Free Republic

How to Fix a Drug Scandal” revisits the double whammy Massachusetts’ criminal courts faced when its two most prominent drug-testing labs were shut down and literally thousands of convictions had to subsequently be tossed. What began in January 2013 as one lab chemist’s drug bust expanded into a shocking case of the Attorney General’s Office being charged with knowingly withholding key evidence from the trial judge. Ultimately over 35,000 convictions were overturned. In 2012 Boston’s Hinton Drug Lab chemist Annie Dookhan met the demands of her job by simply not testing drug samples and saying she did. She hoped to...

Annie Dookhan, the former state chemist at the center of a lab scandal which could overturn hundreds of drug convictions, was arrested by state police this morning. Dookhan, 34, was brought out of her Franklin home in handcuffs and put into an unmarked cruiser shortly before noon. She did not speak and kept her head down as she was led down her walkway in front of reporters. Dookhan is charged with two counts of obstruction of justice and falsely pretending to hold a degree from a college or university. She will be arraigned at Boston Municipal Court this afternoon. Dookhan,...

Massachusetts is reeling from a massive scandal in its state crime lab. Details are still emerging about what officials call a "rogue chemist" who may have mishandled evidence in as many as 40,000 cases over 10 years. It could mean the unraveling of countless convictions. Even lawyers prone to hyperbole may not be overstating it when they call the scandal a catastrophic failure and unmitigated disaster. "Any person who's been convicted of a drug crime in the last several years whose drugs were tested at the lab was very potentially a victim of a very substantial miscarriage of justice," says...

The chemist at the center of a scandal that shut down a state crime lab was involved in testing more than 50,000 drug samples, raising the possibility of an enormous number of legal challenges from people convicted or awaiting trial.

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 indictment 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...