"After months spent testing hundreds of samples from the notorious Hinton State Laboratory Institute, the state inspector general verified the crime lab’s findings in the “vast majority” of cases, though several discrepancies were raised by the review. In 2012, former Gov. Deval Patrick shuttered the Hinton crime lab after officials determined chemist Annie Dookhan had committed multiple protocol violations, throwing thousands of drug cases into question. Dookhan later pled guilty to 17 counts of obstruction of justice, eight counts of tampering with evidence, perjury and falsely pretending to hold a higher-education degree. Tuesday’s report released by Inspector General Glenn Cunha is a follow-up to initial findings from more than a year ago that found the lab “lacked formal and uniform protocols with respect to many of its basic operations, including training, chain of custody and testing methods.” The Office of the Inspector General previously found numerous instances where samples were tested multiple times “with inconsistent results,” but the lab “typically only reported the final result to the parties in the corresponding criminal case.” While determining Dookhan to be the “sole bad actor” at the lab, Cunha in 2014 found a variety of deficiencies at the lab, including a failure to “provide potentially exculpatory evidence to the parties in criminal cases by not disclosing information about additional, inconsistent testing results.”
http://wwlp.com/2016/02/02/ig-finds-discrepancies-in-old-hinton-drug-cases/