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posted by martyb on Friday January 27 2017, @01:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the wheels-of-justice-grind-slowly dept.

The Free Thought Project reports

After years of injustice, thousands of people wrongfully convicted on drug charges in Massachusetts will finally have their convictions overturned. The ruling centers on drug lab tests that were falsified by a state-employed chemist named Annie Dookhan.

"The state's highest court on Wednesday [January 18] ordered prosecutors to drop a large portion of the more than 24,000 drug convictions affected by the misconduct of former state drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan, issuing an urgent call to resolve a scandal that has plagued the legal system since 2012."

Dookhan was imprisoned in 2013 after being charged with a suite of crimes relating to her years-long career of deceit, where she falsified tens of thousands of reports to jail innocent people. She would mark results as "positive" for illegal substances without actually testing them, even adding cocaine to samples when no cocaine was present.

At [Dookhan's] sentencing, Judge Carol S. Ball stated, "Innocent persons were incarcerated, guilty persons have been released to further endanger the public, millions and millions of public dollars are being expended to deal with the chaos Ms. Dookhan created, and the integrity of the criminal justice system has been shaken to the core."

[...] The Massachusetts high court ruled that each [of 24,391 defendants] had a right to a hearing, but the cost and logistics of doing so would be unfeasible.

"The court said district attorneys across the state must "exercise their prosecutorial discretion and reduce the number of relevant Dookhan defendants by moving to vacate and dismiss with prejudice all drug cases the district attorneys would not or could not reprosecute if a new trial were ordered." The cases affected by the ruling include people who pleaded guilty, were convicted, or admitted that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict them. By vacating the cases, the convictions would effectively be erased...
The court said defendants whose cases aren't dismissed should receive a notice that their cases had been affected by Dookhan's misconduct. Then, any indigent defendants would receive public counsel to explore requests to vacate their pleas or get new trials.

Related: Are Questionable Drug Tests Filling U.S. Prisons?


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @04:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @04:09PM (#459521)
    More than that, criminalising drugs just created a whole class of crime where previously there was none. The drug trade would not be so profitable and thus spawn the levels of crime that it does if it were as legal as booze or tobacco, which are arguably just as harmful and addictive as scheduled substances. If drugs were legal (with usage discouraged the way tobacco use is being discouraged these days), then there wouldn’t be most of the kinds of violent crime associated with drugs in the first place! If people want something they will always find ways to get it. Just as with alcohol prohibition in the past, drug prohibition is not going to work and is an absolute waste of money and lives. Let fools poison themselves with drugs if they want, the police and the threat of prison is not going to deter them one iota.
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