Yeah this technician is obviously a terrible criminal, but I doubt culpability lies with her alone. I’m seeing a culture of corruption as pretty likely, and will be sad in a way if she alone takes the fall. Obviously glad it got caught and that at the very least she will be punished.
I won’t be.
She cast doubt on the work of every ethical & hard-working analytical chemist, government employee, cop, and prosecutor. And do you think any of her co-workers are going to be the first pick for a decent job?
But that’s not the only issue. One cannot oversee every task by every worker and confirm every analysis. It is important to make the penalty for cheating severe enough to discourage it.
Every chemist in that lab was under the same pressure to “produce”. Two of them tried to stop her. Her supervisors and directors may have pressured her, but she is the one who falsified the result! Damn, but I just keep getting madder.
That being said, they better get a forensic document examiner on the sample custody log, to verify she was the ones that forge the initials. An external one.
Huh?
I’m old-school here. If your running a child sex-slave thing, you gotta give it 100%. Otherwise you are fooling nobody but yourself.
There’s another whole level involved here. If I’m reading the article correctly, Dookhan would sometimes falsify records using other testers’ identity. That means that it’s not just every test that Dookhan conducted that’s now worthless. A good lawyer can now make a case that any test conducted by Hinton State Laboratory Institute during the nine years Dookhan worked there might have been one of the ones she falsified even if it was some other employee on record for having done the test.
What a clusterfuck.
It was a reference to a comment on the source article, that " So much of this goes on everyday, cheating at work and stealing, asaulting, rape, keeping children as sex slaves."
I seriously doubt it’s prosecutorial misconduct if the prosecutor had no knowledge of the woman’s illegal activity at the lab. What it defitely is, though, is perjury, tampering with evidence, and forgery.
Oh, yeah, it is. There’s no telling how much money the state’s going to be out. This will be taxpayer money that could be better used on things such as, oh, perhaps, verifying someone’s qualifications before turning them lose on evidence!
On the one hand, you’re right, if a cop found someone with less then a gram of coke, that person would probably walk away thrilled to get a ticket for a few hundred dollars, a mandatory court date and a slap on the wrist.
But as a, errr, former college student, a gram is not an insignificant amount. Sure, a dealer will typically have quite a bit more then that and someone going out for a big weekend with some friends will have about three and half grams, but your typical college kid that might get picked up for some random offense that just happens to have some blow in his pocket is probably going to have about a half a gram. I wonder if he’s better off fighting in and hoping the results are inconclusive.
I wonder if cops have field testing kits for coke? A friend of mine got busted by the campus cops (which are county sheriffs with an on campus sub station) for smoking pot in her room. They testing pipes with field testing kids for residue right there in her room. I’m sure that stops people from claiming they have tobacco pipes shoved in their socks.
Oh, okay.
Don’t do that anymore, you scared me.
Even I don’t think falsifying lab data is as bad as child sex slaves. Close, though.
Really, the law is to protect people, including the defenseless, and she certainly undercut it, didn’t she?
My take is that it is not RO because of the serious and extensive policy implications of this case.
[quote=“Monty, post:13, topic:636298”]
It occurs to me that a number of people are culpable in this case:
[ol][li]The cretin who falsified the tests, of course.[/li][li]Her supervisors for not verifying her credentials in the first place.[/li][li]Her supervisors again for not monitoring her.[/li][li]Her supervisors yet again for simply accepting her astronomical workload completed as though that’s not a red flag.[/li][li]Her supervisors once more for not taking action when “some irregularities” were reported to them over the course of a couple of years.[/li][li]The courts for not verifying her credentials when certifying her as an expert witness.[/ol] [/li][/QUOTE]
7. The policy makers who set up a system with insufficient oversight. Cops should be sending known samples in to test the laboratory’s fidelity to fact. Why? Because:
Yes.
Be so kind as to mentally change lose to loose. In this case, though, maybe lose isn’t too much of a mistake as the lab tech in question certainly destroyed a lot of evidence.
“Dookhan was the most productive chemist in the lab, routinely testing more than 500 samples a month, while others tested 50 to 150.”
bricker probably has the answer to this but it seems to me that the crime is distribution of the actual drug. If I sell fake guns without a license and pretend theya re real guns, I don’t think I can go to jail for selling guns without a license (maybe for fraud but not the other stuff).
On the other hand she looks pretty cute.
Think about the mess for the cops, overburdened courts and prosecutors as well.
Of the 34,000 a good number were probably guilty, but, unless untainted evidence is still available, how will the convictions stand? Even with “good” samples, how much will the retesting cost?
Total nightmare.
Interestingly, I recently watched a Law & Order about this very thing. Actually, it was about fingerprint evidence, not drugs.
OK, it’s just a TV show, but L&O is pretty good about staying true to life. I am certainly willing to believe that samples are given to technicians with a little nudge and wink about giving the low life criminal scumbag a “fair test.”
I don’t understand how this could possibly have been anything other than a ridiculously large red flag.
At least in Florida, there is a separate crime addressing those scenarios: manufacture/sale/distribution of a counterfeit controlled substance (§831.31, Florida Statutes). For the purposes of non-prescription drugs, that means the container must identify the drugs as a controlled substance. This makes sense, when you think about it, because otherwise you might be subject to prosecution for innocently carrying a bag of flour or something.
So you can only get in trouble if your little baggie with talcum powder says the word cocaine on it?
I believe the crimelab in Nassau County NY had a huge quality control problem three or four years ago. I didn’t track it closely, but the matter still is in the courts and occasionally hits the news. It’s nice that Law and Order wrapped it up in a single hour episode.
I tend to agree that there are much bigger people mixed up in this. Here in MA, there is tremendous pressure to get drug convictions…Federal funding is contingent on getting more money for drug busts. So I think that this woman’s contacts with prosecutors and the police should be investigated.
Another unintended consequence of the “War On Drugs”-we now have a police/justice/prison system that depends upon more and more prosecutions for drug possession and distribution.
What a wonderful system!
Which is why she’ll probably get a slap on the wrist. :rolleyes:
You’re compeltely wrong about a gram being a large amount of street cocaine. Maybe in the 1980s. Nowadays cocaine at street level, at least in the UK, is maybe 20% purity max and people routinely buy a couple of grams for a night out.