© Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Reuters.Annie Dookhan, convicted of falsifying evidence used in roughly 34,000 criminal cases
How many people are in jail based on faked data?
Earlier this year, I wrote about a
sprawling prosecutorial scandal in Orange County, California, involving a long-standing program of secret jailhouse snitches that had tainted prosecutions in cases almost too numerous to count. This story has
only continued to worsen. One of the prosecutors at the heart of the case simply packed up and
left California last month, and just this week the news emerged that Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas had been told that his office might have a
jailhouse informant problem all the way back to 1999, a full 16 years before the current allegations about the misuse of jailhouse snitches had surfaced.
The problem with a scandal on this order of magnitude isn't just that it reflects a fundamental flaw in the justice system. The problem is that, as a purely practical matter, there is simply no easy way to correct it. In Orange County, some convictions have been tossed, others have been stalled, and a call for a Justice Department investigation has gone unheeded. Even years after cases like this come to light, undoing or redoing wrongful convictions proves almost impossible to achieve, especially when the state believes someone else should be cleaning up the mess.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of a massive scandal that cannot seem to be reversed involves
Annie Dookhan, a chemist who worked at a Massachusetts state lab drug analysis unit. Dookhan was sentenced in 2013 to at least three years in prison, after pleading guilty in 2012 to having
falsified thousands of drug tests. Among her extracurricular crime lab activities,
Dookhan failed to properly test drug samples before declaring them positive, mixed up samples to create positive tests, forged signatures, and lied about her own credentials. Over her
nine-year career, Dookhan tested about 60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases. Three years later, the state of Massachusetts still can't figure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly.
Comment: Also see: 'Structural failure'? Western propaganda rag creates narrative on the Russian A321 plane crash