Defendants in criminal matters are generally are entitled to have their own experts inspect any evidence proferred by the government. In drug cases, courts usually require that inspection and testing be done at the government’s facility and under government supervision, however (to take care of the possession and custody issues). State v. Cloutier, 302 A.2d 84 (Me. 1973) includes a good explanation.
You gotta admire that kind of dedication to fucking things up. Most inveterate fuck-ups satisfy themselves with just fucking up their own work irretrievably, but it takes something else to fuck up the whole company, all in a day’s work. Hats off.
Which is why the techs should have had NO CONTACT with officers or prosecutors; one courier officer should have brought the evidence to the sample tech. The sample tech should not have done any testing. No one should have had access to the lab other than the chemists who worked in the lab; even chemists from other labs in the building wouldn’t have access.
This isn’t just about chain of custody and preventing corruption as you suggest; those drugs are valuable and the chemists are not paid a lot.
Sample prep: she wasn’t doing acid digestions on soil for metals, though. She was working with cocaine or heroin cut with one or more common compounds. I don’t know, but the prep might be no more than a dilution. The samples were run on GC-MS, weren’t they? Much better resolution, easier prep. The drugs aren’t pharmaceuticals with all kinds of excipients for taste and compressing and delayed released.
She could prep one sample and run it five times, BUT she couldn’t be certain that one sample was positive. If she ran one negative sample for four others, she would have ended up with atypical and unexpected negative results, that would have raised a red flag sooner.
Roughly, yes. The amount of the sample is always noted, whether as “two four oz. jars” or “10.230 g”. The chemist takes a subsample and records the weight; the custodian reweighs the main sample when it is returned. The weights are probably not verified unless there is a problem.
The chemist only uses part of the subsample for the prep. Probably half to a tenth of the subsample is just waste. The weight of the waste may or may not be tracked; it should be.
All the weights - sample receipt, sample check out, subsample, analytical sample, subsample excess, sample return - should be on balances with print outs.
In most labs, the sample preps (dilutions, usually) are reserved until the instrument analysis is completed, in case there is any question about the result, and the instrument runs overnight. I don’t think it could work this way in this case. The instrument should run under supervision, and the sample preps sent to waste. Destruction of the sample should be verified by a second person.
They’re not cheap and I doubt most defendants could afford the tests and the best attorneys. Most probably pled out.
More at the link.
Good job, Ms. Dookhan. :rolleyes:
Hey, here’s an odd question. Is it possible that criminal Dookhan must forfeit the pay she received while she was busily ruining other people’s lives?
They should take all those suspended sentences and add the time to hers.
I wonder if she’ll warrant protective custody in prison. I can’t imagine that she’d be left alone by other inmates after pulling this kind of shit.
Doubt it but IIRC you can be personally sued for deliberate criminal acts and the defendant would not be able to hide behind city/county/employer like a simple error or oversight that caused a loss would.
I would imagine we will be seeing a giant class action suit against the lab, her, and the agencies that engaged that labs services.
The employee’s commission of a criminal act takes her outside the scope of her employment. If she is personally liable, the state won’t be, and unless all those people are really stupid they won’t be arguing that she is liable.
Well, in this case, it seems that the employer is also liable because they didn’t do a damn thing to supervise or even verify Dookhan’s work.
It seems impossible the lab didn’t have complacency in her crime considering how many more tests she claimed to have done than anyone else. Most likely they were back logged, and the work was getting “done” so the supervisors looked the other way to not make waves, but eventually the house of cards came crashing down.
I think they should bury her underneath the jail, what a horrible thing to do.
… and then pretend they were looking for her.
They should send her away forever and make sure she is in general population. Let THEM take care of her.
This.
I’d like to see a technical expert testify that she ran Auschwitz, and then the Allied high command hang her.
Afterward we will all admit it was an error and no harm had been intended.
Okay. This is the kind of crap that disgusts me as much as, if not more than, the stupity of the cretin in question.
Some people seem to feel they have to take their outrage up to eleven.
Personally, I think Annie Dookhan committed a serious crime and should be tried and given an extended prison sentence. But let’s keep it in perspective. She’s not Pol Pot.
When you have lost your job, your home, and your family, along with everything you ever worked for because of this idiot whose motivation was to make a name for herself at your personal expense and tragedy maybe you would think differantly
As I said, I’d fully support her being sent to prison for twenty years. But I still feel that there’s a limit to my outrage. What she did was really wrong - but it’s not as bad as being a serial killer.
How about not judging things on that scale? I mean, nothing is as bad as Hitler, right?
No but a serial life destroyer. As you would well understand, going to jail for any period of time of more than a couple months is going to seriously derail your life. If false convictions were obtained on her test results (there are other powdered drugs that a patient reconstitutes with water and injects). If she says its cocaine not the methylprednisone that a suspect has an Rx for, she has, purely for the sake of a better raise review, created an extremely expensive disaster for the suspect.
Toss this to a single mother registered nurse:
kids end up in foster care
loses her RN licence
home forecloses
family assumes she did this to herself
Employers shy away from people who have done time, even if they do get a full pardon later.
People talk about getting killed over the contents of your wallet
This lady intentionally destroys hundreds if not thousands of lives for an extra couple thousand a year in pay.
The price for her to send someone to jail falsely ends up being about $5-10.
I wonder if she’s just a sociopath, or maybe there is a tiger mom angle to the story… still hard to imagine what could possibly be going through her brain.