The former state chemist whose alleged wrongdoing has undermined the integrity of thousands of drug convictions across Eastern Massachusetts was arrested and brought before a judge Friday to face charges that she falsified reports and lied about her professional credentials.
Annie Dookhan, a 34-year-old mother of a young son, was escorted by State Police from her Franklin home in handcuffs just before noon Friday, just one day after Governor Deval Patrick predicted criminal charges in a scandal that has already led to the release of or reduced bail for at least 20 drug defendants.
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Will she be put in the same cell as some of the thousands of people she helped to falsely convice?
I agree with you here.
Where were her supervisors?
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Rest assured that if this was a private sector melt down like the one that happened last winter with National Grid, where the CEO of that entity was (rightly) rippped apart, the governor and other political leaders would be lined up in front of TV cameras all day long saying how outraged they are and calling for resignations and hearings.
The governor's executive management skills are open to legitimate questions. There are holes in his administrative governance process that enabled this oversight to snowball into a major problem. What procedures does he have in place to ensure departments under his direct control are working properly? Contrary to what some may think, It's not aways about politics. Once in a while competence does matter.
I'm not a big fan of Deval's but, let's face it, trying to oversee state agencies is no easy task. How many of those who work for the state got their jobs due to political connections and not based on the qualifications it takes to get a job in the private sector? The private sector certainly has its issues but having to be profitable to exist is a strong motivation to run your business correctly. What's the motivation for state employees who work for agencies funded by tax dollars?
If politics wasn't involved then you woundn't trying to blame the governor at this early stage. Besides, I'm aware of your political history on these forums.
They should arrest all the supervisors... including Julie Nassiff the Lab Director who was fired. This is no one person job... to be fair with the system
Gov. Patrick must be in heaven! He couldn't keep Secure Communities from protecting Massachusetts citizens, but now he's got a great reason to let thousands of criminals go!
If the person or group who hired her had checked with the college as to whether she had such a degree in chemistry, she never would have been hired and this disaster never would have happened. What kind of negligence is this? The person or group in charge does not bother to check out and verify her resume? Hello?? Good God, let's also fire that bleep or bleeps and while we are at it, Martha, check out the resumes of the other lab employees to see whether their claims are true or not and fire them all if they prove to be false.
Her resume didn't list a Masters when she applied and it wasn't a requirement of her job. She started claiming she had a masters when she testified in court, that's the illegal part.
In case you're ignorant of the fact, stephanosky, Martha Coakly had nothing to do with running the lab.
It's not her responsibility to check resumes of state employees. Right now she's investigating crimes committed by a single person, not running a fishing expedition... Thank goodness.
Since she had no concern for those who she was supplying fraudulent evidence against, she certainly was no "bleeding heart" liberal. Maybe she's a right-wing fascist who believed when people are arrested they have to be guilty regardless of the evidence. She was just doing her civic duty, clearing the streets of riff-raff.
There is a stronger possibility that she was working very hard to keep up with the work-load assigned to her. This employee's Supervisors have a responsibility to the staff they oversee and shame on them for ignoring the untenable schedule of testing crucial drug samples and court appearance. On the other hand - lying under oath about her credentials - is a whole different issue (perjury) and what about the mandatory state Performance Evaluations? Surely, the Laboratory SUpervisors were smart enough to know what is or is not a possible work load for one of their staff.
I'm not surprised you're defending her, and trying to throw blame all over the Commonwealth. Do you have any idea how pathetic that is?
God this is just awful.
16,000 cases, but only 1100 are still in prison. How many of the 14,100 were innocent. They were convicted and served time. Do they have any recourse?
That should be 14,900. With those math skills, the state of Mass would love you to work in their crime lab, or even better, in their budget office.
Yeah, I made a simple arithmetic error. Thank for your kind words.
Heroin, not heroine.
She can't have acted alone. Assuming most of what police confiscate is positive, how did it somehow become negative en-route top the lab, which then needed to make sure it was positive in order to prosecute the original charges? Dealers arrested with coke were dealing coke, which was replaced with some other powder that needed to be positive for cocaine, validating the arrest - so where's all the cocaine, all the missing heroin and where is the money? There is much more to this story.
The buck stops in the Governors office and the AG's office.Of course they will deflect the blame and to great fanfare will publicly try her and throw her in jail,but they all share responsibility for this.Where was the oversight?
I agree, this is about what leaders did Gov Patrick have in place, and what was the communication like: did the Governor's office have a policy of "tell me immediately about issues and let's deal with it" or "don't tell me bad news" ?
This led me to think about this: what's the difference with Gov Patrick and Obama regarding 'being a black leader'? Why can I publicly disagree with many of Patrick's policies, and noone has ever accused me of being a racist, yet if I criticize President Obama's policies I am quickly deemed to be a racist? I guess that's just a win for Massachusetts voters and Patrick supporters.
They could cover up and refuse to release the cell phone records for Tim *CRASH* Murray (did he ever pay the Commonwealth for that car he totaled as promised?) but they can't cover this up.
The governor's executive management skills are open to legitimate questions. There are holes in his administrative governance process that enabled this oversight to snowball into a major problem. What procedures does he have in place to ensure departments under his direct control are working properly?
Patrick, like other MA governors, has not shown an affinity for the details of being the state's executive officer. His past blunders such as having the house slam gaming down our throats, allowing the MBTA to award contracts to unproven suppliers, the unexplained midnight ride of Tim Murray and a community college run amoke shrink in comparison to this debacle.
This strikes at the very core of the rule of law upon which our society is based. He allowed that to erode on his watch. He is a nice guy, intelligent, very charming and wonderful family man. But he is a lousy executive. Contrary to what some may think, It's not aways about politics. Once in a while competence does matter
This may be the ideal time for the Commonwealth to admit defeat in the drug war.
If drugs were legalized and controlled and taxed, think how many crimes could be prevented. With legal access to controlled substances, the drug cartels would go away. Rather than getting uncontrolled substances from street corners or drug dens, adults could purchase drugs as they now purchase alcohol and cigarettes.
Of course there would still be abuses, but the number of deaths would decrease, the prisons would cease to be overcrowded, and the Commonwealth would get a cash bonanza in the taxes raised from the sale of drugs.
The time to be self-righteous about a drug war should come to an end. After all, what has improved in the past 50 years of fighting this war and how much has been wasted in terms of human life and money spent to stop that which doesn't appear to be stoppable?
Do we really need to continue to allow drug gangs to run freely and shoot people at will. This will not stop unfortunately but it will be severely impacted with the state taking over the sale of drugs.
“Right now, I think the focus should be on why her actions went unchecked for so long,” said DeJuneas. “If they had done their job in making sure she was doing her job the right way, a lot of this would not have happened.” Totally agree. Everything so far has focused on Dookhan without questioning how her supervisors allowed her to operate the way she did. Dookhan was a rogue chemist but the bigger story is the environment she worked in for such an important state agency. Another black eye for state run agencies.
Of course her supervisors have been questioned and some have been fired or resigned. That's a different issue.
Don't minimuze the fact that the *sole perpetrator* of these crimes was Dookhan. Whatever the failings of supervision, it was Dookhan who sent innocent people to prison. It was Dookhan's work that is causing the release of likely-guilty criminals. No matter how many supervisors are found to be incompetent, without Dookhan's criminal activity there would be no scandal and no impact on the criminals and the innocent.
Who was giving the Jamaica Laboratory their 'accreditation status' all these years?
Was it another State department.
Generally in my experience, accreditation is based largely on the correct procedures and policies being in place. That doesn't mean people are religiously following the policies and procedures. And it's likely that any visits by accreditors would be known about well ahead of time, if there were such visits. This is from my experience in the private sector, but I think it's probably common.
This catastrophic event was an accumulation of poor management for many, many years.
In general terms, that makes some sense to me. But it's also like saying a person died of "respiratory arrest" (stopped breathing): there are a lot of ways to get to there. Fixing this problem moving forward will depend entirely on the specifics of how it happened. It may be mostly limited to a crazy/deceptive chemistry tech and her disinterested supervisor, or turn out to be something much bigger still. The specifics, not the breathless initial reporting, will tell us what to do next.
It may not be politically correct, but the Globe should question who hired her and was in based on
Affirmative Action and a desire for "diversity".
Oh, now racism raises it's ugly head. I'm surprised you revealed your true colors so blatantly, but now we all know.