Unintended Consequences: Annie Dookhan and the Drug War

On Saturday afternoon, there was a forum on criminal justice issues entitled “Unintended Consequences: Annie Dookhan and the Drug War”. The event was held at the Maynard Public Library, featuring State Senator Jamie Eldridge (D-Acton), Jack Cole from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, Barbara Dougan from Massachusetts Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and forum organizer Jamie Folk.

Senator Eldridge opened the event with his remarks on drug sentencing reform. He is an active supporter of Massachusetts legislation on a variety restorative justice and criminal reform issues.  His legislative goals for the current session include bills to provide opportunities to refer juvenile and low-level criminal offenders into community programs.

Restorative justice programs hold the offender accountable for his actions, but give him a chance to stay out of the criminal justice system, cost less, and provide better outcomes.

Another bill he has filed would empower the Commonwealth to expunge criminal records for those who were falsely or mistakenly charged with a crime. Current Massachusetts law does not allow such records to be permanently erased even in the case of mistakes.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Jack Cole of LEAP is a former undercover narcotics officer, and now an advocate for drug reform and legalization. He gave a presentation about how the war on drugs is a wildly corruptive influence on the US criminal justice system, creating poor incentives for police, and a bloated prison population.

The federal prison population has increased 2500% in the last 35 years, and the US maintains by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, primarily due to drug sentencing laws and mandatory minimums.

There is no evidence these incarcerations have improving public safety.  Meanwhile, in 1965 police solved 91% of murders, while today it is at 61%. Police are devoting their time to drug offenses instead of more serious crime. And despite this, the US still has the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use in the world.

Jack cited data from other countries that have legalized and decriminalized all drugs, including Portugal and Switzerland. Legalizing drugs and treating drug addiction like a public health issue and not a crime saves lives and saves money.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition is a group of law enforcement and criminal justice community members with firsthand experience in the failed war on drugs. They are active in all areas of drug reform, and have urged the Federal DOJ to respect the recent legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, and allow these states to be a model in restoring balance to law enforcement priorities.

Massachusetts Families Against Mandatory Minimums

Barbara Dougan of FAMM spoke about how our sentencing laws require mandatory sentences for any involvement in many Massachusetts drug cases. These laws apply regardless of a person’s personal action, the circumstances of the charges, or whether the punishment fits the crime. All judicial discretion is removed.

For example, anyone with any involvement in drug trafficking is subject to the same mandatory minimums, regardless of the facts of that person’s involvement. Someone who may have owned a property that briefly stored illegal drugs is subject to the same mandatory prison term as the person who actively worked to buy and sell the drugs.

And the amounts of drugs like cocaine subject to trafficking laws is much smaller than most people imagine. Far from the image on “Miami Vice” of a speedboat transporting bales of cocaine, an amount equal to the volume of a soup can requires a 12-20 year minimum sentences.

FAMM has an active legislative agenda in Massachusetts. One reform bill would reform the school zone law (H.1645) to repeal mandatory sentences and reduce the size of “school zone” in drug cases from 300 to 100 feet.  Another bill would repeal mandatory minimums sentences for drug offenses, and make offenders currently serving eligible for parole and work release (H.1646).

The sentencing reforms passed last year merely reduced some mandatory sentences from 15 to 12 years, but didn’t go far enough. The” three strikes” law passed last year had some mandatory minimum reforms, but went backward by adding more people to face potentially serious penalties for a “3^rd strike”.

Annie Dookhan and the Mass Crime Lab Scandal

Forum organizer Jamie Folk is a citizen activist who was outraged at the shoddy oversight of the Massachusetts crime lab and how it is possible that one chemist could destroy the public trust of our criminal justice system.

Annie Dookhan is a former Massachusetts state drug lab chemist who has admitted to falsifying evidence in a number of criminal drug cases.  She was responsible for drug samples in cases involving 34,000 individuals in her career. Folk suggest that with any minimal oversight of the crime lab, it should have been impossible not to notice the fact that Dookhan handled more than 3 times as many cases as other chemists.

She was also known to have a suspiciously cozy relationship with prosecutors, many of whom she spoke to personally. She appeared to reliably come back with the evidence that prosecutors needed for convictions. Dookhan seemingly considered herself part of the prosecution team, and told DAs it was her job to “take drug dealers off the street”, an outrageous position for a supposedly independent witness.

Folk suggested that these elements are all connected. The drug war creates perverse incentives for DAs to prosecute crimes, since that is how their job performance is judged. And that creates the opportunity for an unscrupulous or unbalanced individual like Dookhan to create even more chaos in service to failed objective in the first place: the war on drugs.

And the costs to the Commonweath to fix these drug cases with falsified evidence is already in the millions, with “astronomical” costs yet to come in court costs and potential civil suits from those unfairly prosecuted with tainted evidence.

In a time of state budget crises and cutbacks, the logic of the enormous costs of the drug war is impossible to accept.