60,000
Drug Samples Compromised in Crime Lab Scandal
By JG Vibes
theintelhub.com
September 29, 2012
Over the past nine years
of her career a Massachusetts chemist named Annie Dookhan tested more than
60,000 drug samples which effected the cases of about 34,000 defendants.
According to a police report obtained by the Associated Press she has recently admitted to faking many drug sample results.
Governor Deval Patrick has identified 1,141 inmates in MA jails and
prisons convicted based on evidence handled by Dookhan, who was also the
quality control officer in a drug testing lab. In addition to this crime
lab scandal, Dookhan is also accused ofcreating a forged masters degree in chemistry
from the University of Massachusetts, which ultimately got her the high level
job in the lab.
Dookhan was arrested by
State Police yesterday morning at her home in Franklin, Massachusetts, but is
expected to post her $10,000 bail by the end of the week. Once free on bail,
she must turn over her passport and wear a GPS monitoring device. She can have
no contact with her former colleagues and must be in her house from 6 p.m. to 6
a.m. She has been charged two counts of obstruction of justice and one count
of falsifying her academic records. Judge Mark Summerville set another
hearing for Dec. 3
There were many signs of
this misconduct throughout the course of her employment in this particular lab,
but nothing was investigated until last year when her coworkers at the
Department of Public Health lab told State Police that they would not testify
under oath about the results of drug tests she performed. Prior to that in 2004
she whipped through some 9,239 samples while her colleagues averaged only one-third
that number. Last year, the Department of Public Health found out about what
she was doing, but downplayed it, telling superiors that errors had occurred on
only one day and had only affected 90 cases. The department also waited six
months before alerting police and prosecutors to the problem.
Assistant Attorney
General John Varner 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.
The fallout from this
case has already started to begin, as the lab has already been shut down and
more members of the lab are stating to resign.
Dozens of inmates have already been released, and many more releases are
expected to come. Now with all of the cases that she was responsible for
prosecutors must prove that substances seized by police are scientifically
proven to be illegal drugs and that they have not been tampered with between
arrest and trial, an impossible feat because the samples have now admittedly
been tampered with.
J.G. Vibes is the author of an 87
chapter counter culture textbook called Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance and host of a show called Voluntary Hippie
Radio.
He is also an artist
with an established record label and event promotion company
that hosts politically charged electronic dance music events. You can keep up with his work,
which includes free podcasts, free e-books & free audiobooks at his
website www.aotmr.com
