GIST: "When people get in trouble with the law, they have a right to due process.
That’s the term for a protection at the heart of a free society. If government is to stand in judgment, in a civil or criminal proceeding, the process must be fair to the defendant.
Outside of the courts, it’s a principle taught from preschool on. In a civil society, people are accountable for their actions. And when there could be consequences, those actions must be judged impartially.
In a ruling last week, the Supreme Judicial Court documented a massive breakdown in due process that affected tens of thousands of people. The court’s 46-page decision reveals, in horrifying detail, that for years a secretive and insular office run by the Massachusetts State Police knowingly hid potentially exculpatory information from defense attorneys and their clients.
That evidence: Internal worksheets completed by the office that showed that in hundreds of instances, devices used to test blood-alcohol levels in the drivers had “failed certifications.”
That is not playing fair.
Across the state, 27,000 people are now getting notices that they have the right to seek new trials or to withdraw guilty pleas. What’s come to light concerns us all. It reveals a stunning arrogance of power. Beyond the damage to those defendants – who number almost as many as all who live in West Springfield – this is a body blow to public trust in governments and the courts.
The SJC decision said as much.
“These defendants … did not have the benefit of using exculpatory authorization reports, the quality assurance manual, failed certification worksheets, and internal repair records to challenge the validity of the breath test instrument used in their individual cases,” the court found.
Justices said the office held a “cavalier and supercilious attitude toward its discovery obligations … (which) led to the repeated concealment of evidence that its testing process was flawed.”
The extent of the office’s missteps? “Vast.”
“The broad scope and nature of these violations of court orders undermined the criminal justice system in the Commonwealth, compromised thousands of prosecutions for OUI offenses, and potentially resulted in inaccurate convictions,” the court found.
Because of that misconduct, defendants who were subject to breath tests between June 1, 2011, and April 18, 2019, can seek to have guilty findings vacated.
For the state, it wasn’t the first time one of its labs was found to have gone rogue. In 2012, a drug lab chemist, Annie Dookhan, was found to have falsified tests on illicit drugs, in some instances reporting false positive findings that provided inaccurate information to prosecutors and defense counsel. As many as 61,000 cases were affected; Dookhan served three years in prison.
Behind all the big numbers are individual defendants. Each of them was deprived of due process. In many cases, they paid high prices for lost livelihoods.
Problems with the Office of Alcohol Testing had been ferreted out in earlier litigation and were detailed in a 2017 investigation by the unit’s state police overseers. That year, the office was found to be acting in blatant disregard of court orders. Evidence that could benefit a defendant in an OUI case was intentionally withheld.
That probe found the office to be infected by “a longstanding and insular institutional culture that was reflexively guarded.”
Translation? When it came to accountability, the Office of Alcohol Testing had an infuriating “none of your business” attitude.
For nearly a decade, the office failed to play fair with breath tests taken from people believed to have been driving under the influence. The case behind the new SJC decision stems from a 2013 arrest in Beverly at a sobriety checkpoint. The driver told officers she’d had three drinks. She failed a field sobriety test and was recorded as having nearly three times the legal limit of alcohol in her bloodstream.
Told by her lawyer the breath test results would seal the deal for prosecutors, she admitted to facts sufficient to produce a guilty finding, lost her license for two years and had to attend a 14-day second-offender program. A lower-court judge denied her request to change her plea, in light of problems with the Office of Alcohol Testing. The SJC decision now gives her – and thousands of others – that right.
They’d gone to court hoping for fairness. They now know a government office engaged in egregious misconduct that denied them due process. The road to trust will be long."
The entire editorial can be read at:
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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