MA Won’t Toss All Cases Tainted by Convicted Liar Crime Lab Chemist

Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier

When American “justice” is meted out “by-the-book” it is typically anything but justice as most Americans sitting in cages are there for non-violent crimes in which there was no victim and most of those convictions are drug related. Imagine then the horror of government simply lying in order to win criminal prosecutions for drug offenses? Imagine how evil a government would have to be to even question whether or not all those convicted under such circumstances should be freed once evidence of widespread malfeasance comes to light? Imagine if the lies could be tracked back to just one person and they were given a lighter punishment than each and every one of the people whose lives she ruined?

Sadly, for the families of some 34,000 defendants in Massachusetts, they don’t have to imagine such a horror; they’ve been living it for over a decade now.

“Close to 20,000 Massachusetts criminal drug cases are set to be dismissed because of a scandal involving a former state chemist who admitted faking tests, civil liberties activists and prosecutors said on Tuesday.

It will mean the largest number of drug cases tossed out in U.S. history due to one person, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Rogue chemist Annie Dookhan pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence during her nine years working at a state crime lab in Boston. The scandal shook the foundation of the state’s criminal justice system,” Scott Malone wrote for Reuters yesterday.

What did “rogue chemist” Dookhan do? Well:

“The chemist at the heart of the state drug lab scandal that has sent shock waves through the Massachusetts criminal justice system would alter drug samples, sprinkling real cocaine in with a non-drug substance in order to make the test turn out positive, a prosecutor said today in court.

Annie Dookhan also admitted she would grab a pile of 25 samples, test about five, and then list them all as positive, said Assistant Attorney General John Varner,” Mark Arsenault, Milton J. Valencia, John Tlumacki and John R. Ellement wrote for Boston-dot-com back on September 28, 2012.

During her career, Dookhan mishandled some 60,000 drug samples involving more than 34,000 criminal cases. So, what kind of criminal charges does such comprehensive malfeasance on the part of a government employee earn from government? Just two charges of obstruction of justice and one charge of falsifying her academic records, which earned her a bond of $10,000. She was convicted on those charges in 2013 and sentenced to three to five years. Today, she walks the world a free woman while thousands of innocent people are mired in some stage of the penal system because of her.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts decided that they just couldn’t throw out all of the convictions they won via Dookhan’s malfeasance and will instead allow prosecutors to cherry-pick ones they think they could win again on untainted evidence. Such a case-by-case review will cost Massachusetts taxpayers an awful lot of money.

“’It puts a very, very heavy burden on the prosecution to review all these cases and determine if there’s any possibility that they could be prosecuted again if a motion for a new trial were allowed,’ said Terrence Kennedy, a criminal defense attorney and member of the Governor’s Council. “It’s an almost impossible burden. It’s an expensive burden because it also puts the costs in the DA’s budget, which is a huge factor, too,” Andy Metzger wrote for the State House News Service back in January.

Justice Geraldine Hines wrote the court’s dissenting opinion, arguing for wholesale dismissal of every case Dookhan worked on – i.e. the right thing.

“’The time has come to close the book on this scandal, once and for all, by adopting a global remedy,’ Hines wrote. She said, “The only fitting end to this blight on the integrity of our criminal justice system is vacatur and dismissal with prejudice of the convictions of all relevant Dookhan defendants,” Metro West Daily News reported.

Instead, the court voted to allow prosecutors to have another go at cases they think they can win, cost be damned. Chief Justice Ralph Gants wrote the majority opinion in a decision that gave state prosecutors until yesterday to decide which cases they were going to dismiss.

“’The success of case-by-case adjudication will depend on the cooperation of the district attorneys, who will have to examine each drug conviction of each relevant Dookhan defendant in their district and determine which cases they reasonably could and would re-prosecute if a motion for a new trial were granted, and move to vacate and dismiss with prejudice the rest,’ Gants wrote. ‘We rely on the exercise of the district attorneys’ sound discretion to reduce substantially the number of relevant Dookhan defendants.’”

Of the 34,000 cases Dookhan tainted, prosecutors agreed to dismiss fewer than 20,000 total convictions. And, again, this bears repeating: the one woman at the heart of all of this, the one woman whose entire life is a lie, this one piece of human jetsam that has ruined thousands of innocent people’s lives and is still costing Massachusetts’ serfs lots and lots of money as the state tries to re-victimize those she has already wronged, Annie Dookhan, served roughly three years and is now free. She walks free because the government only cares about government; it exists only to serve itself at the expense of all of us, those who get ground flat and bled white to pay for it all. We don’t matter, we’re not part of the state like Annie Dookhan was.