Crime & Safety

Inspector General Says Annie Dookhan 'Sole Bad Actor' at State Drug Lab

A new report found that management failures contributed to evidence tampering.

Annie Dookhan, a former chemist at the Forensic Drug Laboratory at the Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Jamaica Plain, was the "sole bad actor" in alleged evidence tampering, the Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General said Tuesday.

Dookhan admitted to tampering with drug samples at the lab in 2012. Her actions, which may have tainted as many as 34,000 drug cases, raised questions about the integrity of the testing performed at the lab and prompted an investigation by the OIG, which released its findings of the "top-to-bottom" probe on Tuesday. 

The investigation looked into drug lab's management from 2002 to 2012 to determine if any chemists, supervisors or managers committed any misfeasance or malfeasance that may have impacted the reliability of drug testing at the lab. 

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More than 200,000 documents were reviewed in the investigation, including lab records and emails. The OIG identified "a number of deficiencies in its practices and protocols" and reportedly found no evidence that any other chemist at the drug lab committed any malfeasance with respect to testing evidence or knowingly helped Dookhan. Moreover, the OIG found no evidence that Dookhan tampered with any drug samples assigned to other chemists' when she worked to confirm their test results. 

The OIG, however, found that management failures of the lab's directors "contributed to Dookhan's ability to commit her acts of malfeasance," and that the directors were "ill-suited to oversee a forensic drug lab" in that they provided little supervision and were unresponsive to chemists complaints and suspicions, while also downplaying Dookhan's breach of protocol. 

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The OIG is working with an independent, out-of-state laboratory to retest a number of samples found to be potentially problematic, the results of which will be detailed in a supplemental report. 

The following items were included in the OIG's review of the drug lab, according to the report released Tuesday

  • Dookhan was the sole bad actor at the Drug Lab. Though many of the chemists worked alongside Dookhan for years, the OIG found no evidence that any other chemist at the Drug Lab committed any malfeasance with respect to testing evidence or knowingly aided Dookhan in committing her malfeasance.  The OIG found no evidence that Dookhan tampered with any drug samples assigned to another chemist even when she played a role in confirming another chemist’s test results.
  • The management failures of DPH lab directors contributed to Dookhan’s ability to commit her acts of malfeasance. The directors were ill-suited to oversee a forensic drug lab, provided almost no supervision, were habitually unresponsive to chemists’ complaints and suspicions, and severely downplayed Dookhan’s major breach in chain-of-custody protocol upon discovering it.
  • DPH Commissioner John Auerbach and his staff failed to respond appropriately to the report of Dookhan’s breach of protocol; the investigation DPH conducted was far too narrow and Auerbach and his staff failed to disclose another known act of malfeasance to prosecutors, defendants and other interested parties.
  • The Drug Lab lacked formal and uniform protocols with respect to many of its basic operations, including training, chain of custody and testing methods. This lack of direction, caused in part by the Drug Lab’s lack of accreditation, allowed chemists to create their own insufficient, discordant practices.
  • The training of chemists at the Drug Lab was wholly inadequate. New chemists’ training was limited and lacked uniformity, and DPH offered virtually no continuing education to experienced chemists.
  • The Drug Lab failed to provide potentially exculpatory evidence to the parties in criminal cases by not disclosing information about additional, inconsistent testing results. The OIG is in the process of retesting approximately 2,000 of these drug samples to determine whether the results provided to prosecutors and defendants were accurate.
  • The Drug Lab failed to uniformly and consistently use a valid statistical approach to estimate the weight of drugs in certain drug trafficking cases.
  • The quality control system in place at the Drug Lab, which focused primarily on the functionality of the lab equipment rather than the quality of the chemists’ work, was ineffective in detecting malfeasance, incompetence and inaccurate results.
  • The security at the Drug Lab was insufficient in that management failed to appreciate the vulnerability of the drug safe, and did not do enough to protect its contents.
  • There were no mechanisms in place to document discrepancies in chain-of-custody protocols or inconsistent testing results.
For more, read the OIG's full report and recommendations for the drug lab >>


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