"A federal jury could begin deliberating Monday over whether
former state officials should be held responsible for the wrongdoing of
corrupt drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan, the first case of its kind to
question the state’s role in what became the worst criminal justice
scandal in Massachusetts history. The case involves a Boston man,
David Jones, who had served two-and-a-half years in prison for selling
crack cocaine, but who had that case overturned based on Dookhan’s
failure to properly test drug evidence. Jones sued several of Dookhan’s former supervisors, saying they were
complicit in her wrongdoing and negligent in not reporting her failure
to properly test drugs to authorities, depriving Jones of a fair trial. “The
fraud of this chemist, Annie Dookhan, was made known, and/or should
have been obvious, to her supervisors and managers,” Jones argued in
court records. “Yet those responsible for oversight at the JP drug lab
allowed this misconduct to continue despite unmistakable warning signs
that Dookhan’s work was suspect.” According to testimony in the
case last week, Jones was arrested in March 2010 after undercover Boston
police detectives said they saw him sell crack cocaine to someone in a
car in Mattapan Square. When the man left Jones’s car, authorities found
the crack cocaine on him and Jones was subsequently arrested, with more
than $600 in cash in his pocket. He denied selling the man drugs. His
conviction was overturned following the lab scandal — after he had
completed his prison sentence — and prosecutors chose not to try the
case again.........Lawyers in his civil lawsuit are set to deliver closing arguments
Monday morning, and jurors could begin deliberating thereafter. ........ The
case is the first civil rights lawsuit related to the Dookhan scandal
to go to trial. A separate case was filed earlier against Dookhan, her
supervisors, and the state, but the case was dismissed for technical
reasons. Several similar cases naming those defendants are pending in
federal court in Boston.........State officials called Dookhan a rogue
chemist, but a state Office of Inspector General investigation later
found a pattern of neglect, mismanagement, and poor standards at the
laboratory, known as the Hinton laboratory. Among the deficiencies, the
investigation found roughly 2,300 drug cases in which test results for
evidence were inconsistent, and yet the possibly exculpatory information
was never flagged for prosecutors and defense attorneys. Dookhan had
been involved in many, but not all, of those cases. Jones’s
lawsuit is based on those allegations. On Friday, US District Judge Mark
Mastroianni allowed copies of the Office of Inspector General report to
be presented to jurors. The lawsuit argues specifically that the
Hinton laboratory had outdated standard operating procedures, did not
follow guidelines that were recommended by the industry, failed to
provide proper oversight for chemists, and failed to report Dookhan’s
wrongdoing when it was first detected in 2008 by supervisors and
co-workers.........
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/13/jury-decide-state-officials-culpability-false-crime-lab-tests/MsOlpIrDl0SHJ5Nl4ICCUK/story.html