Annie Dookhan: Massachusetts: Bulletin: Crime lab fiasco back in the news (it seems like it never went away. HL.) as a Supreme Court Justice drops 100 more convictions - all handled by her, The Boston Herald (Reporter Joe Dwinell) reports..."The ruling came after Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins filed a motion to vacate those convictions. She has pledged to dismiss Suffolk County drug convictions — an estimated 74,800 — for anyone whose drug certification was done at the Hinton Lab between May 2003 and August 2012. That’s when rogue chemists Dookhan and Sonja Farak were convicted of botching samples in what has become the worst case of its kind in the nation’s history."

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “No conviction that Annie Dookhan had a role in securing can be allowed to stand now that we understand the full scope and enormity of her malfeasance and the gross mismanagement of the former William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute,” Rollins said Friday."

---------------------------------------------------------------

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: 

STORY: "More drug cases dropped due to tainted chemist Annie Dookhan," by Investigative/Enterprise Reporter Joe Dwinell, published by The Boston Herald on June 25, 2021."

PHOTO CAPTION: "Former state chemist Annie Dookhan now out of jail, is still linked to botched cases."

GIST: "The Annie Dookhan lab fiasco continues to haunt the courts.

A single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court tossed 100 convictions Friday that were all handled by Dookhan.

The ruling came after Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins filed a motion to vacate those convictions. She has pledged to dismiss Suffolk County drug convictions — an estimated 74,800 — for anyone whose drug certification was done at the Hinton Lab between May 2003 and August 2012.

That’s when rogue chemists Dookhan and Sonja Farak were convicted of botching samples in what has become the worst case of its kind in the nation’s history.

“No conviction that Annie Dookhan had a role in securing can be allowed to stand now that we understand the full scope and enormity of her malfeasance and the gross mismanagement of the former William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute,” Rollins said Friday.

In tossing the cases, Rollins added taxpayers will not be forced to “shoulder the cost of litigating each of these cases individually.”

The motion to vacate the remaining cases was filed by Assistant District Attorney David A.F. Lewis, chief of District Attorney Rollins’ Integrity Review Bureau. That bureau, launched in 2019, is the first unit of its kind in the nation, the DA said.

Dookhan raced through tests falsifying evidence, prosecutors said. Farak was addicted to the drugs she was testing and was accused of smoking crack “10 to 12 times a day, including during work” at a lab in Amherst, according to a state probe.

More than 7,800 cases linked to the breaking-bad chemists were already reviewed and thrown out with prejudice as part of a 2017 Supreme Judicial Court ruling."

The entire story can be read at:

https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/06/25/more-drug-cases-tossed-due-to-tainted-chemist-annie-dookhan/

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic"  section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;

-----------------------------------------------------------------

FINAL WORD:  (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases):  "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."

Lawyer Radha Natarajan:

Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;

—————————————————————————————————

FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!

Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;