Court rules 27,000 people with OUI convictions can appeal due to deliberate screwups by a different state lab than the ones that screwed up all those drug tests

The Supreme Judicial Court concluded today that the way the State Police office responsible for testing blood-alcohol devices withheld information on machines that failed calibration tests for years was such "egregious government misconduct" that anybody convicted of OUI based on breath tests on machines tested there should be allowed to appeal without struggling to prove their tests were invalid.

The court stopped short of simply dismissing every OUI conviction between June 1, 2011 and April 18, 2019 based on the use of the specific devices, because unlike drug cases that could not go forward without proof that the materials in question were specific drugs, police and prosecutors could present other, non-breath-test evidence of OUI, such as the failure to walk a straight line after a traffic stop, glassy eyes, impaired speech and the like.

The ruling comes in the case of a woman who pleaded guilty to her second OUI in Beverly who appealed her ruling after news broke that the State Police Office of Alcohol Testing deliberately withheld any results of machine testing that showed potential problems when asked for the evidence - essentially withholding "exculpatory" information that defense attorneys could use question the validity of the "scientific" breath tests prosecutors were using to try to convict their clients.

The scathing EOPSS [Executive Office of Public Safety and Security] report highlights OAT's disturbing pattern of intentionally withholding exculpatory evidence year after year, dating back at least as early as June 2011. The report characterizes OAT's discovery practices as "dysfunctional," guided by "serious errors of judgment," and "enabled by a longstanding and insular institutional culture that was reflexively guarded." OAT leadership "frequently failed to seek out or take advantage of available legal resources." As a result, thousands of documents were not produced to defendants in the Ananias litigation and in other cases, despite plainly being responsive to discovery orders and requests. These defendants thus did not have the benefit of using exculpatory authorization reports, the quality assurance manual, failed certification worksheets, and internal repair records to challenge the validity of the breath test instrument used in their individual cases. The broad scope and nature of these violations of court orders undermined the criminal justice system in the Commonwealth, compromised thousands of prosecutions for OUI offenses, and potentially resulted in inaccurate convictions. As the specially assigned District Court judge observed in his order denying the defendant's motion, the conclusion that OAT's behavior was egregiously impermissible is "inescapable."

OAT's cavalier and supercilious attitude toward its discovery obligations led to the repeated concealment of evidence that its testing process was flawed. This was compounded by its failure to work with available legal counsel and the experts in the [lab case management unit] who handled all other discovery requests to the crime lab and who could have assisted in the identification and production of this type of exculpatory evidence. Indeed, the reach of OAT's missteps is vast.

The court concluded that "requiring tens of thousands of defendants to bear the cost of proving that OAT's conduct was egregiously impermissible would be antithetical to our responsibility to ensure the efficient administration of justice" and so ruled that anybody seeking to overturn an OUI conviction based on the tests used in the period in question could go into court with the presumption that, in fact, the tests should not be used in evidence as they press their case.