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Author Topic: Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested  (Read 1905 times)

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Offline mukumsplau

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Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested
« on: September 29, 2012, 06:39:18 AM »
probably thats why they call us trickydadians...for some reason she got me thinkin of reshmi...
woman say she aint mean to hurt anyone...eh heh?!!



BOSTON (AP) — A Massachusetts chemist accused of faking drug test results now finds herself in the same position as the accused drug dealers she testified against: charged with a crime and facing years in prison.

Annie Dookhan, 34, of Franklin, was arrested Friday in a burgeoning investigation that has already led to the shutdown of a state drug lab, the resignation of the state's public health commissioner and the potential upending of thousands of criminal cases.

"Annie Dookhan's alleged actions corrupted the integrity of the entire criminal justice system," state Attorney General Martha Coakley said during a news conference after Dookhan's arrest. "There are many victims as a result of this."

Dookhan faces more than 20 years in prison on charges of obstruction of justice and falsely pretending to hold a degree form a college or university.

Dookhan's alleged mishandling of drug samples prompted the shutdown of the Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Boston last month.

State police say Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples involving 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the lab. Defense lawyers and prosecutors are scrambling to figure out how to deal with the fallout.

Since the lab closed, more than a dozen drug defendants are back on the street while their attorneys challenge the charges based on Dookhan's misconduct.

Many more defendants are expected to be released. Authorities say more than 1,100 inmates are currently serving time in cases in which Dookhan was the primary or secondary chemist.






During Dookhan's arraignment in Boston Municipal Court, Assistant Attorney General John Verner called the charges against Dookhan "preliminary" and said a "much broader" investigation is being conducted.
Verner said state police learned of Dookhan's alleged actions in July after they interviewed a chemist at the lab who said he had observed "many irregularities" in Dookhan's work.

Verner said Dookhan later acknowledged to state police that she sometimes would take 15 to 25 samples and instead of testing them all, she would test only five of them, then list them all as positive. She said that sometimes, if a sample tested negative, she would take known cocaine from another sample and add it to the negative sample to make it test positive for cocaine, Verner said.

Dookhan was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice, a felony count that carries up to 10 years in prison, and pretending to hold a degree, a misdemeanor punishable by as much as a year in jail.

She pleaded not guilty and was later released on $10,000 bail. She was ordered to turn over her passport, submit to GPS monitoring, and not have contact with any former or current employees of the lab. Family members and Dookhan's attorney declined to comment after the brief hearing. Her next court date is Dec. 3.

The obstruction charges accuse Dookhan of lying about drug samples she analyzed at the lab in March 2011 for a Suffolk County case, and for testifying under oath in August 2010 that she had a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Coakley said.

In one of the cases, Boston police had tested a substance as negative for cocaine, but when Dookhan tested it, she reported it as positive. Investigators later re-tested the sample and it came back negative, Verner said.

The only motive authorities have found so far is that Dookhan wanted to be seen as a good worker, Coakley said.

"Her actions totally turned the system on its head," Coakley said.
According to a state police report in August, Dookhan said she just wanted to get the work done and never meant to hurt anyone.

"I screwed up big-time," she is quoted as saying. "I messed up bad; it's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."

Dookhan's supervisors have faced harsh criticism for not removing her from lab duties after suspicions about her were first raised by her co-workers and for not alerting prosecutors and police. However, Coakley said there is no indication so far of criminal activity by anyone else at the lab.

Co-workers began expressing concern about Dookhan's work habits several years ago, but her supervisors
allowed her to continue working. Dookhan was the most productive chemist in the lab, routinely testing more than 500 samples a month, while others tested between 50 and 150.

One co-worker told state police he never saw Dookhan in front of a microscope. A lab employee saw Dookhan weighing drug samples without doing a balance check on her scale.

In an interview with state police late last month, Dookhan allegedly admitted faking test results for two to three years. She told police she identified some drug samples as narcotics simply by looking at them instead of testing them, a process known as "dry labbing." She also said she forged the initials of colleagues and deliberately turned a negative sample into a positive for narcotics a few times.
Defense attorneys for drug suspects were not surprised by Dookhan's arrest.

"I hope the system isn't treating the evidence against her the way she treated the evidence against several thousand defendants," said attorney John T. Martin, who has a client who was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea based on concerns over Dookhan's work.

Dookhan was suspended from lab duties after getting caught forging a colleague's initials on paperwork in June 2011. She resigned in March as the Department of Public Health investigated. The lab was run by the department until July 1, when state police took over as part of a state budget directive.
___
Niedowski reported from Franklin. AP writer Bridget Murphy contributed to this report.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2012, 06:40:56 AM by mukumsplau »

Offline Bakes

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Re: Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested
« Reply #1 on: September 29, 2012, 07:32:46 AM »
I don't think people readily would appreciate how much of a problem this woman cause by her actions.  These lab chemists are a critical link in establishing not only whether a substance is contraband or not, but also how much of the substance there is... this is critical for instance in deciding whether someone caught with drugs possessed the drugs for personal use or whether they possessed it for delivery (sale).  Quantity, which may hinge on a matter of ounces, is one of the factors in the determination.  Every one of the cases in which she was listed as the chemist of record is now open for review... or at least if I was the defense lawyer that is precisely what I would do.  Prosecutors scrambling.

Offline asylumseeker

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Re: Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested
« Reply #2 on: September 29, 2012, 07:36:54 AM »
This woman is a Trini ... I had heard of the brewing situation but until 'splau posted this I wasn't compelled to check that angle. Look thing!!!!

Her conduct is absolutely egregious.

Offline mukumsplau

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Re: Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested
« Reply #3 on: September 29, 2012, 07:46:08 AM »
not only did she toy with the freedom of innocent persons but now they may have to let loose guilty ones among the others..assuming defense lawyers gets it right..

and her co-workers rel lapse..rel rel rel lapse..they should have pushed harder...

not sure how this works but wouldn't they have the samples she handled frozen (assuming they weren't already destroyed) ?

plain wutless ness...d woman runnin sample like kamla runnin d country..by vaps..

Offline Deeks

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Re: Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested
« Reply #4 on: September 29, 2012, 08:07:37 AM »
Bakes, believe you me, we know the implications of her actions.

Offline Bakes

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Re: Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested
« Reply #5 on: September 29, 2012, 10:29:01 AM »
not only did she toy with the freedom of innocent persons but now they may have to let loose guilty ones among the others..assuming defense lawyers gets it right..

and her co-workers rel lapse..rel rel rel lapse..they should have pushed harder...

not sure how this works but wouldn't they have the samples she handled frozen (assuming they weren't already destroyed) ?

plain wutless ness...d woman runnin sample like kamla runnin d country..by vaps..

Frozen?  Police smoke dah weed long time  ;D

Offline D.H.W

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Re: Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested
« Reply #6 on: September 29, 2012, 10:37:26 AM »
Lawd I now reading through this. Stueps, woman do rel shit
"Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid."
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Offline Flex

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Re: Mass. chemist in drug test flap is arrested
« Reply #7 on: April 19, 2017, 03:00:37 PM »
Nearly 20,000 drug convictions dismissed over chemist's misconduct
By Eric Levenson, CNN


(CNN)Because of a lab chemist's widespread criminal misconduct in analyzing drug samples, about 95% of 20,000 drug convictions in Massachusetts have been dismissed, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

"That is a victory for regular people, for people who've been tarnished by these drug convictions," said Carl Williams, a staff attorney for the ACLU.

Those drug convictions had relied on analysis from Annie Dookhan, a former chemist for the Department of Public Health. Dookhan worked testing drug samples submitted by law enforcement agencies from 2003 until 2012, when investigators accused her of contaminating drug samples, falsifying results, and mishandling evidence.

Investigators said she admitted to intentionally contaminating some samples to turn them from negative samples into positive samples. She also admitted to "dry labbing" in which she tested a few samples but reported the same results for multiple other samples.

Dookhan pleaded guilty in November 2013 to 27 criminal counts in all, including charges of perjury, evidence tampering and obstruction of justice. She was sentenced to 3 to 5 years in prison, and was released last year.

In all, the scandal cast doubt on drug-testing analyses in about 40,000 cases from 2003 to 2012. More than 20,000 convictions of those remained against so-called "Dookhan Defendants."

Mass dismissals of cases

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in January that going through each of those cases would be too time consuming, and so ordered district attorneys to produce a list by Tuesday of drug convictions that they planned to dismiss.

In Suffolk County, which covers Boston, prosecutors identified 15,570 viable drug convictions to be dismissed, district attorney Dan Conley said in a statement. In all of those cases, there were corroborating facts and evidence against the defendants, he said.

"If there had been evidence that any of these defendants was actually innocent, we would not have hesitated to dismiss the case outright and exonerate the defendant immediately," said Conley.

None of the defendants whose convictions were vacated had been imprisoned solely on Dookhan-related cases, Conley said.

Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel with Committee for Public Counsel Services, said people wrongly convicted of these crimes had lost jobs, lost housing, and in some cases had been deported.

"Although this is a fair and just result now, in many respects, the damage has been done," Benedetti said. "Justice delayed is justice denied."

The real measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

 

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