possible?

I had to think about how it could be plausible to anyone, and then I remembered what my late father (a chemistry major who later worked as an industrial engineer) used to tell me about working in chemistry labs. Sometimes you have to sit around and wait while an assay runs, but I suppose an efficient person (who has enough equipment) could run more than one assay at a time, and monitor each result in turn. I have no specialized knowledge about what a normal rate of doing tests would be in a well administered state crime lab.

I like that you ran the numbers, and think you have a good question.

One remark in the original article said she had access to files and samples for many cases that she was not primary on. Perhaps that's the issue -- the ability to taint results across the whole departmental workload.

Excellent question and one that raises another one. Could she possibly have tainted that many cases working alone? If not, we should be looking at every one around her including the DA.

Simple network analysis of every person (arresting officer, DA and other crime lab technicians) involved in these ~34k cases should be able to come up with a dozen or so people that warrant additional scrutiny.

Actually, it says that someone was let out because she was a secondary chemist. So in other words, if she even came close to working on a case, then it's suspect.

Not to mention, she falsified lab results to the degree that she didn't even do any testing at all on many samples. That's pretty much close to zero time to file the report.

When it comes to intent - she deliberately tainted some samples! Gotta ask yourself why.

Actually, 3-5 years sounds pretty reasonable. If you think about it, you should be glad that she didn't get a crazy "send a message" punishment of 20 years or life in prison. She'll never work in that capacity again, so it's not like there's a need to separate her from society for the protection of society.

A better question to address is how a single rogue person could do so much damage. This is institutional failure. Just going after this woman misses the big problem.

> She'll never work in that capacity again

How do you know? Getting rehired is routine for misbehaving cops.

the forensic community is pretty good about these things. the folks who do these things get whispered about like a bogeyman for years. everybody in this woman's field knows about her now, and will be googling up "massachusetts chemist" for the next 20 years whenever they get a female chemist from massachusetts applying for a position.

She lied about her credentials once, what is to stop her from lying about her background again?

The risk posed by allowing her to walk free in society is too great; she should be indefinitely detained.

maybe it would be more constructive to address that reply to someone talking about her sentencing? i haven't expressed an opinion on it either way.

as far as lying about her background, criminal background checks are par for the course in this line of business. anything drug related ever, or anything indicating a propensity for lying are automatic disqualifications.

I am addressing this: "everybody in this woman's field knows about her now, and will be googling up "massachusetts chemist" for the next 20 years whenever they get a female chemist from massachusetts applying for a position." Googling a liar is a poor defense.

Background checks obviously didn't figure out that she was lying the first time. Why should we trust them a second time?

> Background checks obviously didn't figure out that she was lying the first time. Why should we trust them a second time?

i think you're somehow confused about the core concept of a background check.

i think also that you've got a bone to pick, and you're trying to figure out who it is with. good luck there, little buddy.

If you think a criminal background check is going to be effective at ensuring this woman will never work in this particular field again, that may be one thing, but you were suggesting that mere awareness of this woman would cause potential future employers to use Google to ensure that they never hired her. This would of course be ineffective, since she has been proven to be a liar.

I don't know why you think I have a bone to pick... You seem a little annoyed that I am responding to something that you did not mean to be your primary point. You are going to have to find a way to cope with that.

> This is institutional failure.

Indeed. I wonder how hard it would be to have random testing of the chemists' work.

reputable labs already have every single piece of work looked over, and the process completely repeated for random samples at increasing intervals of time.

and defendants should have their evidence retested by independent labs when possible.

I believe part of the accusations are that she actually tainted evidence. So testing her results would not be sufficient, you would need to test samples that she never had access to in the first place.

I agree. Without knowing much about penology, punishment for the sake of punishment seems overused in the US. Her prison sentence is short relative to all those given out because of her acts, but I think prison sentences in the US are too long to begin with.

If she were sentenced 1 day's prison time for each of the occurrences, it would add up to ~40,000 days in prison, or ~109 years.

I don't disagree that there's an institutional failure, and that perhaps there are others to blame, but she has negligently affected countless lives by disregarding her oaths to uphold the law, and I believe that sort of thing should carry more penalty, not less. Also, we really, really need to start making our civil servants accountable to flagrant violations of the law, lest we have more of them lying before Congress without fear of actual penalty.

I suspect the more they pin on her (and the news articles so far have been very much "witchy"), the more they will deflect from the lax oversight in the lab and the collusion of the prosecutors.

I don't disagree at all. Meanwhile, I'm convinced that the more they don't pin on her, the more it means that they're giving her lenience so that she doesn't roll over and spill details on those institutional failures that they might all have been a part of.

FYI, this post is egregiously oversimplifying, and I deserve ridicule for that, but I'm going to bed -- on a normal day, I wouldn't respond to this for some time.

I'm fine with 3-5 years so long as everyone else responsible in this situation, including DAs are subject to due process as well. There is no way that one person is responsible for almost 34k tampered cases all on her own without many other people being involved or at least aware.

I'm not a fan of our overly aggressive justice system, but if it is going to be overly aggressive, it needs to apply equally aggressively to the watchers as well. Any asymmetry in application of the current practices leaves far more room for abuse in the future than one that is applied equally to all parties. Justice is blind. If she is going to aggressively wield her sword, both your standard street thugs and corrupt government officials should have equal chance of getting struck by her sword.

We can't let the entire system throw her under the bus for 20+ years, while many other guilty parties get away after having been complicit or actively colluded.

Yeah, based on the email content from the prosecutors, it looks like they were in on it too. How does a 50lbs package of marijuana magically become 80lbs as requested by the prosecutor? It sounds like the entire system is corrupt.

Prosecutors are the ones I want most to see investigated here. I would not be surprised is this is a real life example of Stanley Milgram's 1963 obedience to authority experiments.

From Wikipedia:

    If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, 
    he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this 
    order:[1]

        1) Please continue.
        2) The experiment requires that you continue.
        3) It is absolutely essential that you continue.
        4) You have no other choice, you must go on.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were emails from prosecutors that essentially parroted these instructions in a more indirect form.

"Please examine the evidence again."

"Finding justice requires that you examine the evidence again"

"It is absolutely essential that you examine the evidence again"

"You have no other choice, you must examine the evidence again"

I assume nothing will happen to the prosecutors she worked with.

Are they elected?

Only the actual district attorney is elected, and the DA is seldom responsible for the actual trying of cases. The DA is usually pretty far removed from the minutia of actual casework.

Social network analysis using known tampered cases should be enough to highlight all the DAs that could require further scrutiny. I would not be surprised if SNA shows that a few DAs in particular show up over and over and over again in these tampered cases. AFAIK, the DAs are the civil servants with the most to gain and lose from conviction rates and therefore are the most likely to have been involved, assuming others collaborated or were at least complicit.

Previously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Laboratory#Controversy

According to Dookhan's lawyer, she says that she did it because she wanted to get a 8 hour pay-check, that there was "too much red tape" but very loose protocol.

But - she's not a rogue chemist! Oh no.

When chemists do lab tests, are they blind to the criminal circumstances themselves?

http://www.wbur.org/2013/11/29/dookhan-lawyer

What I find really awful, is that in many cases, jobs were lost, families destroyed, and sentences were stiffer because of false results by this chemist.

Could she have been manipulated by prosecutors? Yes she should be held accountable for her actions, but I have a hunch that prosecutors had something more to do with this.

I'm curious what percentage of testing goes through that lab.

She did a lot more tests than her coworkers, and it was a big lab. She also had close ties to prosecutors, which has unsettling implications.

This is a good question. I think most cities have one lab. They probably have multiple analysts in the lab, but I think it's still a pretty high percentage of the total cases.

sadly, no, most cities don't have their own tox/drug chemistry lab. there are entire states with just 1 lab.

i'm not familiar with massachusetts, but i wouldn't be surprised if most of the relevant testing for the state was going through there.

Another travesty of monoculture.

I am shocked and horrified that a loyal servant of the system should be discarded so casually. After all, falsifying convictions is just a part of how the system works, isn't it?

You have to keep the lower orders scared to keep them loyal - otherwise they might start getting ideas above their station, mightn't they? It's like holding a wolf by the ears: release it, and we would all be in trouble.

Story looked familiar. This is back in March.

Being a Mass. Resident this is really really really really old news! How the hell is this just not getting here?

what is her motive?

"Putting drug dealers in jail", to only very loosely paraphrase her words. She was working with the prosecutors.

The news loves to call her a "rogue chemist" to misdirect.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in...

Reminds me of this:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/11/kids-for-cash-j...

"'Kids for cash' judge gets 28 years in Pennsylvania bribery case"

Yup, standard throw her under the bus tactic as misdirection.

I can only speculate about her motives. But the system that is set in such a way that prisons can be privately owned and prisoners exploited for personal gain is a recipe for disaster. Stakeholders making profit from prisoners have a strong incentive to somehow ensure that as many people as possible get sent to prison for as long as possible no matter whether they are guilty or not. Some might decide to achieve this by bribing someone in the chain of obtaining/evaluating evidence. In a penal system like this it's just a matter of time before something like this happens.

BTW, it might also be a nice way to explain why punishments tend to be so much harsher than for example in Europe - in the US can being 'tough on crime' be profitable.

Massachusetts doesn't have private prisons, so I doubt that's the problem here. It's more that putting people behind bars is politically good for prosecutor with ambitions. Martha Coakly was almost elected Senator despite or maybe because of her role in a literal witch hunt.

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

It could also be purely ideological or psychological. It might give her a kick to have that power or she thinks if police suspects someone they are probably already guilty and deserve to be locked away and punished.

It would be an interesting study to see if she had access to pictures, gender, race, income, age of those whose results she forged.

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