Annie Dookhan, went on a free fall from prolific chemist to the defendant at the heart of one of the biggest law enforcement scandal in recent Massachusetts history.
The injustice orchestrated by lab chemist Annie Dookhan was first revealed six years ago, after she had been working for the Massachusetts state drug lab for nearly a decade in spite of her falsified her resume.
She stated she wanted to help prosecutors, in her words, get drug dealers “off the streets.”, but what she did was cost taxpayers millions.
In the year that followed, authorities would call into question the convictions of tens of thousands of drug cases handled by Dookhan in the Massachusetts state drug lab.
While the productivity of Dookhan’s fellow chemists dropped off, Dookhan’s continued to skyrocket.
By the end of 2009, the Globe reported that other chemists had completed an average of 1,981 tests.
Dookhan had run 6,321.
That year, she also told police she started to “dry-lab” to further increase her productivity so she could keep up.
Dry-labbing is essentially identifying the drugs as what they were suspected to be.
If a sample was returned to her after a retest revealed it wasn’t what she said it was, she would contaminate it so it matched.
Eager to please, or not , that screwed the lives of tens of thousands.
The former director of the Hinton Lab in Jamaica Plain, Dr. Linda Han, said she had a few suspicions about Dookhan when she learned that Dookhan had violated lab protocol , though Dookhan had a key to the evidence safe for six months after she was caught improperly removing 90 drug samples in June 2011.
Han said she did consider whether Dookhan’s improper removal of drug samples from the safe had compromised the overall integrity of the testing. But she said Nassif told her there was not a problem.
Dookhan was taken off testing but still kept the key to the evidence lockup.
Even when Han learned that Dookhan had forged colleagues’ initials on multiple documents, Han continued to waver on what to do with Dookhan, according to the report.
Han also said she did ask why other chemists in the lab were not able to analyze as many drug samples as Dookhan, but Dookhan’s direct supervisor, Julie Nassif, answered that some samples were more complicated than others and chemists often had other duties besides testing, and in a report “It never occurred to Dr. Han that Annie Dookhan was doing too many cases,”
Eventually, Han relayed the situation to labor relations, telling an official in that office she thought the matter was a “simple disciplinary issue.” The official told her it was serious and should “go up the chain.”
Dookhan finally resigned in March 2012, and Han and Auerbach resigned a few months later, while Nassif was terminated.
Governor Deval Patrick shut down the lab in August and transferred responsibility for drug testing to the State Police.
But the full consequences of her crimes became clear when prosecutors in eight Boston-area counties announced they would dismiss 21,587 drug cases tainted by Dookhan’s misconduct.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made those dismissals official.
The American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts called it the largest dismissal of convictions in U.S. history.
“A major victory for justice, fairness, and the tens of thousands of people who were wrongfully convicted based on fabricated evidence,” ACLU executive director Carol Rose said in a statement.
[Prosecutors dismiss more than 21,500 drug cases in wake of Mass. lab chemist’s misconduct]
It appears Dookhan has remained quiet since her own conviction in 2013 for these deceptions, which the Supreme Judicial Court once said “cast a shadow over the entire criminal justice system.” .
Her silence is not surprising.
Profiles by the Boston Globe and Associated Press from years ago, when Dookhan was first arrested, portray the Trinidad-born immigrant as soft-spoken, work-obsessed and deeply private.
Her motivation, according to her attorney, reflected the overachiever mentality she had exhibited throughout her life: to be “the hardest working and most prolific and most productive chemist.”
She was a go-getter so anxious to please, former friends and colleagues said, that she made a habit of stretching the truth — and sometimes outright lying — to inflate her personal narrative.
“My colleagues call me ‘superwoman’ and say that I do too much for the lab and everyone else, in general,” Dookhan wrote in an email to an assistant district attorney, reported the Globe. “I am not a workaholic, but it is just in my nature to assist in any way possible.”
This non workaholic though, spent her time falsifying guilty verdicts, incarcerating single parents, and put the health and safety at risk ..etc.
She peddled other exaggerations and lies — about her parents’ job titles, her job titles, her salary and divorce proceedings.
Most damning though, beyond the tampered drug tests, was the lie she told about advanced degrees she never earned, which ultimately resulted in additional charges. She once swore under oath she earned a master’s degree, which she hadn’t.
[Mass. supreme court orders prosecutors to review 24,000 cases tainted by ‘rogue’ chemist]
Dookhan started working for the state drug lab in 2004, and in her first full year on the job tested 9,239 drug samples, three times more than other chemists in the lab.
The following year, that number jumped to 11,232, four times the average chemist and nearly double the second-most productive person behind her.
The year she started at the state lab, Dookhan married Surrendranath Dookhan, who would years later send frantic text messages to a district attorney his wife had befriended.
In them, he told the former assistant Norfolk County district attorney George Papachristos that his chemist wife was “looking for sympathy and attention.”
“This is Annie’s husband do not believe her, she’s a liar, she’s always lying,” one text message said.
Papachristos later resigned from his district attorney job after news reports of his personal friendship with Dookhan.
At work, colleagues began to question the lab’s most unrealistically productive chemist, and in 2010, supervisors conducted a paperwork audit of her work but found no problems, reported the Associated Press.
Though, they did not retest her samples.
It wasn’t until March 2012, after nearly a decade on the job, that Dookhan resigned.
That’s when she said “I screwed up big-time,” according to a state police report. “I messed up bad. It’s my fault.”
[Mass. crime chemist admits daily drug use in lab, sparking a second scandal]
In 2013, Dookhan pleaded guilty to 27 counts of misleading investigators, tampering with evidence and filing false reports.
She was sentenced to three years in prison, plus probation.
Dookhan has since been released on parole.
The court has asked prosecutors to decide which cases to retry and which to drop.
Meanwhile, authorities in Massachusetts are now dealing with a second major scandal at the Massachusetts state drug lab stemming from the disclosure that another chemist, Sonja Farak, was actively stealing and using seized drug samples while analyzing them.
She pleaded guilty in 2014. The consequences of Farak’s case are still to be calculated.