Woman Who Purposely Faked 10,000s Of Black Drug Test Results Walks Free From Prison

SuperAntigen said:

Investigators and former colleagues have said the Trinidadian immigrant seemed driven by a compulsion to overachieve, even if it meant making things up or cutting corners. She became the lab's most prolific analyst, a record that impressed her supervisors but also worried her co-workers — a concern that went overlooked, investigators found

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Felt the need to point ^^ out as the thread title is misleading.



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Mark Antony said:

SuperAntigen said:

Investigators and former colleagues have said the Trinidadian immigrant seemed driven by a compulsion to overachieve, even if it meant making things up or cutting corners. She became the lab's most prolific analyst, a record that impressed her supervisors but also worried her co-workers — a concern that went overlooked, investigators found

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Felt the need to point ^^ out as the thread title is misleading.



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What?

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Hand2HandKing said:

ya dont got da answers b

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Spoiler

she kinda cute....hope she gotta slang it on Backpage

ninjahood said:

Mark Antony said:

SuperAntigen said:

Investigators and former colleagues have said the Trinidadian immigrant seemed driven by a compulsion to overachieve, even if it meant making things up or cutting corners. She became the lab's most prolific analyst, a record that impressed her supervisors but also worried her co-workers — a concern that went overlooked, investigators found

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Felt the need to point ^^ out as the thread title is misleading.



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What?

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intention of why she did it wasn't ostensibly rooted in prejudice, but of self career aggrandizement.

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CashBanks said:

Ninja showing up to play devils advocate in a thread about someone doing harm to black people... shocker.

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ninjahood said:

intention of why she did it wasn't ostensibly rooted in prejudice, but of self career aggrandizement.

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Mark Antony said:

Only thing she slated for is cross eyed auntie porn.

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Brolic Scholar said:

ninjahood said:

intention of why she did it wasn't ostensibly rooted in prejudice, but of self career aggrandizement.

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The system and its war on "drugs" is prejudiced. Opioid use is up in the white community, do you see or have you heard of the war on its users and dealers?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4026559/

Did we hear this soft and reasonable talk when the dealers and users were black? Nope. But mix in white folks, big pharma and the decline of the white race (worldwide) and all of a sudden things must change with how the war on drugs is waged. ***** please...

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.time...eaths-exceed-births-united-states/?source=dam

http://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1288&context=carsey

https://www.google.com/amp/www.news...te-american-mortality-rates-408354.html?amp=1

The system that created her job built prejudices into her job function. The war on drugs (before it became a white problem) was a war on black families. Plain and simple.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cn...chard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fo...-lock-up-blacks-and-protesters-continues/amp/

There's no wiggle room on this one. The way this new problem is being addressed when compared to the drug issues that plagued the black community is "da proof in da pudding b". I usually don't go at you homie, but the playing dumb ain't flying on this one. Let's keep it [emoji]128175[/emoji]today.

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ninjahood said:

da dumb wench was just a cog tryin to over achieve.... da semantics is just that thou.

apparently she's already out.... da roses are already lined up

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Colombia said:

ninjahood said:

da dumb wench was just a cog tryin to over achieve.... da semantics is just that thou.


apparently she's already out.... da roses are already lined up

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Whenever I'm feeling overly ambitious I falsify thousands of drug tests to wreck people's lives too, just some regular cog in da wheel stuff.

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tay1 said:

 
There needs to be a larger investigation. I have a hard time believing just one person is responsible.

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Hand2HandKing said:

thread title is not misleading she did it on purpose

at the behest of prosecutors who wanted convictions off bogus findings, they are just as guilty and should go to jail

it dont matter if she was doing it to brownnose she was doing it on purpose

sounds like she was hoping for a come up

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Hand2HandKing said:

SuperAntigen said:

[thread="653184"] [/thread]

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why dont you cut the crap

"it was a numbers game" 

but HALF 1/2 .5 50% of her cases dealt with her tampering with poc

talking about an agenda 

whos the one with the agenda? me?

for a thread title (I didnt even create)?

her, for falsifying all these poc evidence?

or you, for coming in here and decrying THAT of all things

in attempt to what derail the thread?

call me out on imagined "hyperbole"?

or simply display your willingness to defend white supremacy in all its forms and practices?   

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A federal judge has awarded more than $2 million to a man wrongly convicted based on evidence falsified by Annie Dookhan, the former state chemist who created a multimillion-dollar crisis in the state’s criminal justice system. It is the first case in which Dookhan has been ordered to compensate any of the thousands of defendants whose cases she tainted.

US District Judge Indira Talwani determined that Leonardo Johnson, 53, of Dorchester, is entitled to compensatory and punitive damages for the 15 months he served in prison, because Dookhan gave “false testimony to convict an innocent man.”

Dookhan has 30 days to appeal the award amount. Her attorney, Nicolas Gordon of Mansfield, did not respond to questions about the ruling.

“Judge Talwani’s damages assessment provides fair and just compensation for Mr. Johnson, who has suffered and continues to suffer emotional and financial devastation,” said attorney Ilyas Rona, who represents Johnson. “While we are pleased with the outcome for Leonardo Johnson, we are mindful of the other victims who have received nothing.”

DAVID L RYAN/GLOBE STAFF/FILE 2013
Former state chemist Annie Dookhan.

It remains unclear how much of the total award Dookhan will be able to pay, and how quickly.

“We are continuing to explore all available options to get our client the best possible result, given the ordeal that he went through,” Rona said.

Johnson was arrested in November 2008 in Chinatown. When an undercover police officer asked him for a “twenty” — a $20 rock of crack cocaine — he saw an opportunity to make some cash to buy drugs for himself, he testified at trial. At the time, Johnson was addicted to crack cocaine, he told the court.

But the small nugget Johnson sold the officer was not, in fact, crack. He later testified it was a small piece of peanut or similar tree nut. He was surprised that an experienced officer even believed it contained any drugs. Johnson had previous arrests for drug possession but said he was never a dealer.

Minutes after the transaction, officers from the Boston Police Department’s drug unit arrested Johnson for distributing narcotics in a school zone.

Unlike the vast majority of people facing drug charges, Johnson refused to take a plea deal. Confident that the substance he sold contained no drugs, he took the stand at trial in November 2009. To Johnson’s surprise, Dookhan, who at the time was a forensic chemist at the Hinton drug lab in Jamaica Plain, testified that chemical tests confirmed the presence of cocaine in the sample.

“I knew she was lying,” Johnson said in an interview. “Ain’t no way, no how a cashew can turn into crack.”

The jury quickly returned a guilty verdict, and Johnson was sentenced to two years and one day in prison.

By the time Dookhan was charged with evidence tampering in September 2012, Johnson had served his sentence in full. He successfully petitioned for a new trial, and Suffolk County prosecutors dropped their case against him in April 2013, citing the ongoing criminal investigation into Dookhan.

Dookhan pleaded guilty in November 2013 to all charges of evidence tampering, including contaminating samples intentionally and testifying on results for tests she never ran. She served three years in prison and was released on parole in April 2016.

The state inspector general ordered retesting on Johnson’s sample in 2014 as part of its review of the Hinton lab. Out of more than 600 analyzed, his was one of 11 samples for which additional testing failed to detect any illegal substances.

As the scope of Dookhan’s misconduct became clear, some predicted a wave of lawsuits would be filed against her, her supervisors, and other state officials. But the onslaught never came.

Only seven others have sued Dookhan or her supervisors in federal court. Two cases were dismissed outright, and three are ongoing. A fourth ongoing case, in which the plaintiff alleges Dookhan falsely certified that a counterfeit substance contained cocaine, was moved to state court.

Last fall, a federal jury declined to grant any money to a Boston man, David Jones, who served 2½ years in prison on distribution charges. Jones did not name Dookhan in his suit, only her superiors at the state health department. He argued that these officials violated his civil rights by failing to catch “unmistakable warning signs” of Dookhan’s misconduct.

The jury found that Dookhan’s three supervisors were not liable for any deprivation of Jones’s rights.

Johnson similarly blamed his incarceration not only on Dookhan but also on her co-workers and superiors. He named another chemist who worked closely with her, three of her supervisors, and the director of the crime lab in his August 2014 federal complaint.

“The lab officials who allowed this to happen never accepted responsibility for their own wrongdoing,” said Rona.

Although the state inspector general’s office reported that Dookhan was the “sole bad actor,” it determined the “most glaring factor” that facilitated her misconduct was a “failure of management.” Johnson’s complaint cited another inspector general finding that Hinton lab management inappropriately decided not to disclose inconsistent testing results to prosecutors and defense attorneys, such as the mixed results from tests run on Johnson’s sample for the presence of cocaine.

One of Dookhan’s supervisors named in Johnson’s suit, Julie Nassif, was fired when Dookhan’s misconduct came to light. Another, Charles Salemi, retired soon afterward, and the director of the lab, Dr. Linda Han, likewise resigned in September 2012. Elisabeth O’Brien , the lab’s evidence officer, and Daniel Renczkowski, a fellow chemist, still work as state-employed forensic chemists, according to public payroll records.

All five denied wrongdoing, characterizing Johnson’s allegations as vague and subjective. Dookhan, however, filed no response of any kind in the proceedings, neither in response to Johnson’s complaint nor to his demand for monetary damages.

Johnson simultaneously sued the state under a Massachusetts law which provides compensation for the wrongfully convicted.

The state attorney general’s office settled that suit for $250,000 last fall, a common outcome for wrongful conviction claims. As part of the settlement, Johnson agreed to remove all parties except Dookhan from his federal lawsuit. The settlement does not admit any culpability on the part of Nassif, Han, Salemi, O’Brien, or Renczkowski.

The judge reduced the federal damages award by the amount already paid by the state.

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Massachusetts has spent $20.6 million over the last five years responding to two scandals involving misconduct at state drug labs, according to the Executive Office of Administration and Finance.

The money covers the investigations, the prosecution of the two chemists responsible, and the costs of notifying defendants and dealing with thousands of drug cases tainted by the misconduct.

The Hinton Lab Response Reserve fund was set up in February 2013, through a supplemental budget bill, to respond to the case of Annie Dookhan. The former chemist pleaded guilty to falsifying the results of tests done on drugs at a state lab in Boston. Those tests were used to convict thousands of people of drug offenses. The fund was meant to cover the costs of that investigation.

The fund was expanded in March 2017 to also cover the investigation of cases tainted by Sonja Farak, who stole samples of drugs from a state lab in Amherst to feed her own addiction.

The state was responsible for not only investigating and prosecuting Farak and Dookhan but also for determining how many cases were tainted and dealing with those cases. The American Civil Liberties Union and others have brought extensive litigation, trying to get those defendants notified and have the cases dismissed.

The comptroller's public state spending website details $17.49 million in spending. Generally, some expenditures are left off the public site because they are considered confidential under state or federal law.

The biggest portion of money from the reserve fund went to investigatory agencies. The Office of the Inspector General received $5.77 million, according to the comptroller's data. Most of this went to information technology.

The Office of the Inspector General took over the investigation of the Dookhan case in 2013 because of the potential conflicts of interest of having then-Attorney General Martha Coakley prosecuting Dookhan while also investigating how many lab cases were tainted.

Jack Meyers, a spokesman for the Office of the Inspector General, said the office had to create databases to keep track of millions of drug tests that were run on samples and evidence. The office hired contractors and vendors with computer expertise to set up and maintain these databases. Other state law enforcement and health agencies also used the databases.

The inspector general's office was not involved in the Farak case.

State police got a little under $3 million, with most of that going toward infrastructure and equipment.

David Procopio, a state police spokesman, said after the Dookhan scandal, the police took over operations of the Hinton lab from the Department of Public Health and moved the drug testing to a state police lab in Sudbury. The state police used the money to expand the Sudbury lab, buy new scientific equipment and hire and train new chemists to take on the additional caseload.

The state police used some money to assist an attorney who was analyzing all the Hinton cases to determine which ones required additional judicial action.

According to Procopio, the state police also took over Farak's lab and moved those drug testing cases to a state police drug lab in Springfield. The cost of that move was absorbed into the existing state police budget, so no money from the trust fund was used.

The state reserve fund also paid for costs related to both the prosecution and the defense in the litigation.

The fund reimbursed the state's district attorneys for expenses related to the cases, spending anywhere from $1.95 million for the Suffolk district attorney's office to $11,000 for the Worcester district attorney.

Jake Wark, a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney, said as a result of litigation, prosecutors had to notify defendants whose drug cases were tainted by Dookhan of their rights. The money went toward locating mailing address and mailing notices to defendants.

Suffolk County had 8,000 cases touched by Dookhan - by far the highest number in the state.

The reserve fund also reimbursed the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state's public defender office, $1.67 million for staff time.

Lisa Hewitt, general counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, said huge numbers of the drug cases tainted by Dookhan and Farak involved indigent defendants. Public defenders have had to look at hundreds of thousands of cases and relitigate those that were not dismissed by the district attorneys.

The public defenders, along with the ACLU, have asked that all the cases be dismissed. But judges have decided that prosecutors should instead use case-by-case analysis to determine which cases should be dismissed and which they can retry.

The public defenders have an in-house unit focused on these cases. They have also had to hire private appellate attorneys for some cases, Hewitt said.

Several state agencies were also reimbursed by the fund, including the governor's office ($625,000 for legal services, staff time and consultants), the Executive Office of Health and Human Services ($499,000), the Department of Public Health ($349,000) and the public safety and corrections departments (less than $100,000 each).

Spending from the fund peaked between fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2015, although the fund has continued to spend money through this year as litigation continues.

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