State district attorneys in seven MA counties on Tuesday were filing lists of drug cases they plan not to prosecute as a result of Dookhan's falsification and fabrication of evidence.
Just 55 of thousands of Essex County drug cases involving now-disgraced former state lab chemist Annie Dookhan will be re-prosecuted, said District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett.
But the ACLU and other organizations filed a lawsuit in 2014 on behalf of three individuals whose cases were tainted by Dookhan, which led to the state's Supreme Judicial Court in January ordering the district attorneys to make a lists of cases that should be dismissed and should be re-prosecuted.
The cases would be formally dismissed by court action, expected Thursday, the ACLU said. Annie Dookhan pleaded guilty in.
The state public defender service and the American Civil Liberties Union said that individually relitigating 24,000 cases, with 20,000 defendants, would be both overwhelming to the state's defense bar and pointless in light of what they called an unfair and ineffective war on drugs.
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Earlier this month, Blodgett's office said less than 200 superior court level drug cases involving Dookhan were under review.
More than 5,700 of those letters were returned as undeliverable, the court said, and the entire mailing resulted in motions for post-conviction relief in less than 1 percent of the total cases.
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Prosecutors said they made a decision to re-prosecute defendants with lengthy criminal histories. Her job was to test substances seized by police, and when state officials uncovered her role in tainting the cases, Dookhan went to prison and was paroled in 2016.
Bristol County District Attorney Thomas Quinn III indicated he would prosecute 112 cases if the defendants were granted new trials, NBC News reports.
The justices instead proposed a multi-step process to resolve the cases, the first step requiring district attorneys to vacate cases they could not retry based on the evidence.
"We continue to believe that, despite the considerable risks and burdens, case-by-case adjudication is the fairest and best alternative to resolve the drug cases potentially tainted by Dookhan's misconduct, and the alternative most consistent and in harmony with the relevant principles of criminal justice that have and continue to guide us in this extraordinary situation", Gants wrote.
The state Supreme Judicial Court had ordered district attorneys in eastern MA to produce lists by the end of the day on Tuesday indicating how numerous approximately 24,000 affected cases involving Dookhan they would be unwilling or unable to prosecute if new trials were ordered.
Prosecutors said Dookhan admitted testing only a fraction of a batch of samples, then listing them all as positive for illegal drugs.
But some of the people whose cases are being dismissed have already lost jobs and their homes, or have been deported, according to ACLU attorneys. "Justice delayed is justice denied".
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