If you were a defendant in a case involving drug charges that were tested in a laboratory, you may be interested in the following story.
The top court in Massachusetts is set to decide how to handle defendants convicted with evidence that was tested at a crime lab which had flawed practices.
Requests have been made to throw out tens of thousands of convictions associated with a former Massachusetts drug chemist who is now serving a jail sentence after pleading guilty to tampering with evidence. It is possible that over forty thousand drug cases were tainted.
Similar flawed tests have come about in New York, Delaware and Colorado, raising questions about the quality of the convictions.
Many of the over forty thousand drug cases in Massachusetts involved low level drug offenses that did not send the defendants to jail. Unfortunately, it left them with criminal records and obviously damaging consequences.
The take away for anyone charged with a drug crime, where the drugs were tested by a lab, scrutinize not only the test results but the procedures and perhaps the people involved in the testing.
