A former chemist in a crime lab in Massachusetts has been sentenced to prison for tampering with drug test results associated with criminal cases.
Annie Dookhan, 36, was arrested in 2012 and charged with neglecting required chemical tests. Authorities claim that Dookhan was just visually identifying alleged drug samples and then altering the samples to cover up the practice.
Mishandling evidence may have affected hundreds and thousands of samples, which in turn may have changed the result of criminal cases. Dookhan was found guilty on 27 counts and has been sentenced to three to five years in prison, followed by two years' probation.
Dookhan expressed no emotion during the course of the hearing but replied to routine questions from the judge. She was handcuffed and taken to the women's prison in Framingham. Dookhan's attorney did not comment after the hearing and her parents also left the court without answering to questions from reporters.
The state Department of Public Health lab was closed in August 2012 after authorities found Dookhan's misconduct. Since then around 1,100 criminal cases have been dismissed or not prosecuted due to the possibility that evidence could have been modified.
"This ends one chapter in this situation, but the story goes on for the thousands of individuals whose lives have been affected by the conduct of Annie Dookhan," said Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state's public defender agency. "There are millions of dollars more that will be spent and a lot of time spent by a number of people in the criminal justice system trying to deal with the fallout of what happened in that lab."
Defense attorney Nicolas Gordon requested one-year sentence for Dookhan, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, on the ground she does not have any previous criminal record.
However, prosecutors claimed that her actions had already instigated grave damage to the criminal justice system that has cost millions of dollars to the state. The limit of Dookhan's manipulation is still being assessed and is currently unknown.
