Earlier quoted context omitted.
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No offense, but the degree to which you're focusing on the color of Dookhan's skin is, frankly, creepy. And your remark about an "NAACP award" reads awfully petulantly, to me.
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Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
121–130 of 173 posts
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#1223-5 years?! THREE TO FIVE YEARS???!!! There are no words. Agents of the law need to be held more accountable for their actions than your average citizen, not less. This is disgusting.
Completely agreed. I think a workable compromise would be to sentence her to 3-5 years for each count -- or even, hell, let's be generous... 1 day for each count of tampering.
That's 40,000 counts, 1 day per, continuous -- 109 years and change.
Those entrusted with protecting the law should have far more obligation to uphold its tenets than the hoi polloi, lest we start conceding that there really are two classes of citizenry and start a class war.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#123This kind of case is fascinating. The woman wasn't evil. But her actions really are. It's very easy, too easy, to say that she is evil because what she did was so bad. But that's lazy, and it misses the interesting stuff. How do people get caught up in performing such horrendous acts? There's a bunch of cognitive stuff going on, and some subtle manipulation. I suspect that something similar is how we end up with app…
> The woman wasn't evil.
What the fuck makes you say that?
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#124How hard would it have been to insert a random cross check in to the system? So every 300 tests, the sample is retested by another lab? There's no motivation or incentive whatsoever to structure the process to decrease convictions, that is one of the unspoken but defining features of our legal system. There is an ideal that two sides are arguing something in a neutral setting, but one side is the government, and lite…
Add some "parallel discovery" courtesy of the NSA and you've got a recipe for tyranny.
Parallel construction is the NSA informing local cops of crimes that they actually have evidence for, albeit obtained illegally.
This is just straight lying. Trading hundreds of years of others' lives for a modestly higher paycheck.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a white collar crime and she's an educated person who isn't black or hispanic. That's not every factor behind the sentence, but it's an uncomfortably large subset of those factors.
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The racial and class disparities in sentencing is well established.
Also, the fact that you say she's brown shows you don't understand how race impacts sentences. Its not a matter of being light or dark. Its a matter of being black or Hispanic and the economic and social status of blacks and Hispanics and how voters react to the kinds of crimes endemic in black and Hispanic communities.
Why is the sentence so light? First, its a white collar crime. Sentences haven't been inflated across the board for white collar crimes the way they have for "poor minority" crimes (that is, crimes endemic in poor minority communities). The high sentences for crimes like drug dealing are tied up with both race and class issues, and as a result 3-5 seems like a particularly light sentence.
Second, she's a sympathetic character in sentencing. All sorts of factors can be used in sentencing, and they disfavor people from poor minority communities. Have a wife and child? That's more sympathetic than having an out of wedlock child and baby momma. Grow up in the hood where gangs are pervasive? Well it'll be easier to dig up unfavorable bits of your past than if you grew up in a middle class community.
The root of the outrage is that 3-5 seems so light in comparison to the sentences of the people this chemist helped convict for drug crimes. A big part of that is that the latter sentences are so high because of the race and class issues mentioned above.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#126What about the prosecutors involved in requesting faked evidence? One would expect some long sentences.
What makes you expect such a thing?
"Hope"? Sure. But "expect"? In what world?
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the punishment for helping somebody to hold a person captive in their basement? The sentence should be that times sixhundred (how many wrongful convictions she caused, number might rise yet).
Honestly I think this is a situation where the death penalty is entirely appropriate. I don't like the idea of more suffering when there is already plenty to go around here, but I can't see how you can call it "justice" if she is allowed to live. An example must be set that this kind of thing is so repugnant to civilized societies that it WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. EDIT: The scale of her crimes is thousands of person-yea…
Revenge is useless. Deterrence is not.
Go after the prosecutors who were involved. Conspiracy is often thrown at "peon" types, from those emails it makes sense that at least some of the prosecutors knew what was going on. You want to hammer these wastes of oxygen and make it clear that corruption will not be tolerated.
Never going to happen, of course. It's easier to just kill someone, and who's going to prosecute the prosecutors?
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have mixed feelings about jail terms in general, but I agree– this is precisely the sort of crime I would imagine carrying a life sentence. The number of cases affected & lives disrupted here is hardly fathomable.
Me too re: jail times, but since being "hard on crime" is the politically convenient position for politicians, why not be hard on the right kinds of crime? What's worse is that the system didn't detect the problem for such a long time. Why isn't laboratory analysis blinded? We already spend truckloads of money funding an elaborate appeals process, why isn't there a check on lab analysis? With the drug industry implod…
> Why isn't laboratory analysis blinded?
Exactly my thought. The chemists doing the analysis shouldn't have any way of finding out who the defendant or prosecutor in the case is until they've given their report. Similarly, the parties in the trial shouldn't know what chemist will be doing the analysis in advance.
The part of the story where a prosecutor was practically begging the chemist for a particular result is mindblowing. I hope the feds come in and clean house.
It will be interesting to see how many wrongful imprisonment suits this ends up causing.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#129So, it appears that evidence processing has something akin to zero controls and (effective) auditing? Where prosecutors either knew of or had strong reason to suspect this misbehavior, their immunity should be dissolved and they should be prosecuted. Their personal assets should also be subject to forfeiture for compensation.
Don't worry, it gets worse: http://www.npr.org/series/133208980/post-mortem-death-invest... .
buddy, that's not even scratching the surface. when rural counties are barely willing to pay the elected coroner their stipend, they're surely not going to fund a forensic pathologist ($$$!) and the staff/tools/testing to make them effective.
there are homicides that go undetected left and right, and a distressing number of forensically sophisticated criminals out there.
but everybody thinks the cops whip out some crazy CSI team for every case, and leave no stone unturned, and no test unperformed (hahaha!), so there's no motivation for anybody to try and get the funding necessary.
Re: Government Chemist Tampered With 40,000 Cases
#130How hard would it have been to insert a random cross check in to the system? So every 300 tests, the sample is retested by another lab? There's no motivation or incentive whatsoever to structure the process to decrease convictions, that is one of the unspoken but defining features of our legal system. There is an ideal that two sides are arguing something in a neutral setting, but one side is the government, and lite…
Well, it wouldn't necessarily preclude tampering with the evidence. The article seemed to indicate that it wasn't just reports that were falsified. For instance, in the marijuana weight issue mentioned in the article, she could have slipped in some extra to put it over the weight limit before sending it off to another lab. Maybe cross checking would help, but systemic changes would probably be better.
fwiw, to be a DEA registered lab, and thus, have known marijuana (or other controlled substances) just hanging around, you've got to keep it locked up such that it requires two people to access it, and you've got to track it (very precisely) by weight. and the DEA can check your records any time. they have caught at least some people (who were "diverting" cocaine up their nose) with this.