More Annie Dookhan fallout: crime lab chemist fired for not having chemistry degree

Another chemist has been fired from the Massachusetts state crime lab. Not for tampering (a la Annie Dookhan), but for having insufficient credentials and testifying falsely about it (via the Boston Globe):

The drug analyst who was fired for misstating her credentials allegedly falsely testified in federal court as recently as August that she has a degree in chemistry and possibly did so in dozens of state court cases as well, opening the door for a flood of new legal challenges related to the Hinton drug lab scandal.

The analyst, Kate Corbett, was fired by the State Police Friday for allegedly asserting that she holds a degree in chemistry from Merrimack College, though investigators determined that her degree is in sociology.

Corbett has not been accused of tampering with evidence, a charge that led to the conviction of Annie Dookhan, the woman at the center of the lab scandal.

But Corbett’s declarations in court that she is an expert with a chemistry degree could potentially derail convictions in those cases, say legal analysts, who say her testimony would be tainted.

The explanation is somewhat tragic, really:

However, State Police conducted background checks on the chemists’ education to ensure that the analysts met the agency’s standards for accreditation, and superiors learned of the discrepancies with Corbett’s education. 

According to a State Police report obtained by the Globe, Corbett earned a bachelor of arts degree in sociology from Merrimack College in 2001, though she claimed on her resume that she obtained a degree in chemistry in 2003. 

A State Police investigation concluded that, in the two years after she first earned the sociology degree, she took enough credits that she believed would satisfy a chemistry degree. However, according to the State Police report, Corbett assumed she had earned a second degree without confirming it with Merrimack College. 

Also, according to the report, she would not have qualified for a second degree because she would have had to take an additional set of coursework to meet bachelor of science requirements.

I think her dismissal was the right response from an organization that is being seen as less than competent, charitably speaking. It's fairly apparent to me that her management is (yet again) at fault -- she started working for the lab in 2005. If her credentials were important (and it sure sounds like they were), then they should have been examined by her superiors.

Annie Dookhan sentenced to 3-5 years in prison

Via the Boston Globe, a sad end to this sordid tale (how's that for a cliché?):

Annie Dookhan, the drug analyst who tampered with evidence and jeopardized tens of thousands of criminal convictions, was sentenced Friday to three to five years in state prison, closing a sorrowful chapter for the woman at the center of a scandal that continues to plague the state’s criminal justice system. The 36-year-old mother of a disabled child, whose marriage fell apart in the months after the scandal, softly pleaded guilty to 27 counts of misleading investigators, filing false reports, and tampering with evidence. She must also serve two years of probation and undergo mental health counseling, if needed. 

After the sentence was handed down, Dookhan struggled to hold back tears as she whispered with her lawyer before being led away in handcuffs by court officers. Two family members, believed to be her parents, watched from the courtroom gallery. Attorney General Martha Coakley, whose office prosecuted the case, said in an interview later that the conviction of Dookhan was only one part of an ongoing investigation into the quality of drug testing at the Hinton drug lab, but she said it was needed to bring some accountability for her crimes. 

“Certainly one of the victims in this case, and the actions of Annie Dookhan, is the public trust,” Coakley said. 

Dookhan’s lawyer, Nicolas A. Gordon, would not comment after Friday’s hearing. He had asked Suffolk Superior Court Judge Carol S. Ball to sentence Dookhan to no more than a year in prison. Dookhan admitted to filing false test results and mixing drug samples, and to later lying under oath about her job qualifications, but she said it was only to boost her work performance. 

Prosecutors had asked that Dookhan serve 5 to 7 years in prison, but Ball kept to her earlier decision that she would sentence the chemist to 3 to 5 years, finding that, while Dookhan was a “broken person who has been undone by her own ambition,” the consequences of her crimes were still “nothing short of catastrophic.”

Considering how many people were sent to prison without proper due process (well into the dozens or hundreds, I suspect), her sentence is comically insufficient. Harry Elston is on record (on Twitter) saying that she should be serving the sum total of time served by the innocent people that she sent to prison; can't say I disagree with him.

UPDATE: Here's Carmen Drahl's story on the sentencing at C&EN. Via Carmen and WBUR, the judge's sentencing opinion, which gives some insight as to her logic. 

Podcast: Dr. Rubidium on #AnnieDookhan

In the third part of our epic podcast with Dr. Rubidium, See Arr Oh and I interview her on the Annie Dookhan case. Dr. Rubidium worked as a forensic chemist, so this is a nice explanation of the case and its odd aspects:



Thanks to See Arr Oh for the timepoints:

0:04 - Introduction
0:46 - A Hot Mess
1:25 - Too Productive = A Problem
2:19 - CJ as drug dealer
2:45-9:00 - Dr. Rubidium explains it all: How do analytical chemists test illegal drugs?
9:04 - Dookhan: Tip O' The Iceberg?
11:55 - Analytical Standards - 'Keys to the Castle'
13:35 - Chemists in Court
15:04 - Part-time Harvard Doctorate
16:12 - "This wasn't a surprise to anyone she worked with"
17:36 - Selling paper in Scranton, PA
19:10 - "And that's the other title for the podcast!"
19:21 - Bonus track

And yes, podcast listeners, I am working towards a RSS feed for the podcasts. I think I'll be setting up a separate blog for it, since I can't seem to figure out other ways of doing so. Hopefully by the next one.

More on #AnnieDookhan: a claimed doctorate at Harvard?!?!

Annie Dookhan (who is today heading for her 6th arraignment on obstruction of justice charges) gets the inevitable profile in the Boston Globe. Few of us could survive such scrutiny, but she fares worse than most, with stories of lots of fabulating in her past: salary, her parents' jobs, her titles ("an on-call supervisor for chemical and biological terrorism") and ,best of all, her education:

One MassBiologics employee said Dookhan even claimed to be working toward a doctorate at Harvard. Michael Gennaco, a quality control analyst at the time, said she announced during her second year that she had completed her dissertation. 

“People were excited about that, saying what a genius she was, and someone put up a banner congratulating her,” said Gennaco. “Annie let it be known that she was the best. She was superproductive and supercompetitive and she took on a lot of responsibilities. She was going to run the lab. Well, we all got fooled, didn’t we?”

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus?*

(Do people in Boston not realize that you probably can't get a Harvard doctorate in your off-hours? How the heck did people not figure out that she liked to fib? I like to think that I have a decent bs detector; maybe it has to do with growing up in the Internet age, where most claims are somewhat checkable. I guess the issue is going from "Hey, Annie can't be trusted" and "Annie can't be trusted, and I'm going to go to a supervisor about her." Thank God I've never been in such a situation...)

*My simulation of a Derek Lowe post. 

A second MA crime lab chemist arrested? Ya gotta be kidding me

From the files of "not just one bad apple", another chemist working for the same state crime laboratory system as Annie Dookhan has been arrested:

BOSTON (CBS) -  A chemist from the State Crime Laboratory in Amherst has been arrested. 

Attorney General Martha Coakley announced Sunday, Sonja Farak, 35, of Northampton, was arrested Saturday night and charged with allegedly tampering with drug evidence, possessing class A drugs and possessing class B drugs. Coakley said the two drugs were heroin and cocaine. Farak is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday in Eastern Hampshire District Court... 

Coakley said she does not believe Farak’s arrest jeopardizes the reliability of drug certificates or puts into question the fairness of trials for drug defendants. 

The Amherst Drug Laboratory stores and analyzes alleged controlled substances seized by local and state police. On Friday, members of the Amherst Laboratory contacted State Police to report a discrepancy in the controlled substance inventory held in evidence, according to Coakley’s office. 

State Police say after an investigation they believe Farak removed a substance from a case that had previously tested positive for cocaine and replaced it with a counterfeit substance that no longer tested positive...

One hopes that this was sort of fluky. (Hopes!)

#AnnieDookhan is indicted on 27 counts, pleads not guilty

From the Boston Globe's newsblog, news of forensic chemist Annie Dookhan:

Former state chemist Annie Dookhan pleaded not guilty in Suffolk Superior Court today to 27 indictments for allegedly mishandling and tainting drug evidence, including one case where she claimed to have tested a drug sample that wasn’t even in her laboratory at the time. 

Dookhan, 35, is at the center of one of the largest law enforcement scandals in recent Massachustts history and her alleged misdeeds in the now closed state drug laboratory in Jamaica Plain may impact tens of thousands of cases and cost taxpayers millions of dollars. 

Today, Dookhan pleaded not guilty in Suffolk Superior Court to 27 indictments that allege she deliberately mishandled evidence she was supposed to verify were illegal drugs and for falsely claiming to have a master’s degree from UMass-Boston. 

Dookhan has been free on $10,000 cash bail when she faced a preliminary round of charges and has also been under a 6 p.m. curfew. Today, her attorney Nicholas Gordon, said in court that Dookhan’s social life has been impacted by the limitation and asked that it be set at 10 p.m., a request that was granted.

It will be interesting to see what Ms. Dookhan's legal strategy would be; seems to me that she's waiting for a plea deal that will not come quickly.

How much of people's resume/CVs are checked?

One of the recurring themes of fabulists is how often they fake their credentials to gain their positions. One of my favorite ones is the 2009 case where a Texas A&M administrator claimed to be a former Navy SEAL. From the Austin Statesman:

Texas A&M's No. 3 administrator presented himself as a warrior-scholar: a former Navy SEAL with a doctorate from Tufts University. But records obtained by The Bryan-College Station Eagle indicate that Alexander Kemos never was part of the elite fighting force, and Texas A&M officials confirmed Friday that he doesn't have a doctorate or even a master's degree, which was a posted requirement for the $300,000-a-year position as the top adviser to Texas A&M President R. Bowen Loftin. Kemos resigned Friday morning, the day after he was confronted by Loftin in Maine, where they were vacationing.

So it comes as no surprise to anyone that Annie Dookhan, the dry-labbing chemist, was caught giving herself a master's degree in chemistry. From Carmen's article in C&EN:

Her résumé lists a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Boston*, but she does not hold that credential according to school officials.

Isn't it time that someone came up with a way of checking all the educational credentials that people report in their résumé and CV? If LinkedIn (for example) were to offer a "confirmation" checkmark the way that Twitter does with celebrities, I would think that jobseekers would be forced to verify their credentials (for a nominal fee, of course.) Are there résumé checking services? That'd would be a cheap way to avoid credential fabulists (or at least filter out the dumb ones...)

Readers, ever seen people claim to have things on their CVs that were not true?

(What's to stop someone from inserting their name into articles and padding their publications sections? "The Chemical Development of the Commercial Route to Sildenafil:  A Case History." Dale, D.J.; Dunn, P.J.; Golightly, C.; Chemdued, F.A.K.; Hughes, M.L.; Levett, P.C.; Pearce, A.K.; Searle, P.M.; Ward, G.; Wood, A.S. Org. Proc. Res. Dev., 2000, 4 (1), pp 17–22.) 

*There's a Sean Connery quote from "The Untouchables" that comes to mind.

The human and institutional impact of #AnnieDookhan

From this week's C&EN, Carmen Drahl writes up the Annie Dookhan story:

Credit: Chemical and Engineering News

According to a police report obtained by the Boston Globe, Dookhan told investigators that she forged coworkers’ initials on reports for mass spectrometer calibrations, intentionally contaminated samples, and engaged in “dry-labbing”—identifying narcotics by sight rather than by chemical analysis. In interviews with police, several colleagues said they’d expressed concern to supervisors about Dookhan’s unusually high productivity. Her résumé lists a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, but she does not hold that credential according to school officials. 

“This is a calamity,” says Justin J. McShane, a defense attorney in Harrisburg, Pa., who is closely watching the case. Because the evid­ence Dookhan allegedly mishandled was more than likely destroyed in the normal course of business, no traceable information exists to correctly characterize samples in thousands of drug cases, he explains.

I think it is worth noting that the impact that the Annie Dookhan scandal has had, and will have on both individuals and institutions is pretty huge. (It easily rivals the Sheri Sangji case with both its breadth and depth of impact.) It sounds like people went to prison (or went to prison longer) because of Ms. Dookhan's misdeeds -- what a travesty.