As disgraced state chemist Annie Dookhan appeared in two courtrooms Wednesday to answer to obstruction-of-justice charges, a man freed from jail less than a month ago because Dookhan tested evidence in his case was charged again with drug possession.
“I just got out on Annie Dookhan, and I ain’t going back to jail,” Jonathan Vaughan allegedly yelled to Chelsea police as he was arrested Tuesday night at a McDonald’s restaurant in Chelsea.
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One, simple, question: When running any kind of lab where accurate tests results are imperitive, wouldn't the scientifically prudent routinely run AUDITS of any testing procedure? If the state lab ran audits, how was it possible NOT to pick up on Dookhan's incompetence in fairly short order? Did the lab audit her results? Who supervised those audits? Why did they fail? Life is full of Dookhans in every endeavor and most, prudent, organizations know the imperitive of auditing even the most "outstanding" employees. In fact, its the very fact that someone in Dookhan's position was performing outrageously "well" (at least in the volumes that she was producing) that should have drawn a reasonable managers attention. Perhaps I missed this element of the case being discussed by the Globe but, regardless, isn't the critical lesson to be learned here is that this department was, apparently, so woefully mismanaged that they didn't even manage the most elemental cross check on testing to insure integrity of the process?
McDonald's isn't considered "being in public?" Seriously?