System still failing in wake of Dookhan
The criminal justice system in Massachusetts is delicate if not unstable — and the next round in the Annie Dookhan drug lab scandal could toss napalm on this fragile ecosystem.
That is, if someone finally decides what to do with the thousands of people who may not even know that they have a right to challenge their potentially flawed convictions.
There were some whispers that yesterday’s hearing before Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Margot Botsford would be the end of this whole mess. There was talk that she would dismiss the 24,000 convictions that may have been tainted by Dookhan’s handiwork. But she didn’t. “I haven’t decided anything,” she told a room full of lawyers. “If somebody thinks I’ve decided to dismiss all of these cases — I haven’t, not by any stretch. I don’t know where that was coming from.”
Instead, Botsford split the baby and left prosecutors, civil rights attorneys and defense attorneys frustrated. The ACLU and the state’s public defender’s office want to dismiss all the cases. State prosecutors want to send notice to every “Dookhan defendant” about their case and wait to see what the response is.
Botsford didn’t do either. She decided that the full panel of SJC judges should hear the case in September and figure out what to do.
It’s hard to blame her: No matter what Botsford did, someone was going to be angry. If she dismissed the cases it would have been an affront to the criminal justice system, according to prosecutors.
“Mass dismissal would be unjust and costly, and would represent an abrupt retreat from the fundamentals of our criminal justice system,” attorney Gail McKenna wrote.
If she were to allow prosecutors to mass-mail notice to thousands of defendants who may have had their cases tampered with, defense attorneys believe it would completely overwhelm the system.
“The system is struggling as it is, and it gets by to the extent that it does because there is a known influx of cases,” Benjamin H. Keehn, appellate counsel at the Committee for Public Counsel Services said. “The system is not expecting these cases.”
And that’s true. The system isn’t ready for a conga line of defendants who constitutionally are due counsel. State public defenders are already overworked and now find themselves operating on a shoestring budget with more responsibilities than ever.
Bar advocates — private attorneys who effectively work as part-time public defenders — aren’t all trained to handle the potential tidal wave of new cases. And even if they were, there aren’t enough.
So what is there to do with this mess? Do you wipe the slate clean, or do you wait to see how many defendants show up for their day in court?
Either way, thousands of people are living with potentially flawed convictions, and deal with the consequences every day.
The system failed them once, and it appears there’s no easy answer on how to make it right.