Remember that crime lab chemist from Massachusetts who got her entire lab shut down after it was revealed that she had faked the results of thousands of tests and thus may have put thousands of people in prison unjustly? She’s now pleaded guilty to those charges.
A chemist at a Massachusetts drug lab who admitted faking test results in criminal cases pleaded guilty Friday to obstruction of justice, perjury and tampering with evidence in a scandal that has jeopardized thousands of convictions.
Annie Dookhan entered guilty pleas to the charges Friday morning in Suffolk Superior Court. She was then sentenced to three-to-five years in prison and taken in away in handcuffs.
Dookhan sent the state’s criminal justice system into a tailspin last year when state police shut down the state Department of Public Health lab she worked at after discovering the extent of her misconduct.
Prosecutors said Dookhan admitted “dry labbing,” or testing only a fraction of a batch of samples, then listing them all as positive for illegal drugs, to “improve her productivity and burnish her reputation.”
Yeah, how’s that reputation burnishing working out for you? I say the same thing here that I said of prosecutors and police officers who are proven to have faked evidence that puts an innocent person in prison: She should have to serve out their sentences. Whatever is the longest sentence of someone convicted on her fake analysis should be the length of her sentence. But the judge says she will get no more than five years in prison.
