Annie dookhan who is

In April , the Boston Herald revealed that Dookhan had been released from prison the previous month, after which time she served two years probation. Per the paper, these conditions included not using false credentials when looking for future work and undergoing mental health evaluations. Dookhan's attorney Nicolas Gordon said at the time, "She's moving forward with her life and she has a very positive outlook on the future. I don't think she's made any major life decisions about what she's going to do.

She's certainly keeping her options open. So earning a graduate degree from Harvard felt particularly sweet—especially when she finished in just a year. The only thing was, none of it was true. Dookhan had never taken a class at Harvard, graduate or otherwise. Dookhan had made the whole thing up, a ploy for a promotion.

Unfortunately for her, the gambit failed, and the company declined to promote her. So, in she resigned and took a new job at a state lab near Boston that tested drugs for court cases. By that point Dookhan, age 25, had already lied repeatedly about her qualifications and background.

But she had always maintained integrity at the lab bench. She grew up in Trinidad, immigrating to Boston with her parents in the late s. She later attended the prestigious Boston Latin School and ran track there; she even tried hurdling, despite standing 4 foot She also told people, falsely, that her parents were both doctors. But eventually things took a criminal turn. The state lab identified substances that police officers seized during drug arrests and raids.

Since many drugs look alike—often white or off-white powders—the police would drop the evidence off at the lab so Dookhan and her colleagues could identify it, which they did through a series of tests. The first round of tests, called presumptive tests, told the analysts the general class of drug they were dealing with. For example, one test involved adding formaldehyde and sulfuric acid to an unknown powder. If the sample turned reddish purple, it was an opiate; if it turned burnt orange, an amphetamine.

Other chemicals might turn drugs green or blue or spur reactions that form distinctly shaped crystals. After the presumptive test, a chemist ran a second, confirmatory test to narrow things down to a specific drug. The confirmatory test involved taking a bit of the unknown sample, dissolving it in a liquid, such as ethanol, methanol, or methylene chloride, and running the solution through a gas chromatography—mass spectrometry machine.

If the first test had indicated, say, an opiate, the chemist would also run samples of known opiates e. The machine then printed graphs for each individual sample. By comparing the graph from the unknown sample to the graphs from the known samples, the chemist could identify the exact drug involved. The spectrum for the tested substance black line closely matches that for the heroin control blue line.

Like many drug labs, the Boston lab was drowning in samples. She quickly distinguished herself as not only the hardest-working chemist but the speediest. In her first year, she churned through 9, drug samples—roughly three times what the other nine chemists tested on average. Privately, though, she was suffering.

In she met an engineer from her native Trinidad and married him. Before long she was pregnant. But that first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. She later endured another. The losses devastated her and put a strain on her marriage. Rather than take time off to cope, Dookhan spent even more time at the lab.

Dookhan did eventually give birth, to a son with disabilities. The demands of motherhood slowed her pace, but she continued to lap her fellow chemists year after year. Gradually, though, her coworkers grew suspicious of the superwoman in their midst. In contrast, Rolling Stone pointed out that Dookhan's false results were always in favor of the prosecution, and that by adding weight to certain samples, she pushed many charges from distribution to narco-trafficking.

In April , prosecutors in eight Boston-area counties announced that they would dismiss 21, drug cases affected by Dookhan's misconduct. It was the largest dismissal of convictions in U.

She used drugs she stole on the job — and the extent of her drug use was not revealed by prosecutors until almost two years after her arrest. These worksheets, filled out by Farak herself, showed the chemist had been using drugs for at least a year before she was arrested. So far, nearly 38, cases have been dismissed statewide in the scandal, including 16, cases where Farak tested the drugs and 21, where the chemist was Dookhan.

There are potentially thousands left to go. Today, defense attorneys argue that Farak was likely using drugs before she arrived at the Amherst lab in From to , Farak worked at the Hinton Lab in Jamaica Plain, where she tested more than 9, samples involving some 5, defendants. Suffolk District Attorney Rollins has about 1, At the same time, state officials are still figuring out how much they need to repay drug defendants who were charged a myriad of court fees in cases that have now been thrown out.