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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:47PM (#459629)

    A system is less important that the system's users. If large portions of the population are pouring drugs into themselves, in order to briefly escape from the system, it suggests that the system is not fit for purpose. You, on the other hand, conclude that these people are not fit for purpose.

    Do you know what else is a drain on your precious system? Drug prohibition: overburdened courts, filled to capacity prisons, militarized law enforcement.

    Let's not forget the wasted capacity of these laboratory facilities that could be doing useful research or medical screenings (for diagnosis and treatment rather than evidence for the prosecution).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @08:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @08:38PM (#459700)

    filled to capacity prisons, militarized law enforcement

    Those are features, not bugs to the authoritarian mindset. Then if the courts are overburdened, the authoritarian's next flourish of logic is to determine that courts should be abolished since they just get in the way.

    Makes my skin crawl. I'd rather be shot dead than live somewhere like that.