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Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

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Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#81

I would love to see every single email by DAs that include her name subpoenaed. "The report shows that the Hinton lab leaned heavily on Dookhan’s productivity. Supervisors lauded her work ethic and assigned her an increasing share of tests."[0] We should know what her supervisors and DA were saying in private about her work to her and to one another. There is no way that someone is so much more productive, without an…

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)

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#82
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Karmic justice? Extralegal justice that I dislike personally. That's like being okay with rape in prisons, cause "they get what they deserve"...

Look, I don't think that incarceration works at all. But this person created a possiblity for 34 thousands of other people (assuming one case per person) to get potentially raped in the prison.

I'm not vengeful or violent mostly, but shit like that makes my blood boil a little.

Policemen who wish to carry a tazer used to get electrocuted with one, just so they have an idea what sort of punishment they will dispensing to other people.

I think that every lawyer and DA and what not should be thrown in jail, right in the thick of it, so they'd get a good idea about what they subject other people to.

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#83
post #18

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in... The DA is already covering up and defending the prosecutor's involvement, saying there is nothing wrong with prosecutors telling Dhookan what test results they needed to get their convictions, in clear violation of proper experimental procedures.

There should be a chinese wall between the crime lab and the DA. All the DA should be able to do is submit evidence and any matching of that evidence to the accused should be a complete black box as far as the DA is concerned.

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.

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a chinese wall between the crime lab and the DA. All the DA should be able to do is submit evidence and any matching of that evidence to the accused should be a complete black box as far as the DA is concerned.

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 providi…

>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?

that would explain why she went down without talking to FBI/etc and taking down all the DAs with (or even instead of :) her (as this just couldn't have happened at that scale without all the DAs involvement)

Took one for the team, and will land softly somewhere after the time on the "farm" (again with such cover it wouldn't be general prison population which she helped to populate).

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#85
In one of the threads about this scandal someone said that it would be valuable to send known negative samples to a lab and check which ones come back positive, so that we can investigate whether misconduct was involved. This is basically equivalent to unit testing, since they are known assert(false) tests. Unit tests can be devised to test crime labs, district attorneys, law enforcement officers, judges, etc.

This makes me think if maybe this wouldn't be a worthwhile test for the justice system in general. Hire actors to pose as criminals in the system where the person is not guilty, but where most evidence supports a guilty verdict with a few smaller pieces of evidence that prove innocent. With this we find out how many prosecutors take the case all the way to conviction by willingly choosing to ignore evidence suggesting guilt and which decide to drop the case because they believe the person to be innocent. This would be the equivalent of acceptance testing the justice system.

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#86

In one of the threads about this scandal someone said that it would be valuable to send known negative samples to a lab and check which ones come back positive, so that we can investigate whether misconduct was involved. This is basically equivalent to unit testing, since they are known assert(false) tests. Unit tests can be devised to test crime labs, district attorneys, law enforcement officers, judges, etc. This m…

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.

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#87
I am shocked and horrified that a loyal servant of the system should be discarded so casually. After all, falsifying convictions is just a part of how the system works, isn't it?

You have to keep the lower orders scared to keep them loyal - otherwise they might start getting ideas above their station, mightn't they? It's like holding a wolf by the ears: release it, and we would all be in trouble.

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#88
post #61

> "It's unsettling and maddening, because you're now going to have a lot of people get released to the street prematurely," says Middlesex County District attorney Gerry Leone, one of many hoping the state supreme court will curb the releases. That's a pretty bad way of looking at this, because it assumes that those people deserved to be behind bars to begin with, and ignores those that didn't. How about, "It's unset…

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 icin…

In other words, all you need to say to the officer is - "Actually, you don't know what I was doing. Because it was nothing".

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#89
According to Dookhan's lawyer, she says that she did it because she wanted to get a 8 hour pay-check, that there was "too much red tape" but very loose protocol.

But - she's not a rogue chemist! Oh no.

When chemists do lab tests, are they blind to the criminal circumstances themselves?

http://www.wbur.org/2013/11/29/dookhan-lawyer

What I find really awful, is that in many cases, jobs were lost, families destroyed, and sentences were stiffer because of false results by this chemist.

Re: Crime Lab Scandal Leaves Massachusetts Legal System In Turmoil

#90
post #18

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/12/20/in... The DA is already covering up and defending the prosecutor's involvement, saying there is nothing wrong with prosecutors telling Dhookan what test results they needed to get their convictions, in clear violation of proper experimental procedures.

There should be a chinese wall between the crime lab and the DA. All the DA should be able to do is submit evidence and any matching of that evidence to the accused should be a complete black box as far as the DA is concerned.

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