One bad apple, or so they say
Nov. 22nd, 2013 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pbrayChemist Pleads Guilty in Massachusetts Crime Lab Scandal.
Annie Dookhan pursued renown along a path of lies in depth background piece.
Estimates are forty thousand criminal cases were potentially compromised. Over one thousand cases have been dismissed or failed to be prosecuted since August 2012.
Between 2009 and 2010, the time it took Dookhan to conduct a test went down by more than half. At most work places this is the time when your boss would ask you to share your best practices with the team, so everyone could achieve the same rates of efficiency. Instead she remained the lone outlier, over twice as productive as the next best employee. By 2010 she was five times more productive than the average lab employee.
If she had kept her test numbers merely high rather than inflating them astronomically, it's likely she would never have been caught. And we'd be naive to believe she's the only bad apple in the system, and that this is the only crime lab that had inadequate supervision and a complete lack of checks & balances.
Annie Dookhan pursued renown along a path of lies in depth background piece.
Estimates are forty thousand criminal cases were potentially compromised. Over one thousand cases have been dismissed or failed to be prosecuted since August 2012.
Between 2009 and 2010, the time it took Dookhan to conduct a test went down by more than half. At most work places this is the time when your boss would ask you to share your best practices with the team, so everyone could achieve the same rates of efficiency. Instead she remained the lone outlier, over twice as productive as the next best employee. By 2010 she was five times more productive than the average lab employee.
If she had kept her test numbers merely high rather than inflating them astronomically, it's likely she would never have been caught. And we'd be naive to believe she's the only bad apple in the system, and that this is the only crime lab that had inadequate supervision and a complete lack of checks & balances.