A Rare Victory for Transparency. Massachusetts Could Use Many More.
The statue of justice.
COVID-19 has taught us all about the importance of vaccines. When it comes to government, as Bono put it, “we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease. It’s corruption. But there’s a vaccine for that too. It’s called transparency.”
Massachusetts is in the midst of wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Thousands of convictions had to be vacated because of the corruption of state drug laboratory chemists. Thousands more convictions were vacated because of the combined misconduct of the chemists and prosecutors. And still more will be vacated because of the Commonwealth’s repeated and deliberate failures to investigate the extent to which its evidence was compromised.