> She'll never work in that capacity again

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

> This is institutional failure.

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

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'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.

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.

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...