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.

Romney loses to Paul in his own state

The Examiner
Jeffrey Phelps

Mitt Romney could not even beat
Ron Paul in his home state of Mass.
Paul scored more than half of all
the state's delegates over the weekend.

What may be the most embarrassing moment yet for Mitt Romney, during the race for the 2012 Republican Nomination, happened over the weekend in the very state in which he is the former Governor and calls home.

Ron Paul won.

Even though it was reported Sunday that Mitt Romney himself was apparently responsible for picking the slate of Massachusetts State Delegates he was hoping everyone would vote for, his delegates.
Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, that didn't happen.

Instead, over half of the delegates he was hoping people would vote for never made it, including notable State Republicans such as the House Minority Leader and other state politicians who even wanted to remain nameless.

Romney lost so badly in his home state that Ron Paul supporters were even voted in as the majority of the Alternate-Delegates, spiting hopefuls that included a popular 2010 gubernatorial candidate and a prominent Sheriff.

Even worse for the old Republican establishment is that all these new Mass. State Delegates for Paul will now get to vote for the State Party Chair, the Party Platform, and the VP of their choice. Bet your bottom dollar they will all most likely be Ron Paul Delegates, supporters and ideals.

Massachusetts, however isn't the only state that has seen this explosion for Ron Paul support.

As the race has developed many states around the country have ultimately gone for Paul, much in the same way. Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, Louisiana and Alaska thus far have seen similar results play out there, and many more states are expected to follow suit.

This overwhelming show of support for Ron Paul is also expected to dominate Nevada's State Convention on May 5th.

Victory for liberty and the right to videotape public officials

Boston
Carol Rose

Hear ye, hear ye!!

Tyrisha Greene received criminal charges for videotaping
the Massachusetts police beating of Melvin Jones III (above).

The First Circuit Court of Appeals--the highest federal court for New England just below the U.S. Supreme Court--last Friday handed down a ground-breaking decision defending our right to videotape the police and other public officials as they engage in their official duties--including when, as in this case, the cops appear to be beating a man on the Boston Common.

As I described in my June 8 "On Liberty" blog, the case involved Simon Glik, a passerby on the Boston Common who pulled out his cell phone video camera when he saw the Boston police punching a man as bystanders shouted, "You're hurting him."

Rather than walk away, Simon pulled out his cell phone. Standing 10 feet away, he videotaped the incident. Although he never interfered with the officers' actions, the police arrested Simon--handcuffing him and seizing his phone. They charged him with violating a wiretap statute that prohibits secret recording (although police admit that they were aware Simon was not acting secretly), aiding the escape of a prisoner, and disturbing the peace.

A court subsequently threw out all criminal charges against Simon as lacking merit. But the effort to intimidate him was clear.

So Simon and the ACLU filed a civil rights suit to ensure that other innocent people won't be similarly arrested for doing what most people would consider a civic duty--documenting public instances of police misconduct.

On Friday, the First Circuit agreed. In a decision that reads like an ode to the First Amendment as key to both liberty and democracy, the court wrote:

"The filming of government officials engaged in their duties in a public place, including police officers performing their responsibilities, fits comfortably within these principles [of protected First Amendment activity]. Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting the free discussion of governmental affairs."

Attorneys for the city argued that police should have been immune from a civil rights lawsuits in this case because, they asserted, the law is unclear as to whether there is a "constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public".

Making the law crystal clear, the Court responded: "Basic First Amendment principles, along with case law from this and other circuits, answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative."
The Court further stated that such protections should have been clear to the police all along, noting that the right to videotape police carrying out their duties in a public forum is "fundamental and virtually self-evident", particularly on the Boston Common--the "apotheosis of a public forum."

The Court also made it clear that the right to videotape public officials isn't limited to the press. Rather, the Court noted, "the public's right of access to information is coextensive with that of the press."
"Moreover, changes in technology and society have made the lines between private citizen and journalist exceedingly difficult to draw," the Court continued. "The proliferation of electronic devices with video-recording capability means that many of our images of current events come from bystanders with a ready cell phone or digital camera rather than a traditional film crew, and news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper. Such developments make clear why the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status."

The Court also acknowledged the need for balance between holding public officials "accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably."

Nonetheless, the court concluded, "In our society, police officers are expected to endure significant burdens caused by citizens' exercise of their First Amendment right."

"[T]hough not unqualified, a citizen's right to film government officials, including law enforcement officers, in the discharge of their duties in a public space is a basic, vital, and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment."
Huzzah!