Annie Dookhan. (photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)
The Incredibly Silly “War” on “Drugs”
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
24 November 13
he one thing we cannot have in our ridiculous ongoing modern prohibitionist state is a criminal justice system that punishes the criminals in law enforcement as harshly as it punishes those at whom the laws are aimed, and on whom the law principally falls. Congresscritters get nabbed with some blow and it’s off to treatment. Cops skimming the profits from drug dealers — or, even more heinous, the ones that use the preposterous civil forfeiture statutes to shop for some new wheels — get slapped more lightly than the dealers from whom they skimmed. There is an essential corruption at the heart of the enforcement of the drug laws that rots the whole legal infrastructure of those laws from the inside.
Consider the case, today, of Annie Dookhan, who pleaded guilty to 27 counts of phonying up evidence in drug cases. Every one of her crimes benefitted cops. Every one of her crimes benefitted ambitious prosecutors. There was nobody like Annie Dookhan for inflating your conviction record, boy. The people who were convicted due to the crimes of Annie Dookhan were sentenced to hundreds of years in prison. Annie Dookhan got three-to-five.
Now, three-to-five in a state pen is no picnic, but it also is ridiculously light of the fundamental corruption that Annie Dookhan brought into the criminal justice system. (To say nothing of looking at that sentence in the context of what’s getting people life these days.) The system is stacked against defendants anyway — especially poor defendants in drug prosecutions — and this little wannabe puts her thumb on the scale? I hope somebody she helped convicted nails her — and the Commonwealth, god save it — with a civil judgment the size of Montana.
