How can they even fix this? She admits to contaminating the samples.
IMO, it’s better not to do the tests at all than to have them tested badly or even worse, fraudulently. At least false results wouldn’t send innocent folks to prison.
I am extremely skeptical of this – do you have a cite for it? Someone trying to sell sugar or flour as coke is IMO committing fraud at the least, but I can’t imagine they could be convicted of, say, “possession with intent to sell”, because they didn’t possess.
Now, if you try to buy coke in some kind of sting where there is no coke, that’s a whole different proposition.
That’s going to be tough depending on how she tainted the negative samples. That is, if she took some coke out of a baggie marked #332XDL, put it in a vial, it came back negative so she tossed it, got some more, added some coke to the vial and retested…that’s one thing, but if the first trial came back negative so she added some coke to the baggie and ran a new test, the original evidence is tainted and re-examining it isn’t going to help.
It’s also going to depend on what kind of audit trail the lab has. Is there some kind of system in place for seeing how often a single sample was tested and retested? Are vials numbered from the factory and tracked inside the lab? IOW can they go back and find out how many times she had a negative sample that magically turned into a positive sample.
I’m also curious about the “didn’t mean to hurt anyone” comment. I mean, I get, “just trying to get the work done”. That makes sense where she was skipping the testing and just saying ‘yup coke, sure, that looks like china white’. Probably sent a lot of people to prison that way (and those ones can probably be retested and let out). But tainting a sample and turning it positive just takes more time…unless…she had to do that to make it jive with an earlier result she gave. But I’d be surprised if she had enough background in the case to know what the answer should be. You’d think they’d just be given some evidence with an evidence number and a note that says “Hey, what is this stuff” to kind of blind them to any kind of bias. Maybe they’d be given other notes that would help them identify it, but not things like “A 24 year old with two prior drug convictions was caught selling this to a 15 year old, he claims it’s just baking soda, can you test it”
She didn’t work with urine and blood samples. From what I can tell, she tested confiscated narcotics.
It’s not RO; it’s reasonable outrage. She faces a maximum of 20 years even though she’s put innocent people away for far longer, just because she’s a lazy fuck.
California Health and Safety Code SECTION 109525-109555
109525. This chapter shall be known as the “California Imitation
Controlled Substances Act.”
California Health and Safety Code SECTION 109575-109590
Offenses and Penalties
In California, it’s a misdemeanor. Don’t know about other states or at the federal level.
ETA: So that would mean it would be possible for a fraudulent positive would send someone to jail for a much longer time.
As someone who objects to “drug laws” to a large degree, I see a bright spot here:
And some of those may have also ended up being deported. This week I got a message on an immigration law listserve I belong to from an organization looking for people who ended up in deportation proceedings based on drug convictions that may have had a connection to this lab. It’s going to be a fucking mess to undo the immigration consequences.
Or you’re just doing that to one fifth of the samples assigned to you and then declaring all of those assigned samples to be positive. That’s quite the time-saver she found!
From what I gathered reading more on the story, the tester must test for what the thing is suspected of containing. Evidently (sorry about that pun), testing for one thing might make the sample impossible to be tested for another thing.
This. Exactly. In fact, most of those people currently in jail will (at the very least) get a mistrial and a likely release from jail until they can be retried. That’s over 1000 cases. It’s prosecutorial misconduct (regardless of whether the prosecutors themselves knew about it or not), and that’s like an instant get out of jail card in most cases.
I cannot even imagine how much money her actions are going to cost the state, they’re having to set up special courts with Judges working overtime to handle the sudden massive backlog.
Even if the evidence still remains, ANYTHING that has her lab or her signature on the chain of custody (that would be the drugs, btw) is right out the window. No choice really.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
She was doing both (tainting samples and just not testing samples and slapping a positive on them). WRT tainting samples, HOW she tainted them will come into play I’m sure. When she didn’t test them, I wonder if she just said “yup that’s a +” or if she took all the required testing stuff and destroyed it to make sure that serial numbers and supply reorders kept up with the amount of testing she claimed to be doing.
That’s probably true not only as an evidence gathering thing, but it probably saves the lab (and county) money but it still makes me wonder how changing a - to a + wouldn’t hurt anyone. I wonder if, in her head, anyone that’s made it that deep into the justice system is probably guilty and if they were in possession of something that looked like drugs, it might as well BE drugs. In her head, she was probably just helping the prosecutor along when she changed samples.
As for not testing things, and I haven’t read anything, I wonder how often it happened that she was given, say, 100 samples from the same bust and told to test all of them, so she just tested 1 or 2 and since they all looked the same, what are the chances that there’s a 90 bags of coke in someones bedroom and 10 bags of powdered sugar. And, again, in her mind, what difference did it make.
OTOH, what would happen if she tested 2 bags, tagged them all as coke when 50 of them were heroin or meth or ecstasy in powdered form and she missed taking down a huge drug ring?
Wow is right. This is a crazy story. A couple of things:
*I completely agree that her supervisors should be disciplined for not investigating further when she was “checking” so many more samples than her coworkers - the article states that she averaged 500 samples a month when everyone else did 50-150.
- The (current) latest comment on the article is hilarious: “So much of this goes on everyday, cheating at work and stealing, asaulting, rape, keeping children as sex slaves.” Um… bit of a jump there?
That’s crazy talk. Who keeps their child sex slave at work?
YES! Not to mention a civil suit against the lab.
Cite that it is not???
[serious]Seriously, could an attorney defending someone on a drug charge totally unrelated to this situation present to the jury the specifics of this situation as evidence that there always should exist reasonable doubt where labs are concerned?[/serious]
I rest my case. We can discuss this in chambers later.
I have a bit of experience in labs, but not in criminal evidence labs.
Most test sample preps required around a gram or so, for results in the parts per thousand or percent range; I don’t imagine any case going to trial would involve less than that.
Most accredited labs have to run test samples from the accreditation agency quarterly or so, but they are to verify the results within a required range. They are not “blind” test samples. However, the last accredited lab I worked in put “blind” test samples through the system.
Every test analyzed on an instrument (as opposed to by wet chemistry) should be traceable - the instrument keeps a record of every run, with the sample name and the analyst. One can easily mislabel a run, but any negative result should still show up. The analyst should not have “extra” of a known positive sample to run as another sample.
Any sample analyzed for use in a court case must have a clear chain of custody, so every one who handles the sample can be traced. Most have custody seals applied as soon as they are taken.
What I find absolutely astonishing is that
she falsified paperwork after a discrepancy that indicated results may have been falsified was noted.
Falsifying records is bad enough, but trying to do so after the problem had been detected is just mind-boggling stupid, or indicative of an incredibly corrupt culture. I cannot understand how she even had access to the log book if her name were on the analyses for any of those 90 samples.
I know that lab techs are pushed constantly to increase their “productivity”.
I’m pretty sure we are talking about urine samples here…
From the linked article in the OP.
[QUOTE]
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.
Sounds like she was testing the drug itself.
And meanwhile, the system will become even more backlogged.
This woman and her supervisors infuriate me. If she was (supposedly) doing over 300% more than her co-workers were, that should have set off alarms. And her supervisors should have been watching her, to see how she was getting this accomplished. Maybe they were too busy with their child sex slaves to do so.