Worse:

>"We tell them, 'Listen, we know what you were doing before and we're watching you. And if you go back into the life, that Dookhan's not there anymore. So when you go [back] in on this charge, it's gonna stick,'" Davis says.

So, Ed Davis is sending officers to threaten people who, from a legal perspective, have not been convicted of a crime and have been erroneously jailed for years. Lovely. That's really icing on the cake.

I'm not happy about putting potential dealers back on the street, but we are a nation of laws, and these people will be freed by our courts. You can't have the police commissioner sending people to threaten them.

At the risk of painting with a very wide brush, DAs aren't incentivized to make sure people get due process. They are incentivized to convict as many people as possible. In multiple cases here in Texas where later DNA evidence overturned rape and murder charges, the DA argued right up until the moment of reversal that they believed totally in the guilt of the accused. They have to, it's their job and to have public doubt in the people they are trying will only result in them looking for a new job pretty quickly.

Not saying it's right, just how it is.

That is not how the police work nor think about cases, though. One of the many reasons I dislike them.

All suspects a guilty, period. Or else they wouldn't be suspects, now would they?

or both?

I'd say that imprisoning innocent people was already the worst case scenario.

> It seems those problems are now mostly cleaned up, and there is no particular implication here that a similar problem exists in the state crime lab

Except that the incentives are still massively perverse. It doesn't take an organizational dynamics genius to know it's a safe bet these are not the only two state crime labs with this problem.

Outside of political fallout, nothing will happen to the prosecutors. Nobody will charge them criminally, and civilly, prosecutors have absolute immunity in most cases, sadly.

(There are limits to when they are given absolute immunity, generally limited to to advocative functions, but they are often hard to separate out)

The problem is no one, especially not the Justice or Police System, want to show all the flaws that they have when it's so easy to cover for themselves currently.

I like your idea! In an evidence based society, it might be picked up and spread like wildfire.

Of us (by majority, here) programming nerds, who wouldn't want to write better programs? Which consumer doesn't want better product safety? Which government could fail to want more truth-based justice?

But the USA is far from an evidence based society. It's a society where, in the interest of perpetuating religions, intellect is trumped by superstition and evidence by authority. As a side effect, justice is predicated on vengeance rather than reform.

Are they elected?

She did a lot more tests than her coworkers, and it was a big lab. She also had close ties to prosecutors, which has unsettling implications.

This is a good question. I think most cities have one lab. They probably have multiple analysts in the lab, but I think it's still a pretty high percentage of the total cases.

"Putting drug dealers in jail", to only very loosely paraphrase her words. She was working with the prosecutors.

The news loves to call her a "rogue chemist" to misdirect.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in...

I can only speculate about her motives. But the system that is set in such a way that prisons can be privately owned and prisoners exploited for personal gain is a recipe for disaster. Stakeholders making profit from prisoners have a strong incentive to somehow ensure that as many people as possible get sent to prison for as long as possible no matter whether they are guilty or not. Some might decide to achieve this by bribing someone in the chain of obtaining/evaluating evidence. In a penal system like this it's just a matter of time before something like this happens.

BTW, it might also be a nice way to explain why punishments tend to be so much harsher than for example in Europe - in the US can being 'tough on crime' be profitable.

Care to cite anything about this? From a Biochemist's perspective, when done properly, chemical analysis is extremely accurate and provides a great deal of information.

If you read some of the other articles in this thread, there is specific mention of a recent supreme court case ruling in 2009, "Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts", where it was found that the accused are entitled to face expert witnesses as their accusers. This means forensic analysts are forced to appear in court more often.

The forensic analysts are government employees. This means that they are almost always providing evidence that implicates the accused in the commission of a crime.

When a case goes to trial, the prosecution only includes evidence that proves guilt. At the very least, if it proves neither guilt nor innocence, they exclude it from their exhibits as irrelevant. Prosecutors don't even look for opportuinities to prove innocence. That's not their job. That's up to the defence. They deliberately engage in tunnel vision, biased only in favor of guilt. If they have evidence that exonerates the accused, they simply drop the case. They have to. But that outcome is deeply undesirable to the prosecution, because it opens the door to wrongful arrests, police harassment and other liabilities.

The disturbing part here is that she was rubber stamping evidence in favor of guilt.

What if her behavior correlates to the DEA's program of parallel construction using inadmissible evidense collected by the NSA and shared with the DEA, thus provoking a premature conclusion of guilt, where the court case was then reversed engineered to align with the illicit intelligence?

If she were playing a role in that capacity, this would represent a far more serious problem than a single "rogue" chemist... She would merely be a patsy, a useful idiot, taking the fall for a much larger institutional debacle.

And they should also get some known-innocent control samples. (Of course, properly blinded.)

If she were sentenced 1 day's prison time for each of the occurrences, it would add up to ~40,000 days in prison, or ~109 years.

I don't disagree that there's an institutional failure, and that perhaps there are others to blame, but she has negligently affected countless lives by disregarding her oaths to uphold the law, and I believe that sort of thing should carry more penalty, not less. Also, we really, really need to start making our civil servants accountable to flagrant violations of the law, lest we have more of them lying before Congress without fear of actual penalty.

I'm fine with 3-5 years so long as everyone else responsible in this situation, including DAs are subject to due process as well. There is no way that one person is responsible for almost 34k tampered cases all on her own without many other people being involved or at least aware.

I'm not a fan of our overly aggressive justice system, but if it is going to be overly aggressive, it needs to apply equally aggressively to the watchers as well. Any asymmetry in application of the current practices leaves far more room for abuse in the future than one that is applied equally to all parties. Justice is blind. If she is going to aggressively wield her sword, both your standard street thugs and corrupt government officials should have equal chance of getting struck by her sword.

We can't let the entire system throw her under the bus for 20+ years, while many other guilty parties get away after having been complicit or actively colluded.

> She'll never work in that capacity again

How do you know? Getting rehired is routine for misbehaving cops.

> This is institutional failure.

Indeed. I wonder how hard it would be to have random testing of the chemists' work.

I agree. Without knowing much about penology, punishment for the sake of punishment seems overused in the US. Her prison sentence is short relative to all those given out because of her acts, but I think prison sentences in the US are too long to begin with.

I had to think about how it could be plausible to anyone, and then I remembered what my late father (a chemistry major who later worked as an industrial engineer) used to tell me about working in chemistry labs. Sometimes you have to sit around and wait while an assay runs, but I suppose an efficient person (who has enough equipment) could run more than one assay at a time, and monitor each result in turn. I have no specialized knowledge about what a normal rate of doing tests would be in a well administered state crime lab.

I like that you ran the numbers, and think you have a good question.

One remark in the original article said she had access to files and samples for many cases that she was not primary on. Perhaps that's the issue -- the ability to taint results across the whole departmental workload.

Excellent question and one that raises another one. Could she possibly have tainted that many cases working alone? If not, we should be looking at every one around her including the DA.

Simple network analysis of every person (arresting officer, DA and other crime lab technicians) involved in these ~34k cases should be able to come up with a dozen or so people that warrant additional scrutiny.

Probably. But that's the karmic justice, I guess.

What is even more horrible, is that she'll do the time, but all the prosecutors, whose careers she boosted, would walk away from this clean...