A chemist employed by a Massachusetts crime lab has been arrested for filing false drug results, forging her paperwork and mixing samples, which may cause thousands of inmates to be released from prison, as reported by the CBS News.
A.D., 34, was arrested on September 28 and was arraigned in Boston Municipal Court the same day.
The Hinton State Laboratory Institute, where A.D. worked, was shuttered in August and three of its officials have since resigned. One of those that resigned was the state's public health commissioner. Over a dozen drug defendants have been released from jail since the lab's closing.
In her nine-year career, A.D. tested over 60,000 drug samples that involved 34,000 defendants.
More inmates are expected to be back on the streets based on A.D.'s misconduct.
According to Attorney General Martha Coakley, A.D. faces two obstruction charges. One is for lying about drug samples she analyzed as the primary or secondary chemist in a March 2011 Suffolk County case, and the other is for testifying under oath in August 2010 that she had a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts.
Coakley told reporters that she believed A.D.'s motive was to be perceived as a good worker. However, Coakley said, "Her actions totally turned the system on its head. People absolutely deserve a system they can trust...We have to get to the bottom of this, and we will."
A.D.'s coworkers allegedly exposed her work habits to their supervisors years ago and those supervisors are now under scrutiny for failing to alert the authorities.
Governor Deval Patrick commented, "I think that all of those who are accountable for the impact on individual cases need to be held accountable."
Though A.D. was decidedly the most prolific worker in the crime lab, testing hundreds more samples per month than her co-workers, one co-worker told police that in all that time he had never seen A.D. use a microscope.
A.D.'s work was audited by a supervisor in 2010 and nothing was found amiss. However, during that same year, a chemist discovered seven instances where A.D. identified narcotics incorrectly.
In August A.D. admitted to police that she had been faking her test results for two to three years. In some instances she identified drug samples via "dry labbing" – which means she performed a visual exam only instead of actually testing them. A few times, according to A.D., she forged her colleague's initials to change a negative sample into a positive one for narcotics.
After being caught forging a colleague's initials A.D .was suspended from her lab duties in June 2011. During the Department of Public Health's investigation, in March, she formally resigned.
E.O., a co-worker of A.D.'s said, "…in 2009 she had a miscarriage and other personal problems. Perhaps she was trying to be important, by being the 'go-to' person."
A.D. told police, "I screwed up big-time. I messed up bad; it's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."
If you have found yourself charged with one or more crimes, contact a criminal defense attorney for help right away!
