Annie Dookhan sentenced

"Mass. chemist pleads guilty in drug lab scandal"

by

Bob Salsberg

November 22nd, 2013

boston.com

A former chemist at a Massachusetts drug lab who admitted faking test results in criminal cases pleaded guilty Friday and was sentenced to prison in a scandal that has jeopardized thousands of convictions.

Annie Dookhan changed her plea Friday in Suffolk Superior Court on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and tampering with evidence. She was sentenced to three to five years in prison, followed by two years’ probation.

The diminutive Dookhan showed no emotion during the hearing and did not address the court. She answered ‘‘guilty’’ and replied to a series of routine questions from the judge in a barely audible voice. She was led away in handcuffs and will begin serving her sentence immediately at the state women’s prison in Framingham.

Her attorney did not comment after the hearing, and her parents left without speaking to reporters.

Dookhan sent the state’s criminal justice system into a tailspin last year when state police shut down the state Department of Public Health lab she worked at after discovering the extent of her misconduct.

Prosecutors said Dookhan admitted ‘‘dry labbing,’’ or testing only a fraction of a batch of samples, then listing them all as positive for illegal drugs, to ‘‘improve her productivity and burnish her reputation.’’

Since the lab closed in August 2012, at least 1,100 criminal cases have been dismissed or not prosecuted because of tainted evidence or other fallout from the lab’s shutdown.

Anne Kaczmarek, the state’s prosecutor, asked Judge Carol Ball to impose a five- to seven-year sentence, citing the ‘‘egregious nature’’ of Dookhan’s actions. Ball had already said in a written memo that she would not sentence Dookhan to more than three to five years if she changed her plea.

Defense attorney Nicolas Gordon asked for a one-year sentence for his client, who was born in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago and has no previous criminal record.

Prosecutors said Dookhan’s actions had caused serious damage to the criminal justice system and cost the state millions of dollars to assess the damage and mitigate the effect on thousands of people charged with drug offenses during the nine years Dookhan worked at the lab. The court system has been flooded with motions for new trials filed by defendants in drug cases.

As of Friday, the state had spent a total of $8.5 million responding to the drug lab crisis, and another $8.6 million was authorized to be spent in the current fiscal year, according to Alex Zaroulis, spokeswoman for the state office of Administration and Finance. The Legislature has authorized as much as $30 million to cover costs incurred by the court system, prosecutors, public defenders and other state agencies.

‘‘This ends one chapter in this situation, but the story goes on for the thousands of individuals whose lives have been affected by the conduct of Annie Dookhan,’’ said Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender agency. ‘‘There are millions of dollars more that will be spent and a lot of time spent by a number of people in the criminal justice system trying to deal with the fallout of what happened in that lab.’’

Dookhan also pleaded guilty to falsely claiming that she held a master’s degree in chemistry. One of the conditions set for her probation was that she not use the false credentials when seeking employment after serving her sentence. She was also ordered to have mental health evaluations after leaving prison.


Number 2 in Massachusetts crime lab scandal

1,141 inmates could benefit from Annie Dookhan's mistakes

A few years in jail for a serious crime--Annie Dookhan

Number 2 in Massachusetts crime lab scandal

"Massachusetts crime lab scandal explodes"

by

Rebecca Trage

April 4th, 2013

Chemistry World

More than 300 convicted inmates have been released from Massachusetts state prisons in the US as a result of the September 2012 arrest and subsequent prosecution of Annie Dookhan, who worked in a Department of Public Health state laboratory and allegedly falsified evidence used in criminal cases. Now the scandal has grown with the prosecution of another Massachusetts state lab chemist for tampering with evidence and stealing drugs seized as evidence.

Sonja Farak, who worked at the Massachusetts State Crime Laboratory in Amherst, was charged with tampering with four drug samples stored at the lab on 1 April. In two of the cases, authorities allege that Farak mixed drug evidence samples with counterfeit drugs to hide her theft, and in the two other cases the samples could not be found. She was also charged with cocaine possession.

Attorney general Martha Coakley said that Farak – who was originally arrested in January, just months after the Dookhan scandal broke – ‘violated the trust placed in her’.

Question marks

‘Every case she handled now has a huge question mark around it,’ says Josh Lee, a criminal defense attorney and founding partner of law firm Ward, Lee and Coats. ‘Such an individual is not going to be concerned with good laboratory practices or proper evidence handling and testing,’ he adds.

If Farak was adulterating drug samples to cover up her theft, as she is accused of doing, then that could have influenced the weight of these samples and changed the crime that suspects were charged with. ‘Changing weights changes crimes and can, for example, elevate something from drug possession to drug trafficking,’ Lee notes.

Farak once worked at the same lab as Dookhan – the William Hinton State Lab in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. That lab has been closed since August, while the Amherst lab was closed in January, pending further investigations.

The fact that both Dookhan and Farak were employed at Hinton Lab indicates a ‘systemic problem’ with that particular facility, but the failings are broader, according to Lee. ‘It is a bigger problem than just Massachusetts, or just this particular lab,’ he tells Chemistry World.

Wild, wild west

A chemist should be completely independent and not forced to answer the commands of the head of a police department, Lee states. ‘They need to get these labs out from under the control of law enforcement,’ he says. In addition, he says that all work in forensics labs should be videotaped to prevent similar scandals, and even stop forensic scientists from cutting corners.

Lee says the field of forensic science is still a ‘wild, wild west’. He says the procedural safeguards in place in other scientific fields, like genetics, are lacking in forensics because it was created to serve law enforcement.

While Lee says it is relatively common to see errors and improper validation of tests at forensic labs, Michael O’Keefe, the president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, disagrees. ‘This is very rare,’ O’Keefe says. ‘I have been a prosecutor in Massachusetts for over 30 years, and have never seen this before.’ He notes, however, that the Dookhan and Farak cases do highlight the difference between Massachusetts state police crime labs and those under the state’s Department of Public Heath, like Hinton and Amherst once were. He describes the latter as lacking ‘rigorous forensic accreditation’.

The Massachusetts state police took over Hinton and Amherst labs in July 2011, and a spokesman suggests to Chemistry World that this change is why Dookhan and Farak were charged.

The repercussions of these two cases could be huge. The questions raised about Dookhan’s work led to the review of 534 cases. The Republican, a Massachusetts newspaper, reports that lawyers for 11 men serving drug crime sentences have already petitioned a judge for their temporary release because of Farak’s involvement in their cases.


1,141 inmates could benefit from Annie Dookhan's mistakes

1,141 inmates could benefit from Annie Dookhan's mistakes

"Chemist in lab scandal told investigators: ‘I messed up bad’"

by

Brian Ballou and Andrea Estes

September 26th, 2012

boston.com

The former state chemist at the heart of the state drug lab scandal admitted to investigators that she improperly removed evidence from storage, forged colleagues’ signatures, and didn’t perform proper tests on drugs for “two or three years,” according to a copy of a State Police report obtained by the Globe.

Annie Dookhan, whose misconduct may have jeopardized evidence in about 34,000 drug cases, also admitted that she recorded drug tests as positive when they were negative “a few times” and sometimes tested only a small sample of the drug batch that she was supposed to analyze.

“I messed up. I messed up bad. It’s my fault,” she told the state troopers who visited her Franklin home on Aug. 28, insisting that she acted alone. “I don’t want the lab to get in trouble.”

However, the troopers’ interviews with other chemists in the lab make clear that Dookhan’s colleagues had concerns about her unusually large caseload and lab habits and raised them with supervisors. But the supervisors took little action even when they learned that she had forged other chemists’ initials on some drug samples.

The police report marks the first time that the public has heard from Dookhan in her own words. What emerges is a picture of a woman who may have suffered an emotional breakdown and who had been under suspicion for cutting corners in the lab for at least two years. When the troopers confronted her with the evidence of wrongdoing, Dookhan confessed again and again.

At one point, when troopers suggested Dookhan should speak to her husband about getting a lawyer, Dookhan said that she was going through serious marital problems and had no money to hire one.

After the interview, State Police were so concerned about Dookhan’s state of mind that they called to make sure she was not suicidal, according to the report.

Detective Lieutenant Robert Irwin, a trooper assigned to Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office, asked Dookhan if she ever thought “bad thoughts.”

“She said that the harm she was causing people would go through her mind every now and then,” Irwin wrote in his report. “I then asked her if she had thought of harming herself. She said no.”

The state lab in Jamaica Plain was closed in August after State Police discovered the potential magnitude of Dookhan’s actions. As a state chemist for nine years, Dookhan handled 60,000 drug samples and sometimes provided expert testimony in court.

So far, Dookhan has not been charged with any crime. Coakley’s office is trying to determine whether there was any criminal wrongdoing by Dookhan or others.

Already, at least 20 drug defendants have been freed, had their bail reduced, or had their sentences suspended because the evidence in their cases was analyzed by Dookhan. And many more are likely to be freed: Governor Deval Patrick’s investigators have identified 1,141 inmates in state prisons or county jails in cases based on evidence handled by Dookhan.

Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey has called the Dookhan case “one of the largest criminal snafus in the history of the Commonwealth.”

But until now, Dookhan, the 34-year-old-mother at the heart of the debacle, has not been heard from, declining comment and remaining largely out of public view. In fact, she made it clear to Irwin that she didn’t understand why the media was interested in her.