Stunning Drug Lab Scandal Could Overturn 23,000 Convictions

Apr 8, 2017 | Blog, News

In the annals of wrongful convictions, there is nothing that comes close in size to the epic drug-lab scandal that is entering its dramatic final act in Massachusetts.

About 23,000 people convicted of low-level drug crimes are expected to have their cases wiped away next month en masse, the result of a five-year court fight over the work of a rogue chemist.

Annie Dookhan was arrested outside her home in Franklin, Massachusetts, in 2012. Bizuayehu Tesfaye / AP, file

“It’s absolutely stunning. I have never seen anything like it,” said Suzanne Bell, a professor at West Virginia University who serves on the National Commission of Forensic Science. “It’s unbelievable to me that it could have even happened. And then when you look at the scope of the number of cases that may be dismissed or vacated, there are no words for it.”

The dismissals will come in the form of filings from seven district attorneys ordered by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to decide who among 24,000 people with questionable convictions they can realistically try to re-prosecute.

Their answer, due by April 18, is expected to be “in the hundreds,” a spokeswoman for Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan said this week. An exact number was not available because the prosecutors are still working through the list, the spokeswoman, Meghan Kelly, said in an email.

The development was first reported by the Boston Globe.

Related: How One Texas County Drove a Record Rise in Exonerations

The prosecutors didn’t want the scandal to end like this. They fought for a way to preserve the convictions, and leave it to the defendants to challenge them.

Civil rights groups and defense lawyers argued for all the cases to be dropped, saying that was the only way to ensure justice.

The state’s high court chose its own solution, ruling in January that district attorneys should focus on a small subset of cases it wanted to retry, and drop the rest.

It has taken five years to get to this point, longer than it took to discover, prosecute and punish the chemist, Annie Dookhan. She worked at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Boston for nearly a decade before her misconduct was exposed in 2012. She admitted to tampering with evidence, forging test results and lying about it. She served three years in prison and was released last year.

By then, most of the people Dookhan helped convict — most of whom pleaded guilty to low-level drug offenses based on her now-discredited work — had finished their sentences.

Is not entirely clear why Dookhan, a Trinidadian immigrant mother, felt compelled to change test results on such a massive scale. She was by far the lab’s most prolific analyst, a record that impressed her supervisors but also worried her co-workers — a red flag that went overlooked for years. She seemed driven to stand out, even if it mean lying, former colleagues have said. She also maintained friendly relationships with prosecutors, even though her role was to remain objective.

Many of those convicted through Dookhan’s work likely did commit the offenses, but many did not, defense lawyers say. All of them are now burdened with dubious convictions that have made it difficult to find jobs and housing or to obtain student loans, the lawyers say. Some defendants were convicted of more serious crimes, and the drug convictions were used to stiffen their sentences. Non-citizens have been threatened with deportation.

Civil rights advocates say the case has exposed the folly of aggressive enforcement of low-rung drug offenders, many of whom are addicts in need of treatment. “It’s a soup-to-nuts indictment of the war on drugs,” said Matthew Segal, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, whose lawsuit led to the supreme court’s ruling. “These scandals happen around the country because our war on drugs is based on cutting corners.”

The reliance on forensic science in the criminal justice system has improved policing and prosecutions, but the misuse of science has also fueled wrongful convictions, researchers say. Drug labs play a distinct role in that machinery.

Related: Rogue East Cleveland Cops Framed Dozens of Drug Suspects

Lab scandals have undermined thousands of convictions in eight states in the past decade, according to data maintained by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Critics say forensic chemists feel a duty to help prosecutors rather than remain neutral. And they point out that many labs — including Hinton when Dookhan worked there — lack professional accreditation or proper protocols to prevent and detect misconduct. Some of her superiors have lost their jobs for failing to notice or report her misdeeds.

“This drug lab scandal is another example of why the criminal justice system needs to reform its approach to forensic science,” said Dan Gelb, a Boston attorney who helped write an amicus brief on the Dookhan case for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “Labs shouldn’t be an extension of law enforcement.”

Because of the system’s reliance on plea bargains to keep cases moving, defendants often don’t have a chance to challenge results from drug labs, Bell added.

That’s become a big point of discussion at the National Commission of Forensic Science, she said. But the commission, which was formed by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2013, is facing an uncertain future, with no clear message from the Trump administration if its work will continue to be funded, Bell said.

The Dookhan case awakened Massachusetts to the crisis, Bell said.

But the end of the Dookhan saga will not bring the end to Massachusetts’ problems.

That’s because it is dealing with a second scandal, at a second lab, this one the result of a chemist who admitted to doing drugs — including an array of substances submitted as evidence — while on the job.

Thousands of convictions in that case are now in doubt.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stunning-drug-lab-scandal-could-upend-23-000-convictions-n739626

Rogue East Cleveland Cops Framed Dozens of Drug Suspects

Apr 8, 2017 | Blog, News

In January 2013, police raided the home of a Cleveland drug dealer, saying in a search warrant that an informant had recently bought crack cocaine there.

But the drug dealer had surveillance cameras that proved the officers were lying. He gave the tapes to his lawyer, who showed the FBI. The feds then worked to uncover a massive scandal of a rogue street-crimes unit that robbed and framed drug suspects who felt they had no choice but plead guilty to fraudulent charges.

Four years later, authorities are still unwinding the damage.

Three cops who worked for the city of East Cleveland are in prison. Cases against 22 alleged drug dealers have been dismissed. Authorities are searching for another 21 people who are eligible to have their convictions tossed. On top of those injustices, there is a slim chance that any of them will be fully reimbursed, because the disgraced officers and their former employer don’t have the money.

“I always took it on the chin when I got arrested for something I know I did. But when a cop lies to get you in prison, that’s a different story,” said Kenneth Blackshaw, who was arrested in a 2013 traffic stop and spent two years behind bars before his drug conviction was overturned.

The detectives, Blackshaw said, knew just who to target: people with long criminal records who knew their word would never stand up against a police officer’s. He is trying to recoup all that he lost, including $100,000 the cops took from his home in an illegal search.

“A person like myself doesn’t stand a fighting chance for his freedom when he stands accused of something he didn’t do,” Blackshaw, 51, said.

Drugs, race and graft

The Cleveland-area victims are among thousands of people who have been exonerated in cases involving police graft over the last three decades countrywide, from California to Texas, and from New Jersey to Ohio. In Philadelphia, more than 800 people have had their convictions dismissed. The Rampart scandal in Los Angeles in the late 1990s led to at least 150 tossed cases.

Former East Cleveland Police Officers, clockwise from left: Torris Moore, Antonio Malone, and Eric Jones. FBI; Cuyahoga County Sheriff; East Cleveland Police.

These “group exonerations” are distinct from the stories of people cleared by DNA or new evidence, a movement led by crusading lawyers who dig into individual cases to expose faulty forensics, false confessions, mistaken identities and official misconduct.

Group exonerations rarely attract much attention outside of the communities where they occur. They typically involve people convicted of relatively minor crimes that resulted in short prison sentences or terms of probation. The victims often have criminal records and, if not for the corrupt methods that led to their convictions, may actually have been guilty of a crime.

There is no official record of group exonerations, and researchers believe that in some police corruption scandals, authorities don’t bother to identify tainted convictions — or tell victims they could be cleared. Even so, the number of people wrongly convicted under such circumstances likely exceeds the more than 2,000 individual exonerations recorded since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

The vast majority of victims are black — a result that points to national trends in American drug-law enforcement researchers at the registry said in a report issued last month. “As any forger knows, the way to create convincing fakes is to make them look like the real thing,” the report’s authors wrote. “For drug cases, that means arresting mostly black suspects.”

The impact is profound. Group exonerations not only undermine crime fighting efforts, but also destroy faith in police and fuel the belief that the justice system treats poor, minority communities unfairly.

“What I saw in this case is a legitimate reason for these folks to have these feelings toward law enforcement,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Feran, who prosecuted the East Cleveland officers.

Setups and thefts

East Cleveland is a city in distress, much more so than Cleveland, its larger Rust Belt neighbor. More than 40 percent of its 17,843 residents live in poverty, almost all of them black. Mass demolitions of abandoned homes has left the 3-square-mile city pocked with vacant lots. The median household income is $19,592. The local government is near bankruptcy.

That is the atmosphere in which the rogue street crimes unit operated.

After the FBI got tipped-off in early 2013, agents had the drug dealer who caught officers lying about buying crack at his house wear a wire. His secret recordings caught one of the officers shaking him down for $3,000 during a traffic stop.

From there, investigators uncovered more frame-ups and thefts. They documented several of them in an October 2015 indictment that charged the rogue unit’s commander, Torris Moore, and two underlings, Antonio Malone and Eric Jones, with illegally searching and stealing from alleged drug dealers and faking reports to cover up their crimes.

The indictment included charges that the officers had arrested an alleged drug dealer identified as K.B. The following day, while K.B. sat in jail, the indictment said, the officers broke into his room at his grandmother’s house and took $100,000, keeping a third of it and turning in the rest.

Blackshaw did not know his case was under investigation. He learned of the officers’ arrest by watching the news in prison. He called home and an aunt told him she’d already talked to his lawyer. “We’re working on getting you out of there,” he recalled her saying.

A feeling of vindication washed over Blackshaw. He had agreed to go to prison even though he didn’t think his arrest was legitimate. He has a long history of drug offenses, and his charge, possession of more than 100 grams of cocaine, carried a mandatory minimum sentence of 11 years behind bars. He maintains he did not have any drugs on him when he was busted.

He’d told his lawyer he wanted to go to trial. But his lawyer, Terry Gilbert, had advised against it, reminding him that it would be his word against the officers’. So Blackshaw pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received a five-year prison sentence.

“Neither of us ever dreamed that these cops could be crooked enough to steal money and lie about it, and even if they did, who would believe Kenneth Blackshaw?” Gilbert recalled. But, as it turns out, the officers lied in the police report and to prosecutors while defending their illegal search.

‘Legally innocent’

Most of the victims mentioned in the federal indictment didn’t have private lawyers to push for their release. But the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office had just formed a Conviction Integrity Unit, which helped make sure all of the convictions were vacated. Blackshaw was released from prison in February 2016.

All three officers were sentenced to prison: Moore got nine years, Malone six and Jones nearly four. In a tearful courtroom apology, Moore said she’d turned rogue in 2011.

That revelation prompted the Conviction Integrity Unit to review all of the officers’ work since 2011. They came up with dozens of suspect cases. In some, the officers cited the use of confidential informants without proving their existence. In others, money used for undercover drug purchases, or money seized in arrests or raids, was not properly logged, raising questions about where the cash ended up.

Each of the defendants, like Blackshaw, had pleaded guilty. Now they were all eligible to have their cases dismissed.

Some of the victims had likely committed drug offenses. But because the entire process was corroded, the cases could no longer be defended in court. Justice required their dismissal.

“We didn’t go all the way to determine whether they were factually innocent or not,” Jose Torres, who heads the unit, said. “We were convinced that they were legally innocent, and that’s enough for us.”

Search for victims

So far, authorities have identified 43 people whose convictions deserved to be tossed. But in order for that to happen, they or a lawyer representing them needs to appear in court to ask a judge to dismiss the charges.

Working with the county public defender’s office, they’ve only been able to dismiss convictions for 22 people, Torres said. They’ve tracked down a couple of others who are expected to appear in court soon. The rest either haven’t been found or don’t want to come forward.

In each case, defense lawyers have insisted on protecting the victim’s right to sue for damages. But whether they get any award remains to be seen.

Blackshaw, out of prison for more than a year, says he’s trying to start a commercial cleaning business. He is grateful to be released, but he lost two years of freedom.

And he is still fighting for the rest of his money.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rogue-east-cleveland-cops-framed-dozens-drug-suspects-n736671