© Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Reuters.Annie Dookhan, convicted of falsifying evidence used in roughly 34,000 criminal cases
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.How many people are in jail based on faked data?
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: This is an appalling travesty of injustice against thousands of people, most likely disproportionately affecting the poor and minorities, yet those who are responsible for this aren't being held accountable and those who are innocent and were falsely imprisoned aren't seeing justice. Seems like another indicator of a severely corrupt system and a product of a psychopathic for-profit prison industrial complex that cares more about profits than people or justice. Anytime accountability is lacking, corruption is surely to follow.
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