Massachusetts Court Paves Way for Reviews of Tainted Drugs Cases

Massachusetts' top court on Monday paved the way for potentially thousands of people convicted of drugs crimes to be re-tried because their cases involved evidence from a rogue crime lab scientist. The decision from the Supreme Judicial Court is the latest fallout from one of the country's biggest crime lab scandals, in which scientist Annie Dookhan tainted as many as 40,000 drugs cases at the now-closed Hinton State Laboratory Institute by falsifying results. The court's panel of justices said that defendants who seek new trials "cannot be charged with a more serious offense than that of which he or she initially was convicted under the terms of a plea agreement and, if convicted again, cannot be given a more severe sentence than that which originally was imposed."