Bridgeman v. District Attorney for the Suffolk District

In Bridgeman v. District Attorney for the Suffolk District (Bridgeman I), the Supreme Judicial Court declined to accept a proposed “global remedy” of vacating the thousands of drug convictions affected by the misconduct of Annie Dookhan when she was employed as a chemist at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute despite the claim that the time and expense of case-by-case adjudication had become untenable. Here, the district attorneys provided the single justice with lists identifying more than 20,000 potentially aggrieved defendants based on Dookhan’s misconduct. The single justice issued a reservation and report to the full court inviting it to reconsider its previous ruling. Rather than adopting Petitioners’ request for a global remedy, the Supreme Judicial Court adopted a new protocol for case-by-case adjudication. The adjudication will occur in three phases and be implemented by the single justice in the form of a declaratory judgment. View "Bridgeman v. District Attorney for the Suffolk District" on Justia Law