Yes, she is at fault. But make no mistake, it was a system failure here.

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"During Dookhan’s nine years at the lab, Coakley said, a second chemist would test the same sample as Dookhan and come up with a different result. When the samples were sent back to Dookhan, she ­allegedly tampered with them to make them match her inaccurate ­results."

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So, there were checks. Not double blind testing where the testing is totally annonomous. The problem is that the checks raised flags which were then ignored. So, it was supervision that allowed this to happen. If there are checks and balances but they are ignored then anyone could have been tampering with the results. So, tell me why the supervisors are not criminally guilty?  When a corporation presents its finances at the end of the year the CEO must personally certify them and is at risk for prosecution if they turn out to be maniulated. So tell me why Ms. Dookhan's supervision is not culpable.

There must be other criminal charges appropriate here ... criminal negligence on the part of supervisors,  evidence tampering on the part of DAs who were in communcation with Dookhan.

“She is at the center of the drug lab’s failures and bears the primary responsibility for what went wrong there,” Patrick said. “Our focus now is on making this right.” There should also be focus on those who enabled her and how to ensure it can never happen again. To be able to do what she did on the scale that she did it, no pun intended, speaks to an incredible lack of oversight inside the lab.

Is there a problem with this caption/headline writers comment? Or, did this dud really say that? “She thinks she hasn't hurt anybody. . . . The damage she has done is incalculable,” Defense lawyer Bernard Grossberg said about Annie Dookhan (above). “She has destroyed lives that probably cannot be resurrected.” If not, ANNIE, TIME FOR A NEW LAWYER!!!

Drug testing results in criminal charges. When the testing is manipulated it results in destroyed lives, in destroyed families. So, there are "checks and balances" to ensure that the testing is done honestly. That job is just as, or even arguably more important than the testing itself. Because without assurance that the testing is valid you have an evil system. You have a system that can be manipulated to provide whatever result you want. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ This reminds me of the Priest scandal, where the actual evil doers were moved around (laundered) so that they were not found out and did not reflect badly on the organization. In that situation, the "checks and balances" were also not enforced (by the Bishops, Archbishops, the Cardinals, and the Pope). In fact, the situations we enabled to continue, much like the Supervisors did here by seemingly ignoring the red flags. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ You simply do not have an honest, clean, system if only the individual contributors are responsible and not management. And this is a system that creates criminals, not license plates. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ This is not the faithful in the parish being managed here, it's a state open to all kinds of people. If the state cannot figure out logically how to keep things honest then perhaps it needs to find out what other states have the best reputation for clean government, find out from them how they do it, and them bring some of those ideas back here.