PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "It’s a feature of our criminal justice system that while it defines its goal as public safety, it makes no use of the lessons learned by experts who have studied safety in high impact fields such as aviation, medicine, and nuclear power. Yes, those experts would tell us to discipline rule violators. No system can survive without doing that. But they would also warn us that punishing the bad apples is a terrible place to stop—that it is an illusion to think that the job is to protect a safe system from the occasional bad person. Look at any criminal justice catastrophe—a lab scandal, a wrongful conviction, a death in custody, a mistaken release—and you will find what medical experts found whenever they looked at “wrong patient” surgeries, or wrong dosage deaths: dozens of small errors, no one of them independently sufficient to cause the tragedy, combine with each other and with latent system weaknesses. Then—but only then—the nightmare becomes a reality — an “organizational accident.” Cops under pressure to hit a Compstat number stop a guy on Dudley Street. He has a bag in his pocket. He thinks it contains cocaine. In fact, it contains baking soda. The cops arrest him, and seize the bag. A “field test” of the contents is ambiguous, but he has an outstanding warrant for ignoring child support orders, so the cops arrest him, and charge him with possessing drugs with intent to distribute. An assistant district attorney charges a felony trafficking offense. The bag goes to the lab. The lab is overwhelmed; the volume of cases forces triage, shortcuts, “covert work rules.” Today’s “covert work rule” sets the stage for practical drift to another even more lax practice tomorrow. Annie Dookhan fakes a test result and certifies it. It “makes sense” to her—it’s despicable, but rational. No one questions the result—maybe no one is able to question the result. The case comes back to court. The prosecutor has a file, nothing else. The defender has 50 files, and no easy access to a chemist of his or her own. The judge has 40 cases on his docket and needs to get to zero by 4 p.m. A deal is offered: Drop the mandatory minimum, offer six months in the House of Correction. We have a dozen individual mistakes here, and we have a gradual demoralization that made the mistakes and violations “normal.” When the innocent man pleads guilty rather than risk taking a 20-year sentence, a dozen “someones” have their fingerprints on the case. Other “someones” far from the scene, who set the budgets, devised the incentives, built the pressures, but left no fingerprints, played their roles, too. None of them intended the catastrophic results they helped bring about. When we discover one of these travesties of justice, we have to seize the opportunity that it offers to discover the myriad system weaknesses that still lie in wait for the next case that will come along—and it will come along."
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COMMENTARY: “The problem isn’t just a few bad apples,” by James Doyle, published by Commonwealth, (a non-profit journal of politics, ideas and civic life), on February 22, 2023. (James Doyle is a Boston defense lawyer and author and formerly the head of the public defender division of the Committee for Public Counsel Services and director of the Center for Modern Forensic Practice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
SUB-HEADING: "Learn the lessons: lab scandals require top-to-bottom review."
GIST: "Now we learn that Inspector General Glen Cuhna, who once seemed ready to pin a massive state drug lab scandal on a lone chemist, Annie Dookhan, actually referred four other lab workers for prosecution. Interesting.
Still, counting the number of “bad apples” shouldn’t distract us from the reality that the Massachusetts lab scandals were not the work of isolated violators; they were full system crashes. A look at them will reveal system weaknesses that exorcising individuals will not cure. Ignore that fact, and we are doomed to see this fiasco repeated.
Standing to the left of Annie Dookhan (and Sonja Farak, too) were the people who hired them, trained them, supervised them, and devised the laboratory evidence-handling protocols they blithely skated around.
Standing to their right was a legion of lab directors and legal system practitioners– prosecutors, defenders, and judges—who failed (throughout the disposition of 30,000 cases) to notice that anything was amiss.
It is easy to see that Dookhan and Farak crippled the work of Massachusetts prosecutors and defenders downstream, but it is important to remember that their awareness of the ramshackle state of the downstream inspection apparatus influenced the upstream choices of the two “bad apples.”
Besides, simultaneously battering all of these players was an encompassing environment of acute caseload pressures and dire resource shortages that generated the culture of “work-arounds,” triage, and “covert work rules” that made it both attractive and possible for Dookhan and Farak to zig when they should have zagged.
Don’t look for three or four bad apples. Convene an all-stakeholders “sentinel event review” as a hospital would after a wrong patient surgery, or the NTSB would do after a plane crash.
Hold ourselves accountable for learning the lessons. Change what we can change. Build the capacity to keep doing it.”
The entire story can be read at:
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/criminal-justice/the-problem-isnt-just-a-few-bad-apples/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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;
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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;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
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