Massachusetts chemist faked drug test results

[slimvictor]

Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach resigned Monday in the wake of a growing investigation into a chemist whose alleged mishandling of drug samples led police to shut down the state crime lab and re-examine tens of thousands of drug cases.

Auerbach said it's clear that there was "insufficient quality monitoring, reporting and investigating on the part of supervisors and managers" at the lab, which had been overseen by the Department of Public Health before being transferred to state police as part of a budgetary realignment.

"What happened at the drug lab was unacceptable and the impact on people across the state may be devastating, particularly for some within the criminal justice system." Auerbach said in a written statement Monday. "We owe it to ourselves and the public to make sure we understand exactly how and why this happened."

Auerbach said he will continue to work with investigators.

Gov. Deval Patrick accepted the resignation, calling the failures at the lab serious. He said the actions and inactions of lab management compounded the problem.

Authorities have not released specific details about what chemist Annie Dookhan allegedly did.

But in a letter sent last week to defense attorneys around the state, Max Stern, the president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said he was told in a meeting with Patrick and other administration officials that the chemist is accused of deliberately tampering with some drug samples, including the weight of the samples, which can affect the length of prison sentences given to people convicted of drug offenses.
"Apparently, the lab analyst in question had unsupervised access to the drug safe and evidence room, and tampered with evidence bags, altered the actual weight of the drugs, did not calibrate machines correctly, and altered samples so that they would test as drugs when they were not," Stern said in the letter.

"The lab is apparently unable to tie this conduct to specific cases. And the conduct appears to have occurred over a prolonged period. There are also questions about supervision of the lab generally, failure to follow and update protocols throughout the lab, the quality of the analyst's work due to the exceptional number of analyses she conducted, and the particular analyst's sign-off on the work of others. "

Read more here:
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/09/17/4828814/mass-health-commissioner-resigns.html#storylink=cpy

 

[Transcendence]

Yeah all the cops in MA are pissing themselves right now. Last time I checked it was like 50,000 samples that were possibly contaminated. Looks like a lot of people will be getting off drug charges.

 

[cj]

^^^
Not to mention the liability. Lots of lawsuits are coming.

 

[slimvictor]

Mass. chemist's colleagues had questioned her work

A chemist at the center of a drug lab testing scandal admitted she faked results for two to three years, forged signatures and skipped proper procedures, a police report shows.

Some of Annie Dookhan's colleagues also had concerns for years about the high number of drug samples she tested and inconsistencies in her work, according to other police reports The Associated Press obtained Wednesday.

Lab employees' interviews with investigators show they convinced themselves their concerns were invalid or reported them to supervisors who didn't intervene to stop Dookhan.

Dookhan's mishandling of drug samples at the now-closed state lab in Boston has thrown thousands of criminal cases into question, authorities say. A handful of defendants already are free or have had their criminal sentences suspended.

Concerns from Dookhan's colleagues prompted two supervisors to audit her work in 2010, but they just looked at paperwork and didn't retest drug samples.

It wasn't until the spring of 2011, when police say Dookhan admitted forging a colleague's initials on paperwork after taking 90 drug samples from evidence, that things started to unravel for her. Another colleague told police it was "almost like Dookhan wanted to get caught."

Anne Goldbach, forensic services director for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which oversees the provision of legal representation for indigent people, said the new documents show the problems at the Hinton State Laboratory are more troubling than originally believed. She said it appears there was unsupervised access to the lab's evidence office and evidence safe.

While Goldbach said she didn't see evidence of intentional wrongdoing by other chemists, she said that because Dookhan was in charge of quality control equipment other chemists could have gotten false test results without knowing it.

"The fact that she failed to conduct quality control steps ... it calls into question all the testing done by the lab," Goldbach said.

Attorney John T. Martin, who represents several defendants whose samples Dookhan handled, said he believes she changed drug weights to meet statutory standards for stricter sentencing.

Martin said in the cases of four of his clients, Dookhan determined that the weight of the drug sample was just 1 gram above the amount needed for a more serious penalty even though police reports made the seizure seem smaller.

Police say Dookhan told them several times in an August interview that she knew she had done wrong.

"I screwed up big time," she said while becoming teary-eyed, according to the report by investigators for Attorney General Martha Coakley's office. "I messed up bad. It's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."

Authorities haven't filed charges against Dookhan or commented on her possible motives as their probe continues. Dookhan hasn't responded to repeated requests for comment.

In the Aug. 28 interview with two investigators at her dining room table, Dookhan first denied doing anything wrong when she analyzed drug samples. She changed her story after they confronted her with a Boston Police Department retest of a suspected cocaine sample that came back negative after Dookhan identified it as the narcotic. Police also told her the number of samples she reported analyzing was too high and she couldn't have done all the tests.

The report shows Dookhan then admitted identifying drug samples by looking at them instead of testing them, called dry labbing.

She said she tested about five out of 25 samples she got from evidence, after routinely getting a large number of samples from different cases out of the evidence room, police say. She also told police she contaminated samples a few times to get more work finished but no one asked her to do anything improper, they say.

"I intentionally turned a negative sample into a positive a few times," Dookhan said in a signed statement she gave police.

cont at
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap...SP9o1A?docId=769d7538761f4ce28eae2c42115e0eee

 

[Transcendence]

What an evil bitch. It's one thing to get high off of drugs from the evidence locker. But then she goes and falsely increases the weight of the sample so that the accused get a harsher sentence? And turns negative samples into positive? Why? How could it have possibly benefited her? All the while she's getting high and trying to fuck over other people on drug charges. Fucking despicable....

 

[Hypnotik1]

Massachusetts chemist arrested for faking positive drug test results

Wow!

You would think it'd be easier to call them all negative rather than positive if you're being lazy....

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.

http://news.yahoo.com/mass-chemist-drug-test-flap-arrested-160136833.html

 

[T. Calderone]

Holy shit! I can't believe her credentials were never verified, having such a position. God knows how many people went to prison
falsely because "she was trying to do a good job." Reading this is sickening.

 

[Hypnotik1]

"I hope the system isn't treating the evidence against her the way she treated the evidence against several thousand defendants,"

 

[poledriver]

Chemist case muddies court system

Chemist case muddies court system

The drugs and firearms on the table were impressive, even to the veteran officers who'd collected them.

Days earlier, on Oct. 13, 2008, detectives from the Barnstable Police Department completed a 10-year investigation — considered one of the largest drug busts in Cape Cod history — by arresting Jimmy Smith in Hyannis.

After raiding his Sandwich home, they found blocks of uncut crack cocaine, bags full of powdered heroin and cocaine, Ecstasy tablets, scales, firearms, ammunition and thousands of dollars in bundled cash. Once the photos were taken and the officers had departed, the contraband was sealed up, catalogued and stored away. All were headed to crime labs across the state for the necessary testing.

Smith pleaded guilty to heroin trafficking charges, among others, in July 2010 and was sentenced to 12 years in state prison.

The drugs seized from Smith did not go to the recently scandalized state lab in Jamaica Plain, which Gov. Deval Patrick closed last month as the commonwealth investigates a chemist who allegedly tampered with samples and faked drug test results.

However, Smith's case — one of thousands handled by Cape law enforcement over the past decade — is an example of what happens to drugs after they are seized by police and helps illustrate how the turmoil at William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute is disrupting the judicial process.

State police say chemist Annie Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples involving 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the Hinton lab.

Dookhan has been accused of illegally manipulating results and samples for two to three years.

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 alleged 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. Dookhan, 34, was arrested Friday on charges of obstruction of justice and falsely pretending to hold a degree from a college or university.

The scandal prompted the resignation of the state's public health commissioner and two others.

Dookhan also allegedly identified some drug samples as narcotics simply by looking at them instead of testing them and also forged the initials of colleagues and deliberately turned a negative sample into a positive for narcotics a few times.

She's also been accused of overstating the weight of some of the drugs to expose defendants to heavier penalties.

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120930/NEWS/209300338/-1/NEWS

 

[cj]

She should go to prison for life. Period.

 

[LogicSoDeveloped]

She should go to prison for life. Period.

As an example, she should be forced to serve the combined sentences of all that she screwed over.

Maybe the courts won't see her as a cop and try to protect her. Either way, she'll be in for a fun stay at the prison where she won't go forever without being identified as I hear people in prison eventually do get the truth on people like cops that get put away.

When I saw the initial headline, before I started reading, I was thinking she altered samples for the accused's benefit but no, she is in fact evil.

 

[Foreigner]

If this woman is protected from jail time there should be a wide scale revolt.

Totally disgusting. Is there anymore proof needed that the war on drugs should be ended? The corruption is off the scale.

 

[poledriver]

Court Sessions Set To Deal With Drug Lab Scandal

BOSTON — Massachusetts court administrators have set up the first special court sessions to deal with the legal fallout from the actions of a state chemist charged with faking drug test results in criminal cases.

Defense lawyers have been told that hearings will be held during the weeks of Oct. 15 and Oct. 22 for drug defendants currently serving sentences in Suffolk County cases in which chemist Annie Dookhan tested drug samples. A judge will hear motions to put the sentences on hold and to request bail.



9/6: State Chemist In Closed Lab Handled 50,000 Samples
9/13: Personnel Shakeup At Troubled Mass. Drug Lab
9/19: Outgoing Mass. Official Addresses Drug Lab Shutdown
9/20: First Drug Conviction Vacated In Wake Of Drug Lab Scandal
9/20: Special Unit Formed To Sort Out Mass. Drug Lab Mess
9/25: Official: 1,150 Convictions Could Be In Question In Lab Scandal
9/25: Chemist’s Education Questioned In Drug Lab Scandal
9/26: Chemist Told Mass. Police She ‘Messed Up Bad’
9/28: Former State Drug Lab Chemist Is Arrested

Details of the court sessions were described in an email sent by the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender agency, to defense lawyers. Joan Kenney, a spokeswoman for the state Trial Court, said Judge Christine McEvoy has been assigned to hear the cases.

Dookhan, 34, of Franklin, was charged Friday with obstruction of justice on allegations that she altered drug tests and skirted testing procedures at a state drug lab. She pleaded not guilty. Her alleged mishandling of drug samples prompted the shutdown of the lab in August and led to the resignation of the state’s public health commissioner.

Since the lab closed, about 20 drug defendants have been released while their attorneys challenge the charges against them based on Dookhan’s conduct.

State police, who took over operation of the lab from the Department of Public Health on July 1, have said Dookhan tested more than 60,000 samples covering 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the lab.

State officials said last week that they have identified 1,141 defendants who are currently serving time in county jails or state prisons based on samples tested by Dookhan. It is unclear how many of those samples were tainted by Dookhan’s alleged actions.

Gov. Deval Patrick has said dealing with the cases of people already incarcerated is the state’s top priority. After that, officials want to hear the cases of people who have already served their sentences and people currently awaiting trial.

Robert Mulligan, chief justice for administration and management of the state’s trial court, said each county will have special designated court sessions to handle the large volume of cases expected to be challenged because of Dookhan’s alleged actions.

In the email sent to defense attorneys, the public defender agency said the special sessions for Suffolk County cases will be held to hear requests for bail and requests to put sentences on hold. The email said each correctional facility will have a day when defendants in that facility will have their hearings, via video monitor.

“The case schedule is being established now in an orderly and coordinated manner,” Kenney said.

Defense attorney Bernard Grossberg, who already has had one client’s prison sentence put on hold because of Dookhan’s handling of drug samples, said he believes judges who sit in the special sessions need little information except that Dookhan was involved in the testing.

“My feeling is as soon as they call the case, if Dookhan’s name is on the (drug) certificate, nothing further needs to be asked and the sentence should be (put on hold) immediately,” Grossberg said. “Later on, you can figure out motions to withdraw guilty pleas or upset convictions.”

http://www.wbur.org/2012/10/01/drug-lab-scandal-special-court

 

[qwe]

what does her bank account look like? where does most of her money come from? i have trouble believing that she did this for kicks.

 

[Foreigner]

So all those potential defendants out there only have a window of 7 days to try and reverse their cases? What a sham of justice. There should be no time limit on it.

 

[Mercc96]

Life in jail stat.

 

[MoosejawSanders]

what does her bank account look like? where does most of her money come from? i have trouble believing that she did this for kicks.

Agreed.

 

[slimvictor]

So all those potential defendants out there only have a window of 7 days to try and reverse their cases? What a sham of justice. There should be no time limit on it.

Absolutely.
How dare they make a time limit?
The lies of someone in the police department unjustly ruined thousands of peoples' lives, and they are not adopting a very apologetic attitude.

 

[Venrak]

Looks to me hat she was intentionally falsifying data, be it weight or identity of substance and possibly also purity in an attempt to doctor the books for either financial gain or just to get high. Its hard to believe this was some misguided sense. Of altruism at play here.

 

[qwe]

Absolutely.
How dare they make a time limit?
The lies of someone in the police department unjustly ruined thousands of peoples' lives, and they are not adopting a very apologetic attitude.

how would one go about looking up the percentage of cases that had a chance to make that window, but A) did not try, B) tried and failed to change sentence, C) tried and succeeded?

in the very near future, we will be able to simply ask any computer to give this info

earl grey, hot...