Current Events –
Chemist Sends Innocent
Blacks To Prison

This is the story of a government chemist who was arrested and charged with falsifying lab results that resulted in 20,000 innocent blacks and others being sent to prison.

Current Events
For a period of 9 years, Annie Dookhan tampered with at least 60,000 test samples, falsifying positive results, mixing samples and botching paperwork at a Massachusetts state police lab.  Was it incompetence, laziness, or racism?

Dookhan admitted faking test results for several years, including identifying drug samples as narcotics simply by looking at them instead of testing them (a process known as “dry labbing“). She also forged the initials of colleagues and deliberately turned negative samples into ones that were positive for narcotics.

She was eventually suspended from lab duties after getting caught forging a colleague’s initials on paperwork. Dookhan resigned as a Department of Public Health investigation was launched. The lab was also shut down.

In September of 2012, Massachusetts state police arrested the 36-year-old Dookhan at her home. Three months later, she was officially indicted on 17 counts of obstruction of justice, 8 counts of tampering with evidence, and 1 count each of perjury and falsification of academic records. She initially pled not guilty, but in a tearful confession on the stand, Dookhan recanted and admitted guilt. She was sentenced to only 3 to 5 years in prison.

Since her conviction, Massachusetts has had to release hundreds of innocent prisoners. The state has also braced for what they expect will be a plethora of lawsuits for wrongful convictions. Surprisingly, Dookhan was released from prison earlier this year, which has activist groups understandably up in arms.

Is a 3-year sentence sufficient punishment for ruining the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people?

.

OK WASSUP! covers current events, including
Chemist sending innocent blacks to prison.