Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday January 27 2017, @03:58PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday January 27 2017, @03:58PM (#459515)

    If your goal is to be viciously cruel to her, make sure she goes in before the women who she falsely convicted get out, and put them in the same population. They'll do far worse to her than anything you can come up with.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by rts008 on Friday January 27 2017, @11:18PM

    by rts008 (3001) on Friday January 27 2017, @11:18PM (#459753)

    While I agree that your solution feels good, I would rather not have the accused have to live with that kind of memory, and also would not want them to get further time to serve from that.

    Vengeance is easy, real justice is harder to do(and rarely 'fully satisfies' our feelings); at the end of the day, you have to decide 'who' and 'what' you want to be.

    Aye, that was a fine post regardless, but sometimes a little contemplation before action can be a good thing. :-)