Massachusetts State Police Lab Technician Who Admitted Faking Results Taken Into Custody

Annie Dookhan- the Massachusetts crime lab technician who's fradulent test results have thrown thousands of convictions into question.

A lab chemist at Massachusetts' William A Hinton State Laboratory was arrested by State Police on charges of witness intimidation earlier on Friday after she confessed to improperly handling evidence turned over for testing and forging supervisors signatures on paperwork.

State police say Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples involving 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the lab. Defense lawyers and prosecutors are scrambling to figure out how to deal with the fallout.

Since the lab closed, more than a dozen drug defendants are back on the street while their attorneys challenge the charges based on Dookhan's misconduct.

Many more defendants are expected to be released. Authorities say more than 1,100 inmates are currently serving time in cases in which Dookhan was the primary or secondary chemist.

The scandal prompted the resignation of the state's public health commissioner and the resignations of two others.

Dookhan is charged with witness intimidation, a crime punishable by as many as 10 years in prison, and pretending to hold a degree, punishable by as much as a year in jail.

Dookhan had once testified under oath that she holds a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, but school officials have said they have no record of her receiving an advanced degree or taking graduate courses there.

In a police interview, Dookhan admitted to faking results of drug tests for at least two years as well as forging colleagues and supervisors initials on paperwork and signing off on negative drug samples she knew were negative as positive.

In July of 2011, Dookhan was suspended after she was caught forging a colleague's initials on a lab report. She resigned in March 2012 as the Commonwealth's Department of Public Health investigated her caseload. The lab was run by the agency until July of this year when the State Police took control.

So not only does Dookhan's conduct allow an opening for some guilty parties to get out of prison, questions about whether or not any innocent people remain locked up due to her negligence and mishandling of potentially exculpatory evidence.

If that is the case, I think it should only be fair to allow some of the wrongly convicted individuals to crash at her residence in Franklin, MA....you know, until they can get back on their feet.