The Drug War Is Creating Problems Too Big To Fix
from the in-which-warning-signs-are-greeted-with-praise,-enthusiasm-and-blinders dept
David Colarusso, a public defender turned data scientist, has a fascinating post at Law Technology Today describing the many issues arising from the abusive activities of a single chemist at the Massachusetts state drug lab. The starting point of his post -- and his problems -- trace back a few years.
In 2012, it was discovered that a chemist working at the Massachusetts state drug lab in Jamaica Plain had been falsifying drug tests (e.g., claiming that samples contained narcotics without testing them and even adding cocaine to samples to get a positive result when prior testing came back negative). She had worked at the lab for nearly a decade, and these revelations called into question the outcomes in tens of thousands of cases.Obviously, this sort of tampering means there are convictions waiting to be overturned. But two years later, little progress has been made. It isn't that the state is obstructing efforts to make the falsely-convicted whole again (there may be some of that, but Colarusso's post doesn't indicate there is), but that nearly a decade's-worth of bogus lab work potentially infects thousands of convictions. Narrowing down this list to those directly affected is an enormous task, one that Colarusso was tasked with making more manageable. Narrowing down "The List" to a single link in the evidence chain -- the drug receipt -- still returned far too many potential matches to be of use. Additional restrictions trimmed the possible matches a bit more, but still left far too many potential victims of the chemist's work.
Staff attorneys take only a small fraction of indigent cases. The majority are handled by private attorneys. So only a subset of defendants on The List would be in our client files. However, given The List contained nearly 40,000 names, this subset was still rather sizable. So we used some nice open source software to look for matches between our clients’ names and those found on the list (this involved some data wrangling in Python and Pandas along with the creation of a nice IPython Notebook or two). This gave us a rough list of clients on The List, and we used these names to create a list of their co-defendants.The narrowing of the field only did so much. The List remained sizable, thanks to inconsistencies inherent in the system itself.
This gave us a rough list of clients on The List, and we used these names to create a list of their co-defendants. We then checked The List for the co-defendant names. Unfortunately, a lot of these were missing. If we assumed the same rate of missing names across all cases, it seemed The List was missing somewhere between 0 and 9,600 names. Wait, what? That’s right, thousands of potentially missing names. The uncertainty came from the fact that we had to match names. The List did not come with dates of birth, addresses, or Social Security Numbers—just names. So occasionally, we could not find a name we were looking for because the Commonwealth and CPCS disagreed on the spelling of a name or someone made a transcription error.By this point in the investigation, the master list was still huge and it was obvious the list itself was missing hundreds of names, which meant hundreds of possibly wrongly-convicted citizens. The reality of this situation was this: to track down those missing names and to finally set the wheels of justice in motion, thousands of police reports would need to be read and cross-referenced against those on the master list. But who will do this? And with what funds? That's still unclear. It all depends on who feels justice should be served and who feels justice should be served, but only up to a certain dollar amount.
So, the problem -- which was one person in one lab falsifying thousands of test results -- has become something so unwieldy that it may never result in the exoneration of everyone chemist Annie Dookhan managed to wrongly put behind bars. The problem is too big to solve, and much of that has to do with the efficiency of drug prosecutions versus the much less efficient wheels of bureaucracy. Data wrangling helped determine the size of the problem and point a way towards a solution, but the solution is still hundreds, if not thousands, of hours away.
But Colarusso points to one aspect that should have been noticed and would have kept this from becoming a 40,000-file catastrophe (and that's without counting the undetermined number of omissions).
The real promise is in catching the next scandal early. This means listening to data and looking for patterns. The rogue chemist had a throughput three times that of the next “most productive” chemist. That should have been a red flag. Data science offers the promise of mining data for signals such as these and sounding the alarm.But they weren't looking for a problem at the drug lab. They were looking for productivity. Dookhan's suspiciously-fast output wasn't greeted with suspicion. It was greeted with praise and an increased workload.
The report shows that the Hinton lab leaned heavily on Dookhan’s productivity. Supervisors lauded her work ethic and assigned her an increasing share of tests.There's a point when a problem is still manageable and there's a point when it becomes too big to correct within the confines of the system that helped create it. The drug lab itself pushed it from solvable to impossible. What happened here isn't an isolated incident. Similar abuses have occurred at the nation's top labs -- those belonging to the FBI. Results of forensic testing were overstated to prosecutors, who then put these experts on the stand to help convict hundreds of thousands of people using the questionable results. It's only because of outside pressure that the FBI and DOJ are even looking into this, and it's easy to imagine "The List" of possibly wrongly-convicted persons here far exceeds the 40,000+ Colarusso tangled with.
“From January 1, 2004, through December 31, 2011, Dookhan was assigned 25.3% of all analyses in the Drug Lab and completed 21.8% of all tests conducted by staff,” the report said.
In addition to the problem begin ignored for two decades, the effort to right the FBI's wrong isn't being pursued with nearly the same enthusiasm as the bogus prosecutions. And yet, there were early warning signs that were ignored. Information about the FBI's evidence issues was passed on to prosecutors -- but this information, including exculpatory evidence, was never passed on to defense attorneys.
The time to handle a problem is before it negatively affects thousands by depriving them of their liberty. But the desire to fight a drug war led to the cover up of exculpatory evidence by US prosecutors working with the FBI and the opportunity to fake even more test results in Annie Dookhan's case. Caught in the middle of all of this are thousands who may never see justice done because the problem was ignored until it no longer could be.
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Filed Under: drug war, falsified results, massachusetts
Reader Comments
The First Word
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drug what?
see states legalized it and how canada gives out medical weed as does tons of other areas
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Why I will never set put foot in the states
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Re: drug what?
As such it is impossible to win - and that should have been clear from the very beginning.
The more successful you are in "winning" the war - the more the price of drugs rises - and hence the incentives and financial backing of your opponents grows.
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Re: drug what?
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Re:
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Re:
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I don't see how this is unmanageable
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Re: Re:
Given the story above, about falsification of drug testing, not actually having/doing drugs does not seem to make a whole lot of difference!
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It is NOT too big to solve
Also, said chemist should be jailed for life. What kind of rotten, sick sociopath deliberately screws people's lives by adding positives where there were negatives? And the lab itself should be prosecuted and closed down and its management along with the power chain that allowed her to work without auditing put behind bars as well.
But we all know this only happens in a fair world.
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Re: I don't see how this is unmanageable
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Re: Re:
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Re: It is NOT too big to solve
If something good is to be handed out by the state (welfare benefits, healthcare, education or relief from wrongful imprisonment) then every possible financial stringency is invoked to avoid doing it on grounds of cost - but if something bad is to be done (arrest, trial, imprisonment etc) then NO EXPENSE WILL BE SPARED.
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Re: It is NOT too big to solve
The lab is already closed as a result of this case.
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Now THAT is funny!
c'mon man - you're an insider here... you know that our government has neither of those...
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Re: Re:
But, at least it's not like someone might just outright fake up that evidence just to get a pat on the head at work... oh, wait.
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Re: Re:
How is not doing drugs going to help people in those cases? Childish is the blind defence of these people without even considering the facts laid out before you.
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failure to test
"You will be analyzing specimens taken from crime scenes and from suspects in custody, but occasionally some of them will actually be control samples prepared by the Public Defender's office. If you return one false positive, your career is over and the Public Defender's office gets your pension."
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Re:
Nobody said that the name of the lab is Jamaica Plain.
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Ambrose Bierce said it best
proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a
scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which
certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a
flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were
sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more
thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which
so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and
human reason are alike destitute of value."
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"chemist Jamaica Plain"
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How about having prisoners do it? Make it one of the "cheap as slave labor" work opportunities at the prison. From what I've heard, the one thing you have in the slammer is time.
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Re: I don't see how this is unmanageable
Some, but not all, defendants are named with the sample tested, many names were left off. The only way to create the complete list is to have a person go to the paper court records scattered all over the place, and read them all.
Given the reasons why this is being done, it probably should also involve a second person doing an audit of the first person's work.
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Re:
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first the Military...........
I knew of someone in the military that was bust in rank and pay for the offense of
"suspicion of being in an area where Marijuana was suspected of being smoked"
he passed the drug screen but was still busted, for being near a place where someone of authority thought they smelled pot (this was in 1982).
I knew then what was coming....
don't hate the players, hate the Government that set up the game.
(see how much your [informed] vote matters?)
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Costs
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in prison for non violent ,drug offenses,
eg possession or use of hash,
people who sold cocaine etc already had their property, cash taken off them .
People who sold cocaine could be put on community service .
And it would save money,
it costs 30k plus to have 1 per person in prison for 1 year .
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How soon they forget....
Result? I think they "fired" the guy in charge ex post facto - he'd already retired.
Cases re-opened? ZERO.
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Re: failure to test
What really needs to be done (and is generally required for labs to get accreditation) is the expansion of quality control resources in labs. Because one cannot reasonable expect a person to be perfect, put more eyes on it. Some labs I've been to have two people in each examination: one running it and one observing the running to make sure it's done properly. Then it's run again by a different pair. Then the results are reviewed by quality control. It isn't perfect, but it's better than only one person seeing it.
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Re: "chemist Jamaica Plain"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan
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Re: failure to test
That, I believe, is the real issue. Labs being run by ritual and wizardry, rather than reproducible science.
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Now this last part....If you been convicted, you don't get to vote ever again.
See the pattern?
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Cynic
After all, we've got to keep those private prison corporations profitable and also protect the reputation of our legal system.
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Re:
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Who will pay for it? That's the easy part.
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Re: Re:
It is being used as though it is a person's name in the article. You did read it, didn't you?
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Re: never set foot in the states
Just do like we 'mericans do.
Be white, look and sound respectable, and cringe in the face of authoritah.
You won't have any problem.
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Call it 'incentive'
When you consider a false positive has the chance to ruin someone for life, no, I don't really consider it unreasonable. The stakes are high, and they're only human as you say, but when screwing up can get someone tossed behind bars for years, decades or longer, 100% accuracy is not only desired, it should be required.
Either that or a positive result should be drastically decreased in evidentury value, such that even a positive result doesn't ensure a conviction, but is only considered a minor bit of supporting evidence, rather than grounds for instant conviction.
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Re: Re: failure to test
The second half of your comment would certainly help, but even then, I think that a positive result should be drastically reduced in value as evidence, simply because while desired, 100% accuracy is not possible, so the possibility of a false positive should always be taken into consideration. Treat a positive or negative result as a piece of evidence, but not a core piece, such that it's not enough to win a case on it's own without significant supporting evidence.
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Re:
Stupid voters that have no idea what their responsibilities are as a fully informed juror.
Stupid & Ignorant people screwing themselves over by loving the rich an famous for no other reason that the fact they are rich and famous. Politics are practically no different here. The fact that Pelosi and now Paul Ryan can say shit like we have to pass this bill to see what is in it is a damn good sign of how terrible the corruption is while the voters do nothing about anything. Except bicker back and forth on party lines like idiots.
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Re: Call it 'incentive'
What I said was that it's unreasonable to expect that of any one person. The technician in this instance was a problem, a huge problem, but the lack of a proper quality control was a bigger one. I believe the lab is as much responsible for this as Annie Dookhan. You can't expect someone to be perfect, so you build a way of determining whether they functioned correctly or not. This lab failed at that on a criminal level.
We can push for Annie Dookhan being punished (and she should be, severely) and we can call for the results to be overturned (which they should be), but by not addressing that the laboratory itself is what truly failed, we leave the door open for the next person to do this. As long as we blame the technician and don't use the opportunity to demand the labs themselves to operate in a transparent, controlled, and unbiased way from the very beginning, nothing will change.
As a side note, I also agree that positive results should be less valuable. There is far too much reliance on psuedo-science and incorrect understanding of the statistical results of an examination.
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Re: Re: Call it 'incentive'
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Re: Re: Re: failure to test
There's far too much weight put on this type of evidence and on the testimony of people who run them. I firmly believe that these sorts of examinations should be used exclusively (or at least almost exclusively) for investigative purposes. There should always be more than the words of an expert witness, especially when it is very difficult for courts to determine the true expert-ness of those witnesses. There are systems in place to try, but it takes a lot of effort on all sides (judge included) to determine the true nature of the expert's knowledge. I, unfortunately, have some stories about examiners that are well respected by everyone except the scientific part of the community.
It's a pretty screwed up system that is unfortunately easy to game.
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Re:
This depends on what state you're in. Where I live, felons can still vote.
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Re: Re:
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Re: Re:
Still, if a person has served their time and not on parole, I think their right to vote should be reinstated.
The right to vote is very serious even if we don't take it seriously. :(
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Re: Re: never set foot in the states
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Re: Costs
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Re: Re: drug what?
This means it's technically more legal than marijuana, which further illustrates the stupidity of American drug laws.
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Re: It is NOT too big to solve
I would certainly agree with that, but I don't know if it's a majority position. I suspect many people would not want a lot of money spent on such a problem, because "most of them are probably guilty of something anyway". I know, it's disgusting. I'm with you though - there should be no consideration of whether to seek justice for the wrongfully convicted based on how much it will cost.
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Re: Re: Costs
For-profit prisons are, yes. Governments are spending huge amounts of money on it.
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Re: Who will pay for it? That's the easy part.
If that only pays for a portion of the work, then the rest has to be done over decades as her wages are garnished. Might not be a good solution.
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Too many?
I think one of us misunderstood the article. I don't see anywhere that it states The List (as he calls it) has too many people on it. Rather, the problem he's trying to solve is finding the hundreds or possibly thousands of additional people who should be on the list but aren't. Did I miss something?
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falseinfo
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If it's the latter, kill it with fire.
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This sounds conspicuously like the zero-gays-in-Iran thing.
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We've already long since established that Justice in the US is not served.
That some of the people who walk are genuinely monstrous is the price the society pays for letting our justice system rot to ruin.
Of course this won't happen today. But it will eventually have to happen.
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Reminds me of our multiple detection dog programs
These dogs are derisively called trick horse dogs.
Most detection dogs are used as a pre-warrant search in order to justify a probable cause search, for which trick horse dogs serve better than actual detection dogs.
As a result we have stats like 82% of the positive signals from Chicago police dogs sniffing Hispanics prove to be false.
Even regular detection dogs have about a 58% false positive rate used by US law enforcement.
I'm pretty sure that without a major reform, we're not going to see redundant tests, given that the prosecutors are going to prefer labs that yield more positive results. Even ones that are false.
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Re: Reminds me of our multiple detection dog programs
This is why seeing those major reformations occur is going to be so difficult. There's really no political incentive to reforming it. If you make it harder to get the positive results (true or false), you look soft on crime. Easier to just throw the tech in prison for a bit, let the lab head resign, and keep going about doing things in a dangerous way (for everyone else.)
A couple years ago, there was a call by NIST to strengthen the scientific ethics of forensic laboratories and better their practices, meaning: training personnel in the ethics of testing and reporting, ensuring that all techs are capable of doing their jobs, detailing false positive rates of testing methods, and so on. The forensic scientist communities and organizations generally regarded this as a good thing. Several government agencies wanted nothing to do with it and flat out ignored several proposals made by NIST and refused to classify certain disciplines as being "sciences" so as to avoid making necessary changes (specifically those revolving around audio and video work.)
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Eliminate State Run Laboratories
It is also abundantly clear that any evidence testing required by law enforcement should only be conducted at independently run laboratories in double-blind fashion.
This simple step will help eliminate any potential bias in the lab or test results.
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Re:
Yes, but for the money, not the lulz. Also just reporting samples as positive without going through the hassle of testing them.
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Proof-reading...
s/begin/being/
Downvote this post after correcting.
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Re: Re: Re:
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Re: It is NOT too big to solve
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.. That made me laugh. When it comes to money the "moral" and "obligation" is thrown out the window. It is our money they waste and steal. They don't care.
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Re: Now THAT is funny!
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statistical analysis & quality control
These include methods such as splitting samples and sending them in separately (or to different labs), spiking test samples with measured quantities of adulterants, and other quality-control checks that are used to gauge the accuracy and consistency of the testing facility -- as well as each employee if need be.
Therefore, in any "normal" testing lab situation, it would be virtually impossible for a technician to put out flawed results for years and never get caught.
But apparently police agencies don't believe in the need for any of this, because in their mind (at least as far as the public is concerned) everyone from the arresting deputy all the way down the line is 100% trustworthy and infallible.
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Re: statistical analysis & quality control
The more cynical explanation is that their goal is not accuracy but convictions.
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Not the real objective.
Actually, considering the cost of incarcerating the wrongly convicted, it would probably save money in the end. But that's not the real objective, is it?
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Why don't they tell us his name?
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Re: Why don't they tell us his name?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150729/10261131790/drug-war-is-creating-problems-too-bi g-to-fix.shtml#c550
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Re: Ambrose Bierce said it best
The Malleus Malificarum for Drug Users.
---
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Re: Re: Re: never set foot in the states
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Re: There are LOTS of reasons to never set foot in the States
For another, if you come to the US as a visitor and don't have first-class emergency-medical and medevac insurance, you risk being financially ruined if you have a serious accident or fall seriously ill. American medical bills are nothing short of obscene. (Just ask the parents of Canadian skier Sarah Burke.) Hopefully, the worst symptoms of any illness you contract at an American restaurant won't kick in until you're back home.
And you don't want to travel with very much cash -- not because of "bad guys," but because of cops. A lot of American law enforcement agencies will simply take it from you on the theory that it's inherently suspicious, and you will have to hire a lawyer, sue them, and prove that you aren't a drug trafficker in order to get it back. And no, you won't recover your attorney fees.
But, hey! Some of our national parks are still pretty nice...
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Re: Re: failure to test
really? you talk as if he checked the wrong box by mistake or mixed up two samples by accident. He deliberately didn't even check samples and then went even further and deliberately falsified negative samples. that a bit more then a mistake.
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Re: Re: Re: failure to test
First, it's she not he. Second, that was in response to someone suggesting that a single mistake by a tech should be grounds for termination and forfeiture of pension.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: failure to test
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