Actually, 3-5 years sounds pretty reasonable. If you think about it, you should be glad that she didn't get a crazy "send a message" punishment of 20 years or life in prison. She'll never work in that capacity again, so it's not like there's a need to separate her from society for the protection of society.
A better question to address is how a single rogue person could do so much damage. This is institutional failure. Just going after this woman misses the big problem.
If she were sentenced 1 day's prison time for each of the occurrences, it would add up to ~40,000 days in prison, or ~109 years.
I don't disagree that there's an institutional failure, and that perhaps there are others to blame, but she has negligently affected countless lives by disregarding her oaths to uphold the law, and I believe that sort of thing should carry more penalty, not less. Also, we really, really need to start making our civil servants accountable to flagrant violations of the law, lest we have more of them lying before Congress without fear of actual penalty.
I suspect the more they pin on her (and the news articles so far have been very much "witchy"), the more they will deflect from the lax oversight in the lab and the collusion of the prosecutors.
I don't disagree at all. Meanwhile, I'm convinced that the more they don't pin on her, the more it means that they're giving her lenience so that she doesn't roll over and spill details on those institutional failures that they might all have been a part of.
FYI, this post is egregiously oversimplifying, and I deserve ridicule for that, but I'm going to bed -- on a normal day, I wouldn't respond to this for some time.
I'm fine with 3-5 years so long as everyone else responsible in this situation, including DAs are subject to due process as well. There is no way that one person is responsible for almost 34k tampered cases all on her own without many other people being involved or at least aware.
I'm not a fan of our overly aggressive justice system, but if it is going to be overly aggressive, it needs to apply equally aggressively to the watchers as well. Any asymmetry in application of the current practices leaves far more room for abuse in the future than one that is applied equally to all parties. Justice is blind. If she is going to aggressively wield her sword, both your standard street thugs and corrupt government officials should have equal chance of getting struck by her sword.
We can't let the entire system throw her under the bus for 20+ years, while many other guilty parties get away after having been complicit or actively colluded.
Yeah, based on the email content from the prosecutors, it looks like they were in on it too. How does a 50lbs package of marijuana magically become 80lbs as requested by the prosecutor? It sounds like the entire system is corrupt.
Prosecutors are the ones I want most to see investigated here. I would not be surprised is this is a real life example of Stanley Milgram's 1963 obedience to authority experiments.
From Wikipedia:
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment,
he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this
order:[1]
1) Please continue.
2) The experiment requires that you continue.
3) It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4) You have no other choice, you must go on.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were emails from prosecutors that essentially parroted these instructions in a more indirect form.
"Please examine the evidence again."
"Finding justice requires that you examine the evidence again"
"It is absolutely essential that you examine the evidence again"
"You have no other choice, you must examine the evidence again"
the forensic community is pretty good about these things. the folks who do these things get whispered about like a bogeyman for years. everybody in this woman's field knows about her now, and will be googling up "massachusetts chemist" for the next 20 years whenever they get a female chemist from massachusetts applying for a position.
maybe it would be more constructive to address that reply to someone talking about her sentencing? i haven't expressed an opinion on it either way.
as far as lying about her background, criminal background checks are par for the course in this line of business. anything drug related ever, or anything indicating a propensity for lying are automatic disqualifications.
I am addressing this: "everybody in this woman's field knows about her now, and will be googling up "massachusetts chemist" for the next 20 years whenever they get a female chemist from massachusetts applying for a position." Googling a liar is a poor defense.
Background checks obviously didn't figure out that she was lying the first time. Why should we trust them a second time?
If you think a criminal background check is going to be effective at ensuring this woman will never work in this particular field again, that may be one thing, but you were suggesting that mere awareness of this woman would cause potential future employers to use Google to ensure that they never hired her. This would of course be ineffective, since she has been proven to be a liar.
I don't know why you think I have a bone to pick... You seem a little annoyed that I am responding to something that you did not mean to be your primary point. You are going to have to find a way to cope with that.
I believe part of the accusations are that she actually tainted evidence. So testing her results would not be sufficient, you would need to test samples that she never had access to in the first place.
reputable labs already have every single piece of work looked over, and the process completely repeated for random samples at increasing intervals of time.
and defendants should have their evidence retested by independent labs when possible.
I agree. Without knowing much about penology, punishment for the sake of punishment seems overused in the US. Her prison sentence is short relative to all those given out because of her acts, but I think prison sentences in the US are too long to begin with.
34000 over nearly a decade career. It's 9.3 cases per day for 10 years, without weekends, vacations or holidays.
And 45 minutes of work per case. Provided she had 7hr working day and a lunch break. And she occasionally testified in courts.
How is that even possible?
I had to think about how it could be plausible to anyone, and then I remembered what my late father (a chemistry major who later worked as an industrial engineer) used to tell me about working in chemistry labs. Sometimes you have to sit around and wait while an assay runs, but I suppose an efficient person (who has enough equipment) could run more than one assay at a time, and monitor each result in turn. I have no specialized knowledge about what a normal rate of doing tests would be in a well administered state crime lab.
I like that you ran the numbers, and think you have a good question.
One remark in the original article said she had access to files and samples for many cases that she was not primary on. Perhaps that's the issue -- the ability to taint results across the whole departmental workload.
Excellent question and one that raises another one. Could she possibly have tainted that many cases working alone? If not, we should be looking at every one around her including the DA.
Simple network analysis of every person (arresting officer, DA and other crime lab technicians) involved in these ~34k cases should be able to come up with a dozen or so people that warrant additional scrutiny.
Actually, it says that someone was let out because she was a secondary chemist. So in other words, if she even came close to working on a case, then it's suspect.
Not to mention, she falsified lab results to the degree that she didn't even do any testing at all on many samples. That's pretty much close to zero time to file the report.
When it comes to intent - she deliberately tainted some samples! Gotta ask yourself why.
I volunteer with a nonviolent communication program at a local prison, and I would guess that sentence would completely shatter her, at least if she was male. Every fellow inmate will identify with her victims and in a male prison they would be vengeful. Not sure how it will work out in a female prison.
Seriously. There are reasons US prisoners keep going back in and part of it is the focus on punishment instead of rehabilitation. Haven't the US a whole amendment dedicated to not using beatings or shankings as a punishment? I wish more people would reflect on why that was considered a good idea back in the day.
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.
What's the justification for that? What qualifies you to pass such a sentence, and what makes the sentence the justice system settled on inappropriate?
The extreme magnitude of the impact of her crime. Injuring 34,000 victims. "Breaking" the justice system. Abuse of the extraordinary power society placed in her.
How about serving the sentences she was responsible for? Even if she served 1 day for every sentence that was a result of her intentional tampering of the evidence, she would be serving life.
There is more to consider than merely justice. We also have to protect society from her. How could she ever possibly be trusted again to anything? Hell, I wouldn't even trust her to bag my groceries. She lied about her background once, and harmed thousands of people. Who is to say that in 20 years she won't be found under another name, in another state, running this or another scam again?
If our system was set up to rehabilitate, that would be great, but it isn't. As long as she remains un-rehabilitated, she should be kept locked up. Not out of some sense of justice or for retribution, but simply to keep her from harming others again.
I feel like there must be others who share the responsibility. There's no way a single chemist could be the source of 34,000 convictions. Since they found a second chemist tainting the results at the lab, I'm guessing the entire prosecution system is corrupted.
