Massachusetts state review says chemist who faked drug test results of 40,000 people was one bad apple

On Tuesday, the conclusion of an official review by the Massachusetts Inspector General declared that the state crime-lab chemist who confessed to have faked drug test results of some 40,000 people was the sole bad apple to the state's criminal justice system.

Reuters said that the investigation was ordered over concerns that rose from the confession of former chemist Annie Dookhan last year that she had faked drug tests used as evidence in drug cases from the years 2002 to 2011. The news agency said that as a result of the admission, over 300 people who had been convicted of drug charges were released from prison.

The report by the state's Inspector General discovered that there were warning signs of fraud throughout Dookhan's tenure as a chemist at the now-closed Boston laboratory. It was known that in under two years, Dookhan had overcompensated her production quota, testing over 8,000 samples annually. The report said the figure was exceeded double the quota of her next-most productive colleague in the laboratory. Dookhan's high output was because she only did visual inspections as opposed to conducting chemical tests, or also known as dry-labbing process.

Reuters said that the Inspector General report revealed that her colleagues were becoming suspicious about her work, with one of them did the effort of tracking her reagents and microscope slides use.

Part of the report read, "One significant red flag that Dookhan's supervisors ignored was her spectacular productivity, particularly after ... (a 2009) U.S. Supreme Court case that required forensic drug chemists to testify in court about their test results, when the productivity of all other Drug Lab chemists precipitously declined."

The news agency said Dookhan was already handed out a maximum of up to five years in prison following a guilty plea she submitted to fraud-related charges, which include evidence tampering, obstruction of justice and perjury.

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Annie Dookhan evidence tampering scandal, Hinton State Laboratory Institute scandal

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