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.
I think we should be more worried that this is a systemic problem and not a single bad actor. There is something wrong with a system that is so vulnerable to this type of manipulation.
It wasn't a whole number, I rounded. Actually, I rounded twice, because it was actually like ~36,000-something occurrences, which I rounded off to 40 because I'm very lazy.
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 imploding, chemists (real chemists) are struggling to find work, so they could even call it a jobs program if need be.
How can a voter rock the boat over an issue so far down on the political issue list?
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.
> With the drug industry imploding, chemists (real chemists) are struggling to find work, so they could even call it a jobs program if need be.
there is a big difference between working as a chemist, and working as a forensic chemist. getting drug into trials and treated like shit by both sides in the case isn't any fun, and it's hard to find people who'll actually stick with it.
I don't know how Massachusetts law -- or US Federal law -- swings, but here in the UK there's a specific crime, magnificently called Conspiracy to Pervert the Course of Justice, which covers everything from perjury to faking evidence. And while the average sentence is on the order of 2 years, there's no upper limit: a life sentence is possible in sufficiently extreme cases.
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-years of human life in jail. Some of them probably deserved it, others probably didn't. There is a serious asymmetry here, she has only 50-100 years that she can be imprisoned and that's not a strong enough message to people in the government who would think about doing the same to further their own careers as well.
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?
Your argument is one of semantics. He is a defender of those who have not deprived others of their right to life. This is the reason why both the word murder and the word kill exist. There is a fundamental difference that you don't appreciate.
Unless there was a death penalty administered due to this, she has not deprived anyone of "life" in the sense suggested. She denied their freedom, and this is a grave injustice, but not one fit for a death penalty. How savage and petty that would be.
What is worth more, 50 years of a single person's life or 10,000 years of many people's lives? If it's really hard to comprehend 50 years of a single person's life how impossible is it to truly understand what 10,000 years of human life is?
If you have 40,000 cases and only say 1/4 of them get falsified and that results in on average one year of wrongful imprisonment you're at 10,000 years.
Superficially I have to agree with you that I look like a hypocrite.
The government is the body which has a monopoly on violence. In other words, they're the only people who can legally do things to people that nobody would volunteer to have done to them, like going to prison. It's the government's job to provide courts through which disputes can be resolved, since you aren't supposed to take matters into your own hands. One class of those disputes is the government vs citizens who have violated the government's rules or the laws.
When those kinds of cases are going through the courts the government should be extra careful to be impartial because everyone can tell that it's potentially a situation ripe for corruption. The government is adjudicating a case between the government (the DA or prosecutor) and someone not in the government ("normal people").
Given the choice you wouldn't choose your wife's parents to settle a dispute between you and your wife; but this can be a very real fear when being prosecuted.
The problem here is even though you can name the different parts of the government and call them separate (courts, prosecutor, forensics, etc) ultimately we find out that forensics and the prosecutor are both "on the same team" and that when the courts get involved again to try and fix the mess, that the forensics person is still "on the same team" as the prosecutors and maybe everyone else.
If you're in the class of people called "the government" you have to be extra right, extra careful, and extra following-the-rules so that ordinary people get a fair shake when dealing with an entity that has virtually limitless funds to prosecute versus their usually meager funds to defend (unless you're in the top 1% to 0.1% or so, then it's just "lots more" rather than "infinitely more").
Here's a case where not only was the forensics person not extra careful, right and proper, not even sloppy and foolish but malicious. And not just a little bit either, she didn't tamper with one case that involved a cheating ex or something. She did it systematically over thousands of cases depriving people of their liberty wrongly. You could build a strong case that she perverted justice in a very horrific manner.
If you add up all the person-years of people's lives that she conspired to help imprison and divide by 100 year in a life (round numbers) you'd get to the point where she's effectively "taken" tens if not hundreds of lives. That makes her in a roundabout way something akin to a very impressive mass murderer. In that case I'm not sure that the death penalty is an over-reactionary knee-jerk kind of punishment.
Like many "criminal-friendly" aspects of criminal law, the opposition to the death penalty goes beyond compassion for the guilty; it is motivated by a desire to protect the other innocent from abuse of power, and principled belief that forcibly ending a life is unacceptable because no person is capable and trustworthy to accurately and fairly determining which cases deserve it, and drawing a bright line to separates the kind of criminal people who would kill unnecessarily from the civilized people who would not, and sitting comfortably on our side without engendering doubts.
I might counter-argue that at some point there's no doubt and being permanently removed from the pool of people who are alive might be OK.
What I mean is that if someone is attempting to murder me and I manage to kill them first that it was a justifiable homicide and that I shouldn't be punished in any way. That's in the law and it even makes sense to a great many people even if they're not lawyers, and even if they don't know the finer points of the law. In that situation there is no doubt, or perhaps no reasonable doubt and the law does effectively judge people to be competent to make precisely that decision.
Part of what makes this so difficult is that she actually wielded vast power due to her position. In many ways she was far, far more powerful than a judge or a prosecutor. A judge can't just unilaterally accuse someone of a worse crime just because, nor can a prosecutor reasonably trump charges up too much without getting called out for bad behavior. But it seems that this lady did precisely that, totally perverting justice.
If an accountant cooks the books it might be professional misconduct (and criminal!) and people might lose their jobs and all of that is terrible. But that accountant can't somehow make all the employees of the company go to jail by doing something wrong.
The power that this lady had and the extent to which she abused it is simply breathtaking.
I just want to weigh in that I am really glad that none of those falsely convicted by this faked evidence were sentenced to death. At least those falsely imprisoned by the "evidence" this scum planted can be set free, even though they lost years of their lives.
And that is the argument of why there should not be a death penalty, even for people who you are really sure that they really deserve it. It's a form of humility: To admit that there can be wrongs in the legal system, and so to be very sure not to do anything completely irreversible.
That's why people argue that the death penalty is unacceptable in any case whatsoever: the system has to be able to admit that sometimes it is wrong.
By god, is the human race so savage that we resort to killing so quickly. This is a life, something some people would consider priceless. Not something you can view arithmetically, calculating the hours in damage caused versus somebody's time left.
Which is a truly disparaging fact, while a human life may not be priceless, putting a value on it draws a very interesting ethical line in the sand. I agree with you, but I would say the life of any human should be worth a hell of a lot and the idea of taking one should be met with the utmost seriousness and avoided at all costs.
The last thing this planet needs is more death and killing.
If taking a life is savage, how much more savage is it to systematically, wrongly deny people their freedom for the sake of promotions?
Is that any less barbaric than denying people their freedom because some people needed their labor in order to enjoy comfortable lives? When that used to happen it was called slavery and from what I can tell it's been abolished worldwide (or nearly so) because we've mostly agreed it's savage and barbaric and the opposite of civilized.
Denying people their freedom through a fair court system is also kind-of barbaric since violence or the threat thereof is what holds the system together. But it's supposed to be "justice" in that there's a fair trial and the hope is that guilty people are properly denied their freedom and innocent ones are not. Obviously there are false positives and false negatives but everyone is supposed to act in good faith to ensure that there aren't systematic biases.
This person introduced a systematic bias which has wrongly denied people their freedom. If she had kidnapped ~600 Americans for 1.5 years she'd be called a terrorist. That's precisely what some Iranian folks who did that to American embassy workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis
On kind of a tangent to the actual topic of the article being discussed, but I saw you mention how you think slavery has been abolished worldwide. I'd like to correct that thinking and let you know that slavery is still a very active thing, with millions of slaves around the globe, and people being captured even in the USA as sex slaves to be sold around the globe. The nearest count I know is at least 27 million people still exist as slaves.
Thanks for the link. I figured it still happened some but not to the extent that you're referring to.
I think mostly what I meant is that it's theoretically (I think) illegal worldwide. There are plenty of places where it still happens through corruption or lax law enforcement.
I am a bit disappointed that the website linked to rolls child labor in with slavery and such because it weakens the number. I don't LIKE child labor but there are still places so poor that the only alternative to children working is starvation. And they don't break the 27 million number down. So it's hard to tell if the child labor portion is 1% or 80% of the full 27 million.
Again just to be clear I'm not in favor of child labor across the board. But if the alternative to a child working is starvation then I see no reason to make a law to stop him or her from working. Getting charities together to give the families food so that the kids can stop working? Great! But just passing a law and supposing/hoping that it will solve the problem? I don't know that it's the right thing to do.
I guess part of the problem is that I have no idea how many kids are working to eat and stay alive by their parents conscious choice vs how many are effectively slave laborers being exploited.
And perhaps more to the point, the 13th Amendment explicitly leaves slavery on the table for those convicted of a crime:
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Does this mean that plainly barbaric things may be justifiably used as punishments? Does this perhaps suggest the possibility that "killing a man", and "killing a man after convicting him of a crime" are morally distinct? Or does this mean that a serious revamp of how we view and run our justice system is long overdue?
I don't think that attempting to maximize suffering is a good idea. If you go down that path, then finding creative ways to lawyer our way around "cruel and unusual" will become the name of the game (say for example, claiming that a plainly cruel punishment is acceptable so long as we do it a lot, making it not unusual. This has been argued before on HN...[0])
I honestly find the suggestion that we should use life imprisonment instead of execution because it is more cruel to be far more disturbing than suggestions that we should just use execution. You are proposing that we do something that you consider more cruel then execution... I'm not good with that.
There's a distinction made between individuals that follow society's rules and those that break them on a massive scale for financial gain (or other reasons).
And if it turns out someone tampered with the forensic evidence or manipulated testemonies in this case? How would you undo the wrongful execution? Witnesses, lab records and cctv can all be manipulated after all...
I agree, in context. If she's purposely stolen years and years from others' lives, she needs to be held accountable for each and every instance. And the idea that this happened in a laboratory doesn't make it any milder...this is, in my opinion, far worse than most violent crimes.
I think the time served should be very long, given that most of our violent crimes have very long terms.
That said, I think we need to revisit very long terms. I don't know the answers, but I think that taking decades for seconds of rage, etc, can be extremely harsh.
I hope we can amend this system, or eliminate the need for it, someday. To me, I'm equally or even more scared of prosecutors that have the power to destroy my life as I am of thugs on the street that have that power.
It's far scarier in cases like this, where they only risk a slap on the wrist balanced against absolutely destroying lives.
I literally cannot imagine losing years in prison, when you have so few already.
"... she needs to be held accountable for each and every
instance."
Accountability is nice, but let's not lose sight of the bigger picture here which is a sharp correction of the system that not only allowed her to carry on for years, but more than likely actively encouraged her.
Personally, instead of having her serve a 100 year jail sentence, I would have no problem letting get a jail sentence of 1 year if it meant that everyone else complicit in these crimes also got 1 year of jail. Spreading it among all those responsible is a much bigger deterrent than throwing one person under the bus.
Going to jail for a serious crime you are guilty of is a lottery. It is a much more effective deterrent when being found guilty and spending time in jail is a likely event when a crime actually occurs."
I think they should all be held accountable, no doubt, and I don't think that was lost in the discussion here on HN, thankfully.
I personally find it more contemptible the more power those involved have. This chemist likely felt pressure from her higher-ups. No excuse for her, but disgusting of them to exert their power in that manner.
I hadn't thought much about your last sentence before, but it's very valid. It's a lottery because you're not always caught (and then in some cases, white-collar-crime, you're likely to get a slap on the wrist). I imagine that most criminals are dumb enough to convince themselves they won't be caught, making their odds to "win" seem even higher.
I think crime & punishment is such a complex problem, and our current system is barely passable, and has incredible room for improvement. I just don't want to be the answers guy, because I don't know how to improve it, and the risks are high.
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.
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.
Nothing in your response excuses you throwing race into the mix.
Race has nothing to do with it. Economic standing does.
Yes, blacks and hispanics suffer disproportionately for the very reasons you cite, but they do not suffer because they are black or hispanic ... they do so because they are disproportionately poor.
Rather than focusing on the real issue, insane sentencing for crimes common in poor neighborhoods, you throw race into the mix, which adds nothing and simply pisses people off.
Blacks and Hispanics suffer disproportionately, when it comes to sentences and everything else, even adjusted for economic status. I'm sorry pointing out that fact pisses some people off. But why the heck do that think blacks are disproportionately poor to begin with, if not for reasons having to do with their race? Its not like we didn't just get done with a couple of centuries of race based slavery and oppression. But no, the attitudes that animated that oppression have simply vanished within my parents lifetime![1] Sociological evolution happening in a historical blink of the eye.
Again, I'm not bringing it up randomly. What drives sentences? Fear. You think fear has nothing to do with race? That's utterly naive. Nobody who has even the barest experience with the criminal justice system can come away without the feeling that racial issues pervade how it works.
[1] Even less. Sentence inflation in the US started in the 70s and 80s, just a decade after George Wallace proclaimed "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" Sentence inflation happened in the aftermath of desegregation, race riots, and white flight. Even if people are much more open minded today, the legal structures and policing apparatus we still have today were forged then.
Honey, you're bullshitting us and yourself. You're telling me when Black Africans where discovered a few hundred years ago they were a few years away from inventing the Micro-chip and the Space Shuttle until the evil white man oppressed them?
Jews were smarter, owned more businesses, & had higher IQ scores than whites before, during, and after the holocaust. Blacks on the other hand were behind since the day they were discovered, throughout their oppression, and still to this day have low IQ scores from before kindergarden and into their adulthood. Racism doesn't destroy you, it's just a push. If you can't get back up on your feet that's your fault.
Also Blacks and Hispanics have much higher rates of: crime, teen pregnancy, high school dropouts, low test scores, & broken families.
- Having kids with the dumbest hood rat kinda man you could find is their problem.
- 1 out of 3 black kids dropping out of high school is their problem.
- Almost 80% of blacks not having a father is their problem.
- Over 50% of black women having children with multiple men is their problem.
- Telling each other they don't act black enough is their problem.
- Having a massively high crime rate regardless of wealth or education is their problem.
- Having low impulse control and being hyper-sexual and having a shitty family is their problem.
I find it fascinating how Whites, Jews, Asians, Indians, Middle Easterners, & Native Americans who are in poverty don't have those problems.
Here's a New York Times article on the black/white test score gap. "AFRICAN AMERICANS currently score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and mathematics tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. This gap appears before children enter kindergarten (figure 1-1), and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but the typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on most standardized tests. On some tests the typical American black scores below more than 85 percent of whites"
You want peoples who were running around naked on the African Savanna and Central American just 400 years ago to have the same achievement and equality and job as Indians, Whites, Jews, Arabs, and Asians who grew up in a society with schools, education, a written language for thousands of years. That's not exactly how evolution and natural selection work. No one is saying that racism doesn't hold people back, but it only holds them back temporarily. Racism and wars and even holocausts don't destroy the group as a whole. Everyone is responsible for themselves, not sitting around begging for table scraps and ranting about how racism is the reason they're behind.
This is perhaps the most profoundly racist thing I have ever encountered on this forum. Your "statistics" lack any verifiable sources and contain so many straw men it is difficult to account for all of them.
I honestly cannot believe that I am responding to this...
Get your lazy ass over to Google and stop expecting everything to be handed to you for inspection. You mean you never read black blogs? You never venture out of your own ass to see other view points?
In Atlanta, African-Americans are 54 percent of the population, but are responsible for 100 percent of homicide, 95 percent of rape, 94 percent of robbery, 84 percent of aggravated assault, and 93 percent of burglary: Atlanta Police Department Uniform Crime Reports, Apr 2011 to Apr 2012 (1 year of full data): http://www.atlantapd.org/uniformcrimereports.aspx (yes Blacks were responsible for 100% of the homicides, not even 99% but 100%)
What else do you need honey? What other form of proof do I need to run out and get for you while you sit in your chair criticizing reality because it doesn't match the fantasy in your head? Did all the movies of slavery warp your mind into thinking blacks are pristine angles who have no flaws while the evil white devil is guilty for everything?
Blacks cannot advance if people like keep holding them to low expectations, low standards, excuse them out of responsibility, and keep telling them they're victims. You claim to stand against racism yet people like you with your head in the clouds are the ones who are indirectly helping it continue.
From the actual study which forms the basis of your "59% of black women have multiple baby daddies" assertion:
> Taken together, the findings from Figures 1.2 - 1.4 suggest that multiple partner fertility is intimately connected with various forms of social disadvantage and discrimination, distinctions in cultural practices and kinship ties, and access to resources. And, many of these differences (particularly monetary ones) may lead to chronic stressors that represent serious long-term and cumulative hardships for MPF women relative to other women.
The majority of the remainder of your sources are news-magazine or tabloid puff-pieces that regurgitate information sourced from God-knows-where. Just because somebody said it once on a website does not mean that the information is accurate or has undergone proper scrutiny. Finally, your Breitbart article suffers from the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy, which means that just because someone important said something does not make it true.
All of that said, none of this is likely to change your viewpoints because I suspect that you have long-since cemented your positions, but I feel the need to stand up and say something because this is the sort of insidious racism that keeps us from moving forward.
Additionally, I would really like to know your name so I can avoid doing business with you.
I love how you ignored the Atlanta crime rate one that proves my point using hard data. Other cities all over the US have the same problems. Blacks make up a tiny percent of the population and yet a huge percent of criminals. And they have this magic touch wherever they go. From the USA, to the UK, to Europe, even in their own homeland of Africa.
Meanwhile Native Americans, who are truly victims, even greater minorities, aren't pushed into every single commercial, don't have their own history month, barbie, or tv channel, don't seem to sleep with everything that moves and cause so much trouble.
Even when the president and first lady talk about the real problems facing blacks, you spew more of your excuses. How come other minorities like Native Americans (who are also socially disadvantaged) don't have the same problems with regard to multiple baby daddies.
My sources were black blogs that simply regurgitated the information and talked about it. And yet you don't like what they found. Maybe white people should start excusing themselves for every wrong they've ever committed.
You're just an endless victim aren't you? Endless excuses. It's always someone else's fault. 500 years from now when Blacks are still behind folks like you will still be out preaching "it's not our fault, we're victims". 5,000 years from now you'll still be victims, unable to get back up. Despite all the hard ships other races went through they got back up. Europe was decimated numerous times by wars, famine, plagues, 2 world wars, and still it recovered. Jews were expelled and prayed upon for 2,000 years and went through a holocaust and a massive exodus from Europe and still got back up. While blacks were found, enslaved, and freed in a few hundred years and can't get back up on their own 2 feet.
You're right, blacks need help. They need all the help in the world. Blacks need other races to help them because they can't seem get up on their own.
Just because you can point out exceptions — and that's all they are: one-off exceptions — to the racial imbalances in the American criminal justice system doesn't mean they aren't glaringly and egregiously there.
It should be every unjust sentence awarded not served. The terror of being told 20 years and living out 1 them is enough to award 20 years to someone else.
3-5 years is fine as long as everyone else who colluded or was complicit also gets caught up in this, especially DAs. The citizens of Massachusetts should demand a thorough clean up of the lab to bring it back to reputability, and that means cleaning house.
I reckon that all other 49 states should see this as a sign to perform their own audits. I just hope that if such audits are performed, that they don't get swept under the rug. Otherwise the problem will be solved, but many who didn't get due process will continue to rot in jail so that other states can save face.
20+ year jail sentences are already excessive for the overwhelming majority of people in jail with 20+ year sentences.
Oh, don't worry. She screwed over 40000 people. The number of lawsuits she'll have to defend against should see her ass parked in court for a decade. Even without any conviction.
Literally my first thought, and glad this was the top comment. It seems insane to me that someone ruins the lives of THOUSANDS and is only given a 3 to 5 year sentence. True irony at its finest.
The chemist involved was believed to have tainted over 40,000 cases over the duration of about 10 years and they'll only get 3 to 5 years? Seriously? Weev who was involved in the arguable AT&T data breach got a 41 month jail term, people who've been caught selling counterfeit DVD's have been given similar sentences.
Dookhan should serve the sentences that she was responsible for, every single case. If anything, I think the death penalty is fair. Imagine all of the lives she ruined. all of the families and children who grew up thinking their dad, mother, grandparent or relative were convicted criminals. Not to mention the trouble convicted inmates have when they get out adjusting to reality and getting a job, credit, etc.
What about the main prosecutor involved here? Is he going to be subjected to a court case as well? Or will the system prove itself reliable once again and the chemist will be vilified and blamed.
Why is your focus on the chemist despite the fact that she was basically bribed? This is a conspiracy and the prosecutors and DA should be investigated. But of course, they're going to be the ones bearing the case against her, and taking the spotlight off themselves. And the only ones who will correctly investigate the DA/prosecutors would be the FBI, I really doubt anything is really going to be done here that will be substantial other than a political panzy-dance.
The chemist could have easily spoken out. Protections would have been put into place to ensure that she and her family wouldn't have been harmed. Obviously blackmail and fear plays a part here, but evident by the fact she didn't seem to be upset about being caught nor deny anything, sounds like a classic case of a sociopath (or even part sociopath). How could you live with yourself knowing for ten years you've ruined countless lives? Whether she believes it or not, she had her chance and the blame sadly does lay with her and the prosecutor for being complacent in the crimes taking place.
I'd have to disagree. It's not easy to out a prosecutor, considering that they could be the one to tell their buddies (other prosecutors) to fix you good.
How 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 literally everyone who should be acting impartially is also employed by the same government. How can that create a balanced process?
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.
I may be talking out of my ass here, but I was under the impression that for weighting, the transport or container will be considered. For things like LSD, this is really idiotic, as the transport (like paper) will weight many, many, times any prohibited substance.
If the same rules are used for all drugs, then adding weight might not require any prohibited substances. Also, a record of something going up in weight may be odd, but probably is less interesting than it going down in weight.
Not that it negates your point. She may have just written down false weights on the data they sent to court.
there should be super careful weighing with, and without the packaging. i'm too lazy to ask my wife who'd know, but i believe that for tracking purposes they include the paper. for sentencing purposes they sample the paper in a couple of places, work out average concentration, and then math math back from there to whatever number is necessary.
going up in weight (by more than the uncertainty of the scales' measurement) is going to be a hell of a lot more interesting to anybody who actually cares, since that can't happen in the normal course of testing. certainly going down is what implies diversion, but it is also necessary for testing purposes.
What is to prevent the chemist from just cutting the coke after snorting some of it. Coke comes in 10% baking soda, goes out 15% baking soda, and who is in charge of figuring that out? The person that did it...
you realize that would help the defendant, if anything, right? perhaps even to the extent of getting the evidence excluded entirely?
(also chemists generally don't want some random guy's cocaine. they know the awful shit street drugs get cut with. once you're DEA registered, you can basically just order pure drugs from the government. that's the stuff that gets diverted, and it's also how you'd up the concentration of a defendant's sample.)
even so, that's why two people are supposed to be present for the handling, and samples should be homogenized early on and then split up for independent testing if the defendant wants it. add on lots of tamper evident tape, etc.
"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."
It would be trivial for any chemist to "divert" cocaine up their nose and not get caught if they put some thought into it. As you said, some already do "divert" cocaine up their nose, so obviously some chemists are interested in random guy's cocaine. If the DEA is catching people through record keeping, you can be sure there are some chemists who sensibly doctor the records at the same time.
If the chemist is interested in doctoring lab results to screw over a defendant (rather than get high).... well shit, we already know that is possible, don't we? That is the entire point of this discussion. There is really absolutely no sense in arguing that chemists cannot doctor evidence to send some guy up the river, we already know that they can.
A simpler validation process would be to compare the positive/negative ratio a chemist in a similar position produces. This would only involve sharing very small datasets between labs.
Are we seriously up in arms about the chemist? The prosecutors are the worse filth here. And the worst thing about it is that the DA and the prosecutors are going to bury her into the ground, and villify her, while they get away totally scott-free. The system just keeps on churning..
“Any help would be greatly appreciated!” he wrote,
punctuating each sentence with a long string of
exclamation points. “Thank you!”
I agree that the prosecutors are probably guilty of some kind of misconduct. However, I think the email you quote is the kind we would see either way. We expect prosecutors to be unabashed in their pursuit of convictions - it's their job. They should cajole and berate, in turn, people who help or hinder their cases.
That may be a shitty model, but it's the model we use. We have a responsibility to only punish people for things they knew to be wrong - thanking a lab tech for a favorable result doesn't cross that line.
That email, unless pleasantries or enthusiasm count as bribes, would not be considered a bribe. It's just good practice to be polite to those who can help you. Perhaps we should legislate that prosecutors should be dour towards everyone they encounter, less a pleasant experience bias someone?
P.s. I realize that improper conduct by both parties is probable in this case, but the quoted email certainly does not cross the line.
Why should prosecutors ever be in direct contact or even know the people running the actual tests? Except in cases where the lab must testify, in which case there should be separate controls (perhaps someone else runs the tests).
Allowing prosecutors to "do their job" and try to be polite or have any influence at all on what's supposed to be a purely factual system is completely and utterly wrong.
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 stores full of "free" games that are full of micro-payments and ads. (Instead of the Doom model of a few free levels and a paid for full version).
1) Most of the people probably were guilty of the crimes they were accused of. A technically faulty conviction means legal innocence, but not actual innocence.[1] Everyone deserves due process, obviously, and "probably" isn't good enough to convict someone, but it is something that can help someone like this rationalize their actions. "I'm just helping get a conviction this guy deserves anyway."
2) Like most people involved in the criminal justice system, these are not sympathetic people. Prior convictions, prior jail time, gang affiliation, etc. You can imagine her rationalizing by saying that even if the accused weren't guilty of the specific crimes against them, they were guilty of something.
Obviously I'm not trying to justify the actions of the chemist here. The criminal justice system has due process and protections and those things are important. But the fact of the matter is that most people who are brought through it are not "good people." That's just the nature of the system. The police don't arrest random law-abiding middle class people and pin crimes on them. For people who work in police work and prosecution, it's a constant parade of various degrees of unsympathetic characters. That's the psychological environment in which this chemist was working. And again, without justifying her actions, if you're trying to understand her psychology, that's where you need to start.
The Nietzsche quote is appropriate here: "And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
[1] This is something I think people have a tough time grappling with. I have friends who do work on wrongful convictions and prisoners rights. It's extremely important, valuable work. But often their work involves defective convictions, not people who are truly innocent (as a matter of actual fact, not as a matter of legal determination).
No. It is simpler than you are making it out to be.
If you say "I did the test that proves it is heroin" and you didn't, and you are smart enough to be a chemist, and you see some poor guy get put in jail, then you are evil.
But she didn't think she was being evil. She somehow persuaded herself that what she was doing was okay.
That's the interesting bit. Why do people go along with things that they know are wrong. She wasn't alone in this, there are a bunch of other people involved too. And it's similar for other frauds and deceptions.
She didn't wake up and think "Fuck it, I'm going to jail thousands of innocent people". So, what was she thinking?
Can we test for that kind of thinking in other people? How do we protect against is?
I think you need to dig a bit deeper than the rationalizations people give for their actions.
There is a difference between a person who genuinely considers what they are doing to be OK, and people who are actually rationlizing things they know deep down to be wrong.
I think your implicit assumption that anyone might have acted like she did, in her position, is wrong. Both a person's innate (not necessarily genetic) moral goodness, and the circumstances a person finds themselves in, play a role in how they are act.
In trying to avoid one kind of simplistic viewpoint, I think you are falling for the opposite one.
I look at her and I think "I would never do anything like that!"
But is that really true or am I just rationalising with the benefit of hindsight?
There was an article on HN about a man running a family business who started defrauding money. It needed the cooperation of other people. Rather than creating any elaborate lies he simply told them, and asked them for help. (I can't remember any more about it, which is making search tricky!). But they all went along. He was a nice guy, and they were helping him, and no-one was really being hurt. Except they were all committing serious criminal offences.
If you go deep enough, some chemical reactions managed her thoughts and behaviors, and negotiated your reaction, as well.
At some point people have to be held accountable and called names like evil. The idea that she can talk herself into believing otherwise is a travesty, mostly because it allowed it to continue.
I think the word evil was invented to describe people exactly like this woman.
I don't think other folk are giving you enough credit here. It's much to easy to think we would never do something without critical thought.
This reminds me a lot of espionage. No one sets out to betray their country, but by gradually making more and more compromises you go from being Uncle Sam to Aldrich Ames.
Maybe she was thinking "the job market for PhDs stinks. I better do this job the way I am expected. And these hoodlums don't deserve to get off on technicalities-- the cops wouldn't collar someone they didn't know was a crook."
She was thinking: "I'm helping justice." I'm sure she was thorughly assured that people she helped to convict are guilty anyways. They just needed cherry on top to convince the judge and/or jury.
In the same way that you can build a reliable system from unreliable components through clever system design, I think you can build an evil system from good but limited people.
I think a lot about the housing bubble, the popping of which has had a terrible human cost. There may be nobody on earth who is willing to say, "Yes, I helped make that happen." But there are an awful lot of borrowers, mortgage brokers, bankers, executives, and investors who are very sure that it wasn't their fault. After all, they were just doing their job or obeying the incentives.
Go check Robert Sheckley's Ticket to Tranai - it had the opposite - utopia created on the basis the human nature is flawed and some creative design. Fun read.
It's not easy to say she is evil; it requires consideration of what is evil, what is an evil person, her particular situation and how it might apply to the definitions.
Concluding a person is evil does not preclude looking at any other angles on the case. So, I don't think it is lazy to consider it.
A question that is simpler to answer is whether or not her behavior matches that of a sociopath.
Of course, if the answer is yes, and I think that it is, then you have to ask what boundaries does a sociopath have to cross to become truly "evil". I'm willing to admit that some sociopaths are not evil, but when a person has 40,000 victims and not only taints evidence but makes up fantastic job titles and passes herself off as an expert witness in court, I think she may have crossed the threshold.
Evil is an ambiguous word. It doesn't look like she did this out of malice. But greed or even fear (of saying no to hot shot prosecutors) - aren't all such reasons equally unwholesome?
Maybe, overcome with self-interest, she didn't view her victims as actual human beings. For example, if someone wanted to cut down a forest to build a strip mall on top of the land, they'd be dooming or displacing the animals (squirrels, insects, etc) that lived there, but most people would be comfortable with that.
Maybe she had dependents to take care of, and she felt that everything she did, she "did it for the family."
Given the fact that she made up impressive job titles for herself, and testified as an expert witness in areas where she did not have expertise, she seems to fit the profile of people who are considered to be "evil".
There is more to this case than the act of tainting samples. There is the collusion of others, and there are the other acts of this chemist. The whole picture is of a person who has gone over to the dark side.
So, 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.
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.
well, usually the state government has some body which certifies these labs. that works for shit (see colorado).
the only real audit is defendants having the evidence retested by their own experts. reputable privately operated laboratories doing this sort of testing for forensic purposes do exist.
The chemist did something horrible and I am not trying to justify her actions. But I think that the true culprit of this is the system of incentives typical for US penal system. If the prosecutors are rewarded based on the number of convictions and prisons can be privately owned and prisoners can be exploited for private gain... something like this is inevitable. If sending people to prison is profitable business there is always going to be someone who decides to expand their 'business' by making sure as many people as possible get sent to prison no matter whether they are guilty or not.
The investigation is expanding. Another lab worker is now being investigated and I read something about some of the prosecutors behavior be questioned. It seems as though this is the beginning not the end.
I find it hard to believe she'd be the only person to do these sorts of things. How many other people across the US in similar positions are surreptitiously tampering with the legal system right now? And how can we find them?
Spot on. It's outrageous that one person was able to cause this much damage, but the sentencing in this case very strongly indicates that there is a perverse system of incentives which allows things like this to happen. As long as someone profits, economically or otherwise, on people being sent to jail, there is an incentive structure which perverts justice. It's shocking to be that there isn't more focus on this problem.
your hypothesis is backed up by this story claiming that at least one other chemist has also been tainting evidence and that 180.000 cases now need to be reviewed.
> Edit: Goes to prove that a _GOOD_ defense lawyer would have dig that up during cross exam. (if that is a thing)
sure, the defense lawyer can ask questions, but what series of questions do you think they could've asked that would've done anything here?
they would've needed to perform pre-trial investigations of the lady (such as the state police performed) to discover this. which isn't out of the question, but isn't very likely to be worth it for the defendants. (cost high, likelihood of useful information low.)
since that is exactly what she was lying, or confused about, i fail to see how asking it one more time would help.
in fact, the state prosecutors probably asked her that question a bajillion times, as part of qualifying her as an expert witness.
(added: in case you don't know, i'd like to clarify that qualifying expert witnesses occurs in open court. the defense, judge, jury, anyone watching the case, etc would all hear the question asked, and her answer. this would come after a copy of her CV, including relevant degrees, was submitted.)
Embarassing for the government, criminal, etc? Yes, but the title (both on HN and in the original) is sensationalistic. 40,000 cases in 10 years? That's around 15 cases per working day. She must have almost done a search and replace to be that 'productive'.
Because of that, I suspect the 'up to 40,000' means there are 40,000 cases that she might have affected, not that she is known to have affected.
Judging by the article she wasn't fabricating evidence, but rather she was "strengthening" what she was given. All her cases clealry need to be re-evaluated, but unconditionally releasing everyone convicted is hardly a sensible option.
There is no way of knowing of that "strengthened" evidence was the difference between any given person walking or going to jail. They all need to be retried, and imprisoning them until that can happen is an injustice. Give them all the opportunity to make bail again until new trials can be arranged.
If the circumstances of their crime make it such that they cannot be retried (for example, all the substantial evidence was bloodwork that was corrupted and cannot be taken again, many months or years later) then they should be released. Guessing that they actually are bad guys isn't good enough.
Article One of the United States Constitution guarantees the writ of habeas corpus. If their conviction was based on the "strengthened" evidence, I believe not releasing them would be unlawful detention and be unconstitutional.
if their offense was not sufficient to warrant holding in jail before the trial I think they should be let out on ankle bracelets or such.
The simple matter here is, the evidence was faulty. Hopefully no prosecutors were in on it, but if the evidence was used to convict then any conviction is suspect.
Numbers don't matter when justice is determined. The government should have better means to validate its employees are doing what they are supposed to do.
I would have liked to seen the Chemist sentenced to life, or at least the cumulative number of years of all sentences with tampered evidence.
How many of those 190,000 pose a risk of harm to other people? How many of them were violent, or sexual[1], offenders?
[1] Laws are different in different places, but here I'm talking about actual sex offences, not things like public urination. (Which is gross, but usually not a sexual offence).
It doesn't really matter what their offense was if the prosecution can't convict them for it legitimately. Any convictions dependent on that chemist's work should be void.
Justice has not been served. People get longer sentences for marijuana possession. The prosecutors in those emails should be jailed for life along with the chemist.
Remarkable is the motivation of this chemist. No substantial money has changed hands, and she probably hasn't even received a promotion due to her higher conviction rates. She probably did it for the recognition or out of some perverse sense of justice. That's actually good news, because it means this case is probably very special.
I would expect them never being allowed to be a prosecutor ever again. There's plenty of other legal jobs they can have, but they abused the public's trust too much to ever hold this one ever again.
Uh, no. They shouldn't be allowed to have any legal profession again.
Think about all the wrongfully convicted people who are marked as felons now. They can't get a job in the legal field now. Hell, they have difficulty getting a job at a fast food restaurant.
The fact that the sociopaths who committed this travesty against justice have expensive mortgages to pay and private schools to send their kids to isn't any reason for excess gentleness.
Yea, no. How about prison time? If you knowingly try to subvert the process that is there to keep innocent people from being found guilty, for personal gain, then you deserve a greater punishment than having to look for another job.
I would want, but not expect, far stiffer punishment than that.
This isn't "you suck at your job," this is "you are an evil person, and willingly have broken the law that you know so well to destroy the lives of others in an attempt to further yourself."
This indicates a serious level of corruption in the police, in the prosecutors, and possibly even in the politicians who are in charge of these things. If this had happened in Putin's Russia, the people in charge would all be fired in disgrace, and the prisoners would be freed with compensation payments.
But in America? What will happen?
Americans like to talk loudly about corruption in other countries but when they learn about corrupt police in many states, corrup sherriffs, corrupt prosecutors (2nd recent case in Mass.) then what do they do? Not much!
This is why the American Empire is on the way out. My family is learning Mandarin Chinese and Russian because it is clear that the two big powers of Asia will dominate the world of the 21st century.
I find it disappointing that the majority of posts here only want revenge with long sentences or even death, and only a minority want to change the system or put systems in place to make this less likely to happen again.
She did not act alone. It is abundantly clear that the prosecutors knew that there was some funny business going on. There are extremely perverse incentives for prosecutors to cheat by any means possible for career advancement.
The only way to fix this is to set it up so that "getting a conviction" in no way whatsoever enhances a prosecutor's career.
I gather from the article there was a lot of contact between the chemist and various prosecutors. That should stop. Maybe we should consider evidence-gathering a judicial function instead of an executive one.
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.