COURT PLOT TWISTS - THE FORENSIC LAB THAT DESTROYED THOUSANDS OF CONVICTIONS

Annie Dookhan worked as a forensic chemist at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, from two thousand three to two thousand twelve. During this period, she systematically falsified drug test results through a practice known as dry labbing, where samples were visually identified without proper chemical testing. She tampered with evidence by adding cocaine to samples that contained none, forged signatures of evidence officers, and certified false results that were presented as evidence in criminal trials. Her misconduct affected between thirty-four thousand and forty thousand criminal cases. On November twenty-second, two thousand thirteen, Judge Carol S. Ball of Suffolk Superior Court sentenced Dookhan to three to five years in prison after she pleaded guilty to twenty-seven criminal charges. On April nineteenth, two thousand seventeen, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered the dismissal of twenty-one thousand five hundred eighty-seven drug convictions in what became the largest single dismissal of wrongful convictions in United States history.