Wood & Nathanson is pleased to announce that, as a result of relentless, detailed work by Attorney Christopher Post, the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office is moving to vacate and dismiss ninety-one additional drug convictions in sixty-four defendants’ cases that were tainted by the ever-growing Hinton Drug Lab scandal. In these cases, each of the defendants pleaded guilty to at least one drug offense despite the fact that laboratory testing subsequently proved that substances in question were not drugs at all. However, these defendants were never provided with copies of their test results, and they were allowed to continue serving their sentences.
Attorney Post was first alerted to the issue when he was employed at the CPCS Drug Lab Crisis Litigation Unit, where he was contacted by a defendant who had pleaded guilty shortly after arraignment. After reviewing this defendant’s file and the associated entries in the Hinton Drug Lab evidence database, Attorney Post determined that the "drugs" had in fact tested negative for controlled substances. But the defendant was never notified of this exculpatory evidence. Shortly thereafter, he came across a second case where this had happened and he began to suspect that this was a systemic problem. After digging through all of the lab’s available protocols, he realized there had been an incredible oversight:
“The lab did not have a protocol in place requiring chemists to immediately notify prosecutors whenever a sample had tested negative, even though they were part of the prosecution team. All they would do is print out the drug certificate, place it in a manila envelope, and then staple it to the back of the evidence bag. Then it would sit in the evidence room waiting for the police department to pick it up. But if a defendant was forced to plead out early due to the threat of a mandatory minimum sentence, for example, the prosecutor would never request a copy of the drug certificate from the police department, and so the test result would just sit there.”
Working closely with ACLU technologist Paola Villarreal, and with the support of attorneys from both the ACLU and CPCS, he reviewed data on thousands of evidence samples. That review showed that there were hundreds of defendants across Massachusetts who had pleaded guilty to crimes that literally never happened. After joining Wood & Nathanson, Attorney Post brought the information to the attention of the SCDAO.
We are thankful that DA Rollins and the SCDAO chose to work proactively with Attorney Post to achieve a just result. These issues were not limited to Suffolk County, however. Attorney Post has identified an additional 278 suspect convictions in Barnstable, Bristol, Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Plymouth counties. We call on District Attorneys in Massachusetts to not only review these cases but to review their discovery procedures to ensure that similar miscarriages of justice do not recur.
This outrageous episode is yet another reminder that our criminal justice system suffers from deep flaws that are far from being fixed. Aside from the lack of timely and complete discovery, it reminds us yet again that forensic science must always be vigorously challenged. It is also a reminder that forensic laboratories should be independent - and accredited - agencies, rather than part of law enforcement.