3 ms·

CBI's star DNA scientist got away with deleting data for years

2 points by ctoth 2y ago

ctoth 2y ago
> At least once or twice a week, Woods went to one particular person with that higher-level clearance, forensic scientist Marko Kokotovic, and asked him to make changes for her without doing that formal documentation. He had “complete trust” in her and regularly agreed to do so, he told investigators in December. > “Honestly she was always very resistant to (the formal process),” Kokotovic said. “I would ask her to do it. She was always giving me a hard time of, ‘It’s so stupid, it’s just a little deletion, why waste all this time doing a correction when it just takes two seconds to delete this.’ It was pretty much always a time thing… She was a little bit more on the intimidating side. And she was always getting so much done that I didn’t want to hinder her progress, in a sense. So I was like, ‘You’re right, I’ll just do it for ya’ and it’s this tidy thing, moving on.” > Woods and other DNA analysts also manipulated the technical review process — what is supposed to be a random process in which analysts review each other’s work for accuracy — to ensure that their allies at work got their reviews, the internal affairs investigators found. > Champlin told investigators she purposely avoided reviewing Woods’ work after the 2018 incident. And some of the top performers in the lab would pass their work back and forth among each other for technical reviews, Miller said. > “You have your friends, and your friends don’t question or argue,” Miller said. “The technical review process can be very argumentative between analysts, where one person thinks it is this kind of sample and the other person thinks it’s this. There can be a lot of arguing. When you are doing it with your buddy, who kind of has the same thinking as you do, you don’t have as many problems, as much fighting over the data.” How do we trust these people with literally anything, let alone putting humans in cages? Just absolutely disgusting. I love how dysfunction rarely changes -- they know they are doing wrong, but they just do it. Normalized deviance. How many other labs, procedures, processes, all well-designed to avoid issues like this are simply worked around by bad actors?

2 points by ctoth 2y ago

> At least once or twice a week, Woods went to one particular person with that higher-level clearance, forensic scientist Marko Kokotovic, and asked him to make changes for her without doing that formal documentation. He had “complete trust” in her and regularly agreed to do so, he told investigators in December. > “Honestly she was always very resistant to (the formal process),” Kokotovic said. “I would ask her to do it. She was always giving me a hard time of, ‘It’s so stupid, it’s just a little deletion, why waste all this time doing a correction when it just takes two seconds to delete this.’ It was pretty much always a time thing… She was a little bit more on the intimidating side. And she was always getting so much done that I didn’t want to hinder her progress, in a sense. So I was like, ‘You’re right, I’ll just do it for ya’ and it’s this tidy thing, moving on.” > Woods and other DNA analysts also manipulated the technical review process — what is supposed to be a random process in which analysts review each other’s work for accuracy — to ensure that their allies at work got their reviews, the internal affairs investigators found. > Champlin told investigators she purposely avoided reviewing Woods’ work after the 2018 incident. And some of the top performers in the lab would pass their work back and forth among each other for technical reviews, Miller said. > “You have your friends, and your friends don’t question or argue,” Miller said. “The technical review process can be very argumentative between analysts, where one person thinks it is this kind of sample and the other person thinks it’s this. There can be a lot of arguing. When you are doing it with your buddy, who kind of has the same thinking as you do, you don’t have as many problems, as much fighting over the data.” How do we trust these people with literally anything, let alone putting humans in cages? Just absolutely disgusting. I love how dysfunction rarely changes -- they know they are doing wrong, but they just do it. Normalized deviance. How many other labs, procedures, processes, all well-designed to avoid issues like this are simply worked around by bad actors?