In 2012, Massachusetts crime lab technician Annie Dookhan was arrested on charges that evidence in her lab was mishandled and falsified, putting more than 40,000 cases into doubt. Dookhan pled guilty and faced 3-5 years in prison with two years of probation. Massachusetts says that they are close to finally clearing the tens of thousands of cases affected by Ms. Dookhan’s crimes.
The vast majority of drug cases potentially tainted by former state chemist Annie Dookhan will be vacated by mid-April, with just a few hundred convictions out of 24,000 remaining on the books, according to district attorneys.
The prosecutors have been working on a 90-day deadline issued in January by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to produce shortened lists of Dookhan convictions they believe must stay in place and are getting close to concluding.
Democracy Now! had Massachusetts’s ACLU legal director Matt Segal on to explain the historic significance of the Massachusetts decision to vacate 21,587 criminal drug cases.
It is historic. We think it is going to be, when all is said and done, the single largest dismissal of cases in U.S. history. And it’s because this misconduct was allowed to go on for so many years. And as a consequence of that, people have already served their sentences and have been living with the collateral consequences of those sentences. So what we hope will happen as a result of these dismissals is that it will allow people like your guest, Timothy, to move on with their lives, to rebuild their lives and to move on from these convictions.
And while Segal says that Dookhan didn’t convict those people by herself, he says she most clearly falsified information. Dookhan knowingly ruined people’s lives for the eight years she worked as a crime lab technician. It’s too bad she could not at least do eight years of hard time.