Whole Lab is Suspect: Up to 190,000 criminal cases Affected in Massachusetts Crime Lab Scandal

NPR

Former chemist Annie Dookhan began serving a 3-to-5 year sentence in a Massachusetts prison on Friday after pleading guilty to falsifying tests of drug evidence and helping to create one of the nation's largest drug lab scandals.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley says the state is taking steps to improve forensic testing:

"It is certainly lessons learned," she says. "We hope that we've made changes in the system that will mean this unique case will not happen again in Massachusetts."

Tens of thousands of criminal cases are potentially compromised and hundreds of people have been released from Massachusetts prisons because of the sloppy drug evidence testing, which went on for years.

Dookhan admitted that she didn't always test the drug evidence she said she did, and that she sometimes forged co-workers signatures. She didn't know how often that happened during her nine years at the lab, but records show she routinely tested thousands more samples than her colleagues. A state review determined that more than 40,000 criminal cases relied on Dookhan's testing. But some say that's just the beginning:

"We expect it could be many thousands more, tens of thousands more," says Anne Goldbach of the state's public defender agency. She says initial reports from an ongoing state inspector general investigation show that oversight at the lab was so lax that every case that used its testing is now in doubt.

"The potential could be 190,000" criminal cases affected, says Goldbach. "Part of that depends on what we learn about the entire lab. Right now the entire lab is still suspect."

So far almost 350 people have been released from prison and hundreds more have had their charges dismissed. State officials estimate it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years to handle all the criminal and civil suits stemming from the scandal.