That's a pretty bad way of looking at this, because it assumes that those people deserved to be behind bars to begin with, and ignores those that didn't.
How about, "It's unsettling and maddening, because we now realize we have a lot of people behind bars without the [proper] due process they deserved"?
>"We tell them, 'Listen, we know what you were doing before and we're watching you. And if you go back into the life, that Dookhan's not there anymore. So when you go [back] in on this charge, it's gonna stick,'" Davis says.
So, Ed Davis is sending officers to threaten people who, from a legal perspective, have not been convicted of a crime and have been erroneously jailed for years. Lovely. That's really icing on the cake.
I'm not happy about putting potential dealers back on the street, but we are a nation of laws, and these people will be freed by our courts. You can't have the police commissioner sending people to threaten them.
Not saying it's right, just how it is.
The DA is already covering up and defending the prosecutor's involvement, saying there is nothing wrong with prosecutors telling Dhookan what test results they needed to get their convictions, in clear violation of proper experimental procedures.
The forensic analysts are government employees. This means that they are almost always providing evidence that implicates the accused in the commission of a crime.
When a case goes to trial, the prosecution only includes evidence that proves guilt. At the very least, if it proves neither guilt nor innocence, they exclude it from their exhibits as irrelevant. Prosecutors don't even look for opportuinities to prove innocence. That's not their job. That's up to the defence. They deliberately engage in tunnel vision, biased only in favor of guilt. If they have evidence that exonerates the accused, they simply drop the case. They have to. But that outcome is deeply undesirable to the prosecution, because it opens the door to wrongful arrests, police harassment and other liabilities.
The disturbing part here is that she was rubber stamping evidence in favor of guilt.
What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?
If she were playing a role in that capacity, this would represent a far more serious problem than a single "rogue" chemist... She would merely be a patsy, a useful idiot, taking the fall for a much larger institutional debacle.
There certainly is a science of forensics, but I think that what happens in a crime lab relates to that science like plumbing relates to hydrodynamics: it's technology, not science.
Done right, this technology leads to results that are generally more reliable than eyewitnesses and other forms of circumstantial evidence. But it's a mistake to consider a technology infallible just because it's based on science. The Scientific Method cannot rule out accident, human error, and malice.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/22/annie-dookhan-fo...
The system is indeed in turmoil as it has to continue to review a massive number of cases. One of the worser case scenarios has since happened: a man who was freed because of possibly tainted evidence went on to allegedly murder someone
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/17/man-freed-becaus...
http://blogs.mprnews.org/cities/2013/08/st-paul-police-crime...
It seems those problems are now mostly cleaned up, and there is no particular implication here that a similar problem exists in the state crime lab, but it is a very good idea for citizens to press law enforcement administrators to make sure that crime lab procedures are validated and standardized and checked and rechecked.
When I started reading the skeptical literature a decade or so ago, I was astonished to discover that even fingerprint identification is not a well standardized or well validated procedure. And I used to believe that defense attorneys (I am a lawyer by training, although I don't practice law) were mostly willfully ignorant of science when they cast doubt on DNA evidence. But now I heartily approve the side-effect of our adversary system of justice, which when it works best should have the "other side" questioning every form of evidence and putting it to the test of rigorous validation. I think too often people trying to solve the problem of crime through the criminal justice system look for quick answers rather than exact answers.
AFTER EDIT: This background article link
http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/19/annie-dookhan-and-th...
from the NPR affiliate in Boston updates the story and is more current than the NPR link kindly submitted here (which is from March 2013 rather than May 2013).
Except that the incentives are still massively perverse. It doesn't take an organizational dynamics genius to know it's a safe bet these are not the only two state crime labs with this problem.
Another chemist found with no credentials - http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/11/26/mass-chemist-academi...
How fast did Dookhan work contrasted to case load: http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-t...
"The report shows that the Hinton lab leaned heavily on
Dookhan’s productivity. Supervisors lauded her work ethic
and assigned her an increasing share of tests."[0]
[0] http://badchemistry.wbur.org/2013/05/15/annie-dookhan-drug-t...
(There are limits to when they are given absolute immunity, generally limited to to advocative functions, but they are often hard to separate out)
This makes me think if maybe this wouldn't be a worthwhile test for the justice system in general. Hire actors to pose as criminals in the system where the person is not guilty, but where most evidence supports a guilty verdict with a few smaller pieces of evidence that prove innocent. With this we find out how many prosecutors take the case all the way to conviction by willingly choosing to ignore evidence suggesting guilt and which decide to drop the case because they believe the person to be innocent. This would be the equivalent of acceptance testing the justice system.
Of us (by majority, here) programming nerds, who wouldn't want to write better programs? Which consumer doesn't want better product safety? Which government could fail to want more truth-based justice?
But the USA is far from an evidence based society. It's a society where, in the interest of perpetuating religions, intellect is trumped by superstition and evidence by authority. As a side effect, justice is predicated on vengeance rather than reform.
A better question to address is how a single rogue person could do so much damage. This is institutional failure. Just going after this woman misses the big problem.
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 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.
How do you know? Getting rehired is routine for misbehaving cops.
Indeed. I wonder how hard it would be to have random testing of the chemists' work.
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.
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.
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...
But - she's not a rogue chemist! Oh no.
When chemists do lab tests, are they blind to the criminal circumstances themselves?
http://www.wbur.org/2013/11/29/dookhan-lawyer
What I find really awful, is that in many cases, jobs were lost, families destroyed, and sentences were stiffer because of false results by this chemist.
i'm not familiar with massachusetts, but i wouldn't be surprised if most of the relevant testing for the state was going through there.
You have to keep the lower orders scared to keep them loyal - otherwise they might start getting ideas above their station, mightn't they? It's like holding a wolf by the ears: release it, and we would all be in trouble.
The news loves to call her a "rogue chemist" to misdirect.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/11/kids-for-cash-j...
"'Kids for cash' judge gets 28 years in Pennsylvania bribery case"
BTW, it might also be a nice way to explain why punishments tend to be so much harsher than for example in Europe - in the US can being 'tough on crime' be profitable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fells_Acres_Day_Care_Center_pre...