Chemist told Mass. police she 'messed up bad'

MyFoxBoston

Chemists who worked with the woman at the center of a Massachusetts state drug lab scandal told investigators they had concerns about her work for several years, but they either convinced themselves they were invalid or reported them to supervisors who failed to intervene.

Defense attorneys say they're troubled by the latest revelations in the case, contained in a lengthy state police report compiled for the attorney general's office, which is investigating, and obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Annie Dookhan admitted to investigators that she faked drug sample results for two to three years, forged signatures and skipped proper procedures, according to the report.

Attorney Rosemary Scapicchio, who represents several defendants whose samples Dookhan handled, called for federal officials to take over the probe.

"I can't imagine she could have been this corrupt without someone noticing," she said. "The investigation needs to go deeper than Annie Dookhan to get to the point of 'How did she get away with it?'"

State police say Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples submitted in the cases of about 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the Boston lab. She resigned in March amid an internal investigation by the Department of Public Health. A handful of defendants have already been released or had their sentences suspended, and the state has created a central office to examine cases Dookhan was involved with and figure out how to deal with them.

After state police took over the lab in July as part of a state budget directive, they said they discovered her violations were much more extensive than previously believed and went beyond sloppiness into deliberate evidence mishandling.

Supervisors suspended Dookhan's lab duties in June 2011, when she was caught forging a colleague's initials on paperwork after taking 90 drug samples from evidence, according to police. But she told police later she disobeyed orders and continued to access an evidence database and give law enforcement officials information on their cases.

On Aug. 30, Gov. Deval Patrick ordered state police to close the lab.

That day, a police lieutenant spoke with Dookhan to tell her she should get an attorney because she could face criminal charges.

Dookhan cried on the phone. She said she was involved in a long divorce from her husband, didn't have money and didn't know any lawyers.

Anne Goldbach from Committee for Public Counsel Services, which oversees legal representation for indigents, said the interviews included in the police report show the problems at the now-closed Hinton State Laboratory are more troubling than originally believed. She said it appears there was unsupervised access to the evidence office and safe.

Goldbach said because Dookhan was in charge of quality control equipment, other chemists could have gotten false test results without knowing it.

"It calls into question all the testing done by the lab," she said.

Attorney John T. Martin said Wednesday that he noticed a pattern of suspicious behavior from Dookhan while looking over his clients' cases.

He said in four cases, Dookhan determined the weight of the drug sample was just 1 gram above the amount needed for a more serious penalty even though police reports made the seizure seem smaller.

Concerns from Dookhan's colleagues prompted two supervisors to audit her work in 2010, but they just looked at paperwork and didn't retest drug samples.

Things started to unravel in spring 2011 with the forging incident. A colleague told police it was "almost like Dookhan wanted to get caught."

One lab supervisor told police later that he believed Dookhan had a mental breakdown.

Dookhan told investigators several times in an August interview that she knew she had done wrong.

"I screwed up big time," she said, according to the report from investigators for Attorney General Martha Coakley's office. "I messed up bad. It's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."

Authorities haven't filed charges against Dookhan or commented on her possible motives as their probe continues. Dookhan hasn't responded to repeated requests for comment.

In the Aug. 28 interview with two investigators at her home, Dookhan first denied doing anything wrong when she analyzed drug samples.

She changed her story after they confronted her with a retest of a suspected cocaine sample that came back negative after Dookhan identified it as the narcotic. Police also told her the number of samples she reported analyzing was too high and she couldn't have completed all the tests.

The report shows Dookhan then admitted identifying drug samples by looking at them instead of testing them, called dry labbing.

She said she tested about five out of 25 samples she got from evidence, after routinely getting a large number of samples from different cases out of the evidence room. She also told investigators that she contaminated samples a few times to get more work finished but that no one asked her to do anything improper.

"I intentionally turned a negative sample into a positive a few times," Dookhan said in a signed statement she gave police.

Dookhan also told investigators she routinely skirted proper procedures by looking up data for assistant district attorneys who called her directly.

Wrongly convicted inmates freed but get little help

USA Today
Brad Heath



Former inmates abruptly freed after spending up to six years in federal prison even though they were "legally innocent" are coming home with less help than the government typically provides the guilty after they are released.

Kim Harris was declared legally innocent and
released from prison with little more than a
bus ticket and the clothes she was wearing.

Most of them have received little more than a bus ticket. Federal law does not require the government to help them search for jobs or find basic necessities such as clothing and a place to live, assistance the guilty routinely receive during their post-prison supervision, partly to keep them from returning to crime.

Judges in North Carolina have so far ordered the government to release at least 17 inmates in one of the largest episodes in recent memory of federal prisoners having their convictions overturned. It follows a USA TODAY investigation this year that identified 60 people incarcerated for gun possession even though a court later determined that they had not committed a federal crime. The U.S. Justice Department had originally argued that they should remain in prison anyway, but reversed its position last month "in the interests of justice," according to court records.

• STORY: Woman fights to start over after conviction overturned

Neither the courts nor the Justice Department could estimate how many more prisoners might ultimately be released. Dozens of other inmates from North Carolina still are waiting for judges to decide whether their convictions should be thrown out, too.

"A lot of people would say they need help finding a job, but it's really they need help finding underwear," said Theresa Newman, who runs a wrongful convictions program at Duke University's law school. "At a minimum, the state and the federal government should help innocent people make the transition out."

The Justice Department would not comment on the record about help for the freed prisoners, saying instead that it is trying to make sure innocent prisoners are freed. Spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle said prosecutors "are working with the court, the probation office and the federal public defenders to ensure that these matters are addressed as effectively and quickly as possible."

At least 10 states provide services such as job training, health care and housing assistance to wrongfully convicted prisoners, according to an Innocence Project study. Most states and the federal government also provide some help in finding social services once someone serves his full prison sentence and is released on parole or supervision, though that help is not available to people whose convictions are overturned.

Compensation for the time they were locked up is even less likely. Federal law permits the government to pay people up to $50,000 for every year they were wrongly imprisoned, but the ex-prisoners -- almost all of whom could have been convicted of state crimes with lesser penalties -- are unlikely to meet its strict eligibility requirements.

"Exonarees fall into this hole where there really isn't a re-entry program for them. Their path to re-entry is often more difficult than someone who has legitimately served time," said Michele Berry, an Ohio lawyer who has handled wrongful conviction cases there. She said that means prisoners freed because they are innocent could have a harder time after they are released than guilty inmates who finish their sentences.

Brookston Cooke, freed in August from a federal prison in Pennsylvania, said he is struggling to find a job and get his license renewed. So far, he's had little success and no real help. "Right now that's my biggest challenge," he said. "Getting back to a normal life."

USA TODAY's investigation found that the Justice Department had done almost nothing to identify prisoners such as Cooke — many of whom did not know they were innocent — and had argued in court that they should remain imprisoned even though its lawyers agreed they had not committed a federal crime.

Federal law bans people from having a gun if they have previously been convicted of a crime that could have put them in prison for more than a year. In North Carolina, however, state law set the maximum punishment for a crime based on the prior record of whoever committed it, meaning two people who committed the same crime could face vastly different maximum sentences.

For years, federal courts there said that didn't matter. If someone with a long record could have gone to prison for more than a year, then all who had committed that crime are felons and cannot legally have a gun, the courts maintained. But last year, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals said judges had been getting the law wrong: Only people who could have faced more than a year in prison for their crimes qualify as felons. Its decision meant thousands of low-level offenders are not committing a federal crime by having a gun.

In addition to the 17 people who have been freed from prison so far, federal courts in North Carolina have overturned 12 more convictions. Most of those people had already served their prison sentences and were on supervised release by the time their convictions were thrown out.

Calls for crime lab to shut down amid more evidence doubts

MPR News
Madeleine Baran

The St. Paul crime lab is housed at the
St. Paul Police Department in St. Paul, Minn.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012.

As questions about the St. Paul police crime lab spread to fingerprint evidence, top defense attorneys say the lab needs to shut down entirely until it can prove that its work is reliable.

The lab already suspended drug testing in July after employees testified they did not follow any written procedures and relied on equipment that may have been clogged with cocaine. The allegations alarmed many in the criminal justice system and threw thousands of drug cases into question in Dakota, Washington, and Ramsey Counties. Police Chief Thomas Smith replaced the lab director and hired two out-of-state companies to conduct an independent review. The Dakota County hearing that exposed the problems in the lab is ongoing.

Despite the damaging allegations, most of the lab is still open. Every day, employees analyze fingerprints and process other evidence from crime scenes. Their findings are used to help convict people of a variety of crimes, including homicide, burglary and rape. That alarms defense attorneys who specialize in forensic science.

"I just can't imagine that there aren't serious, serious questions about what's going on in the other parts of the crime laboratory," said assistant state public defender Pam King. "I don't understand why they have that laboratory open at all."

FINGERPRINT WORK UNDER SCRUTINY

Defense attorneys say they will question any evidence that comes out of the lab. Already, at least one attorney is challenging the lab's fingerprint work. Back in May, two months before the drug testing problems came to light, Washington County public defender Rebecca Waxse asked a judge to decide whether the lab's fingerprint methods were reliable enough to be admitted as evidence in a burglary case.

Her written request contained an alarming accusation. "According to the St. Paul Crime Lab, they do not have standard operating procedures or formal protocols in place to govern the process of fingerprint analysis," she wrote.

Washington County Judge Gregory Galler denied the request. The case is still pending.

Waxse declined to discuss the fingerprint case in any detail or say whether she plans to file a new request based on the recent revelations about the lab's work.

"We need to do more investigation before we can make any true determinations about what we're going to do next," she said.

Video: Unanswered questions. Story continues below.



Washington County Criminal Division Chief Fred Fink, who is prosecuting the case, said he plans to investigate how the lab analyzes fingerprints. He declined to say what he will do if he uncovers any problems.

Washington County arguably has less at stake because, according to Fink, this is the only fingerprint case that was sent to the St. Paul lab. Fink said he's not even sure how it ended up there.

"That was an aberration," Fink said. "Historically, we've only sent drug cases to the St. Paul police lab. Somebody took a wrong turn."

Public defenders in other counties that rely more heavily on the St. Paul crime lab's fingerprint work said they will watch the challenge closely. They said prosecutors should be prepared for more challenges to the lab's fingerprint work.

Defense Attorney Says Undercover Cops Brought The Molotov Cocktails NOT The Defendants