
Former state chemist Annie Dookhan was sentenced to three to five years in state prison after she pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence and filing false reports.DAVID L RYAN/GLOBE STAFF/FILE 2013/GLOBE STAFF
Should state be held responsible for lab chemist’s wrongdoing?
By Milton J. Valencia Globe Staff, March 13, 2016, 8:47 p.m.
A federal jury could begin deliberating Monday over whether former state officials should be held responsible for the wrongdoing of corrupt drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan, the first case of its kind to question the state’s role in what became the worst criminal justice scandal in Massachusetts history.
The case involves a Boston man, David Jones, who had served two-and-a-half years in prison for selling crack cocaine, but who had that case overturned based on Dookhan’s failure to properly test drug evidence.
Jones sued several of Dookhan’s former supervisors, saying they were complicit in her wrongdoing and negligent in not reporting her failure to properly test drugs to authorities, depriving Jones of a fair trial.
“The fraud of this chemist, Annie Dookhan, was made known, and/or should have been obvious, to her supervisors and managers,” Jones argued in court records. “Yet those responsible for oversight at the JP drug lab allowed this misconduct to continue despite unmistakable warning signs that Dookhan’s work was suspect.”
According to testimony in the case last week, Jones was arrested in March 2010 after undercover Boston police detectives said they saw him sell crack cocaine to someone in a car in Mattapan Square. When the man left Jones’s car, authorities found the crack cocaine on him and Jones was subsequently arrested, with more than $600 in cash in his pocket. He denied selling the man drugs. His conviction was overturned following the lab scandal — after he had completed his prison sentence — and prosecutors chose not to try the case again.
Lawyers in his civil lawsuit are set to deliver closing arguments Monday morning, and jurors could begin deliberating thereafter.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, names Julie Nassif, who oversaw the Division of Analytical Chemistry within the Department of Public Health at the time of Dookhan’s crimes; Linda Han, who was the director of the crime lab; and Charles Salemi, who was the supervisor of operations at the crime laboratory. The state is not named, though the defendants were sued in their capacity as supervisors.
The lawsuit had also originally named JudyAnn Bigby, the former secretary of the Executive Office of Health and Human Services; and John Auerbach, who was the commissioner of the Department of Public Health.
Michael L. Tumposky, of the Boston law firm Tumposky & Associates, P.C., said Jones agreed to dismiss the complaint against Bigby and Auerbach to concentrate the case on Dookhan’s more direct supervisors, but he said the case could still expose Bigby, Auerbach, and the state to future liability.