When I studied for my masters in forensics, I was trained to follow the evidence dispassionately and without bias. Even minor hints of bias in your analysis could be cause for dismissal of an entire body of work.
Which is why I find the story of Annie Dookhan so chilling.
Today’s Moment of Science… fast and cheap analysis will cost you for a long time.
My forensics degree brought me to a private toxicology testing lab in Woburn, MA, a skip down the road from where Annie Dookhan worked at Hinton Lab, the Massachusetts’ state drug lab. Dookhan had been, by all reports, an excellent student and a hard worker. She graduated from University of Massachusetts Boston with a biochemistry degree in 2001, then worked as a QC analyst at a pharmaceutical company.
Dookhan told coworkers at the pharmaceutical company that she was working on her masters in chemistry at Harvard part time. She’d had to drop out of Harvard as an undergrad, making it all the more vindicating. Unfortunately, the tale was a long con to bag a promotion that never came; she hadn’t taken a single class at Harvard. New bullshit credentials followed her to the Hinton Lab, where her resume boasted a non-existent masters from UMass. She told her new coworkers she was, once again, in graduate courses at Harvard.
She was by far the fastest chemist in her new job, speeding through testing on three times the amount of samples as the next analyst in her first year. The following year she produced four times the output, which should have made somebody raise an eye.
In the 2009 Melendez-Diaz case, the Supreme Court ruled that forensic analysts had to appear in court to testify on evidence instead of just sending in certification of their results. The reasoning behind the decision was that it would treat analysts as ‘witnesses’ to the case, allowing them to be cross-examined, routing out bad actors.
Because surely, if someone’s willing to fuck with evidence, they would never perjure themselves. Mmmhmmm.
The volume of samples Dookhan analyzed dropped that year because of the time she spent in court, as did the other chemists. The following year though, she spent more hours on the stand and somehow churned through about five times the average volume of samples.
Her co-workers were sick of this bullshit. They’d witnessed years of her not calibrating equipment properly and barely touching her microscope while somehow completing loads of microscopic analysis. She allegedly did mountains of lab work but produced very little waste. Nothing added up with the lab’s golden child.
In 2011 Dookhan was caught in a few serious violations. She’d taken out nearly a hundred drug samples without properly signing for them and forged her co-workers initials in the evidence log. Somehow, she still wasn’t fired, but she was removed from lab duties while continuing to testify in court. She was placed on administrative leave in spring of 2012, and a couple of detectives showed up at her house in August of that year.
They asked her about accusations of dry labbing.
If you hand a chemist a test tube with an unknown white powder, I imagine that you want them to do some chemistry to find out what’s in it. Dookhan took a more, uh, creative approach called dry labbing. She’d get a sample, look at it with her eyeballs, and decide it was cocaine without any testing. When she did actual chemistry and something came back negative, she’d try again by adding some cocaine to it.
In emails exchanged with prosecutors (which also isn’t protocol for a chemist) she said she wanted to “get bad guys off the streets.” Ironic, because from all that evidence tampering, every case she worked on was ripe for being thrown out the window. The perjury from getting on the stand and saying that she had a non-existent masters degree was icing at that point.
It’s unclear how much this has cost the state of Massachusetts, but estimates are into the nine figure range. Over 20,000 people have been released so far, and it’s believed that her work affected over 40,000 cases.
Dookhan was sentenced to 3-5 years in prison, and was released in 2016 after serving less than three years. The minimum sentences for many of the people whose drug convictions she caused were longer than that.
This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you that science is only as good as the people using it.
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I’m absolutely disgusted that she got off with such a light sentence, after all the lives she ruined–both by getting innocent people convicted, and by tainting the evidence enough that guilty drug dealers were released and hurt even more people.
For a similar case, read about Fred Zain, from West Virginia. Many convictions were thrown out because of his misconduct. When this was finally coming out, there were allegations that the state police would come to Zain, and say something to the effect that “We’re sure we have the right guy, and all we need for a conviction is your lab results (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).” This case alone turned me from pro-death penalty to anti-death penalty.