Bulletin: Annie Dookhan; Massachusetts; Former state chemist Annie Dookhan was sentenced to three to five years in state prison after she pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence and filing false reports. Now a federal jury is about to decide whether the state be held responsible for the lab chemist’s wrongdoing? “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.”..."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." Boston Globe;

"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