Annie Dookhan wanted to be a star. After all, the days of crime lab chemists working in dark back rooms, doing dirty, boring jobs, gave way to CSI coolness. And because she followed her passion, a whole lot of people are going to walk out of jail. Many innocent. Some guilty. It won’t be possible to tell which is which, thanks to Annie.
What Annie did at the Massachusetts state crime lab makes the point better than any thoroughly written, thoughtfully researched, report by the National Institutes of Science. Annie makes clear that no science, not even real science, is any better than the human who does it. From HuffPo :
Chemist Annie Dookhan was “Superwoman,” a colleague at a Massachusetts state crime lab used to joke. She seemed unstoppable in her quest to please prosecutors, police and her bosses, testing two to three times more drug samples than anyone else, working through lunch and not bothering to put in for overtime.“The kind of person, if you owned your own business, you would want to hire her,” a supervisor would later tell police.
Aside from faking her credentials, she faked the tests. Some she just didn’t bother with, some she “dry labbed,” which apparently means she just looked at a substance and decided it was narcotics. She made up weights, didn’t calibrate equipment, and worst of all, sprinkled real drugs onto substances when there were no drugs to be had. A star.
The litany of wrongs is comical, not because they should make anyone laugh but because they were so laughable.
As early as 2008, a supervisor noticed Dookhan’s testing numbers were high. He spoke to her superior, but nothing happened. In 2009, the supervisor took his concerns to another superior, saying he never saw Dookhan in front of a microscope.
In 2010, a supervisor did an audit of Dookhan’s paperwork but didn’t retest any of her samples. The audit found nothing wrong. The same year, a fellow chemist found seven instances where Dookhan incorrectly identified a drug sample as a certain narcotic when it was something else. He told himself it was an honest mistake.
In one incident detailed by state police, a lab employee witnessed Dookhan weighing drug samples without doing a balance check on her scale.
Dookhan was handling a staggering number of samples. An average chemist could test 50 to 150 samples a month, but Dookhan was doing more than 500, according to monthly reports, a lab employee told police later.
And her supervisors knew it. Her co-workers knew it. They may have come up with excuses why her mistakes may not have been deliberate, but they knew it all along. They just shut their eyes tight and went on with their business, making sure defendants were convicted.
People are funny. When they see something that stinks, but stinks in a way that produces results they like, they play whatever mental games they have to in order to rationalize the problem away. They believe in the results, which reminds us again of why crime labs have become such a cesspool for error. They consider themselves an adjunct of the prosecution, not a neutral agency whose only purpose is to perform scientific testing. They are part of the machinery of conviction, and are not only expected to do their part, but want to do their part. They want to be proud of the fact that their work puts bad guys away.
The law adores science. Prosecutors and judges may not really understand much about it, which is how we ended up as lawyers rather than doctors, but we embrace the notion of science because it brings a sense of precision and exactitude to our otherwise fuzzy world. It’s an issue precluder, conclusively determining facts as facts and thus removing them from the mix of variables that could be in doubt.
Wrap up a ham sandwich in scientific mumbo-jumbo and we’ll eat it up. For years, lawyers stipped to the chemists findings, even before the prosecution was required to put the warm body on the stand, because there wasn’t much to do with them. They would recite all the tests they did and how that proved a substance was evil. It was all very perfunctory and official sounding. It’s not like you would get Annie on the stand to testify that she “dry labbed” the sample and never actually did the tests at all.
And this is with the good forensic science, the real stuff. Not the bite marks, the duct tape, bullets, fingerprints or even Cokie, the beloved drug dog. This is the stuff, like DNA, which has an actual scientific basis. But none of it is actual science unless it’s performed properly, subject to scientific method, by people who don’t lie and contort, contaminate samples and “sprinkle” when the sample comes up empty.
There will be no shortage of hand-wringing over the disaster Annie has caused. Now, despite the fact that it could have been nipped in the bud, they have over 60,000 samples she tested, plus however many she signed off on forging other chemists initials which basically puts every test every done at risk, they have a problem.
People will walk, as well they should. Good people and bad people alike will walk. Whether this will make any prosecutor, judge or juror think twice about the efficacy of scientific, even good science, in that anything that involves the variable of a human being is never as perfect as it seems. After all, this isn’t the first crime lab fiasco, and yet the gatekeepers continue to compartmentalize the disasters as isolated instances, one after another.
That there was an Annie Dookhan working in the Massachusetts crime lab can be chalked up to one bad apple. That no one figured out that she was doing the dirty when her supervisor never saw her in front of a microscope, however, can’t. That there were doubts for years and no one ever mentioned it, as in Brady for example, while lawyers faced irrefutable scientific proof in court that foreclosed any further hard thought about the scientific evidence, there was a whole system at work covering up for Annie’s 500 samples per month output of eyeballing white powder and proclaiming it cocaine, all to please the police and be a laboring oar in their vital mission to convict.
Yet the law, and the courts, still love science. It’s one less thing to fight about.
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It appears that Annie was very passionate about finding evidence that crimes had been committed.
Very passionate indeed.
It took four years to figure out she was cheating? Pffft, that’s hardly enough time for her to do any kind of REAL damage.
It took three or four times that long to figure out the OKC crime lab had a problem with Joyce Gilchrist. Mind you, it took the defense bar about nineteen seconds, but who listens to the defense bar?
Google Joyce if you want a good read.
I remember Joyce Gilchrist well. Eleven human beings were executed beause of her incredible facility with DNA, finding matches when no one else could.
Ever notice how there are old stories that rear their ugly heads, and yet we never seem to learn anything from them?
Oklahoma County was an interesting place while Bob Macy was DA. There was a reason we referred to the county line as the “Macy Dicks ‘Em Line”. Joyce was actually one of the smaller problems. There were a large number of his line prosecutors who thought, and probably still think, that Brady is nothing more than a Bunch.
But one of his former prosecutors is about to go down, down, down. The Bar Association traditionally gives prosecutors a pass on nearly everything, but when the 10th Circuit issues a published opinion that says a prosecutor lied, under oath, to a federal judge during a capital habeas hearing it’s hard to let that one go by without a serious hand-slapping.
Is there any testing of any of these labs?
1) The analysts could be given samples (in the regular manner) which are actually known, but the lab person would be unaware?
2) Ideally, the supervisor would not know; some kind of double blind test would be best.
This sort of testing if done properly would cut down on a lot of fraud.
Per the NIS report, there are organizations which certify these labs. The organizations were created by and owned by law enforcement for the sole purpose of certifying their own labs. Same with the forensic science literature, “scholarly” periodicals from organizations created by and owned by law enforcement for the sole purpose of creating “scholarly” publication of forensic science for law enforcement. Or in other words, it’s a big circle jerk.
For every defendant convicted under the chemist’s unreliable opinions, there was a defense attorney who failed to defend his client ethically. That’s a lot of unethical attorneys, and it’s a more serious problem that mere prosecutorial misconduct.
Thanks for the non-sequitur du jour. Logic is so 90’s.
The evidence of whether or not this woman actually did anything wrong seems to be inconsistent. On the one hand, she confessed, on the other, Martha Coakley says she’s guilty…
Stopped clock; blind squirrel. It happens.
There is a similar story out of Illinois this past week, a crimelab worker for the State Police has been found to have been doing similar stunts with evidence and tests.
Hey, at least she wasn’t eating the evidence, the way they do in San Francisco…
I bet there’s a whole lot more of that going on than anyone knows.
This is goddamn appalling. It does make me wonder something, though. In the Canadian system, a sample of the suspect substance is sent to a government lab for testing, the remainder being preserved as an exhibit for trial. Prosecution exhibits are subject to examination by defense counsel upon request. If a defendant insists that the substance seized from them is not what the government expert says it is, they have the right to have a sample examined by their own expert. Is this not how the American system works?
I find it exceptionally hard to believe that in over a thousand cases which resulted in imprisonment, not one defendant was able to convince their lawyer to have the evidence examined, or to challenge the examination conducted on behalf of the prosecution.
The trial system, as flawed as it is, is supposed to allow the accused to challenge the evidence of the prosecution, why did that not happen in at least some of these cases? If a defense lawyer had been successful in showing that the analysis performed by this woman was false, would that not have tipped off other counsel? One of the first questions that a crown expert may expect to be asked on the stand is “have you ever made a mistake when analyzing [x]?”
A defendant can move to have drugs examined, but having drugs examined costs money (which few can afford) and to prevail in the motion requires a justification beyond denial that it’s drugs.
While the failures here include sprinkling narcotics into non-narcotics samples, most have to do with drugs that were never actually tested. Regardless of whether they were or weren’t drugs (and they may have well been drugs in the vast majority of cases), the chemist doesn’t get to lie and fake the tests.