Chemistry lab scandal could affect thousands of cases

  By DENISE LAVOIEBOSTON -- A chemist accused of lying about drug samples she tested at a state lab could face additional charges as prosecutors and defense attorneys sift through thousands of criminal cases that could be upended by her actions.

Annie Dookhan, 34, of Franklin, was arrested Friday in a burgeoning investigation that has already led to the shutdown of the lab, the resignation of the state's public health commissioner and the release of more than a dozen drug defendants.

Many more defendants are expected to be released. Authorities say more than 1,100 inmates are serving time in cases in which Dookhan was the primary or secondary chemist.

"Annie Dookhan's alleged actions corrupted the integrity of the entire criminal justice system," state Attorney General Martha Coakley said during a news conference after Dookhan's arrest. "There are many victims as a result of this."

Dookhan faces more than 20 years in prison on charges of obstruction of justice and falsely pretending to hold a degree from a college or university. She testified under oath that she holds a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts, but school officials say they have no record of her receiving an advanced degree or taking graduate courses there.

State police say Dookhan tested more than 60,000 drug samples involving 34,000 defendants during her nine years at the Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Boston. Defense lawyers and prosecutors are scrambling to figure out how to deal with the fallout.

Assistant Attorney General John Verner called the charges against Dookhan "preliminary" and said a "much broader" investigation is being conducted.

Verner said state police learned of Dookhan's alleged actions in July after they interviewed a chemist at the lab who said he had observed "many irregularities" in Dookhan's work.

Verner said Dookhan later acknowledged to state police that she sometimes would take 15 to 25 samples and instead of testing them all, she would test only five of them, then list them all as positive. She said that sometimes, if a sample tested negative, she would take known cocaine from another sample and add it to the negative sample to make it test positive for cocaine, Verner said.

Dookhan pleaded not guilty and was later released on $10,000 bail. She was ordered to turn over her passport, submit to GPS monitoring, and not have contact with any former or current employees of the lab.

Dookhan's relatives and attorney declined to comment after the brief hearing in Boston Municipal Court. Her next court date is Dec. 3.

The obstruction charges accuse Dookhan of lying about drug samples she analyzed at the lab in March 2011 for a Suffolk County case, and for testifying under oath in August 2010 that she had an advanced degree from the University of Massachusetts, Attorney General Martha Coakley said at a news conference.

In one of the cases, Boston police had tested a substance as negative for cocaine, but when Dookhan tested it, she reported it as positive. Investigators later retested the cample and it came back negative, Verner said.

The only motive authorities have found so far is that Dookhan wanted to be seen as a good worker, Coakley said.

According to a state police report in August, Dookhan said she just wanted to get the work done and never meant to hurt anyone.

"I screwed up big-time," she is quoted as saying. "I messed up bad; it's my fault. I don't want the lab to get in trouble."

Dookhan's supervisors have faced harsh criticism for not removing her from lab duties after suspicions about her were first raised by her co-workers and for not alerting prosecutors and police. However, Coakley said, there is no indication so far of criminal activity by anyone else at the lab.

Co-workers began expressing concern about Dookhan's work habits several years ago, but her supervisors allowed her to continue working. Dookhan was the most productive chemist in the lab, routinely testing more than 500 samples a month, while others tested 50 to 150.

One co-worker told state police he never saw Dookhan in front of a microscope. A lab employee saw Dookhan weighing drug samples without doing a balance check on her scale.

In an interview with state police late last month, Dookhan acknowledged faking test results for two to three years. She told police she identified some drug samples as narcotics simply by looking at them instead of testing them, a process known as dry labbing. She also said she forged the initials of colleagues and deliberately turned a negative sample into a positive for narcotics a few times.

"I hope the system isn't treating the evidence against her the way she treated the evidence against several thousand defendants," said defense attorney John T. Martin, who has a client who was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea based on concerns over Dookhan's work.

Dookhan was suspended from lab duties after getting caught forging a colleague's initials on paperwork in June 2011. She resigned in March as the Department of Public Health investigated. The lab was run by the department until July 1, when state police took over as part of a state budget directive.

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Study: Splitting chores could lead to divorce

  Eyewitness NewsNORWAY (WABC) -- Household chores could tell you a lot about the state of your marriage and how likely you are to get divorced.

A Norwegian study has found divorce rates are far higher among modern couples who share the housework.

In homes where the woman does the lion's share of the chores, the divorce rate was about 50 percent lower.

CLICK HERE to read the full story from the Daily Telegraph

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Rielle Hunter: 'I Believed I Could Help Him'

Why did Rielle Hunter accept an invitation from John Edwards, a married man, to join him in his hotel room one fateful day in 2006?

"I went there because I believed I could help him," Hunter told "20/20's" Chris Cuomo in an exclusive interview.

Hunter reveals the details of her first meeting with the then-presidential candidate and the six-year affair that became the biggest political sex scandal of a generation in her bombshell tell-all, "What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter, and Me," to be published June 26. Hunter recently sat down with Chris Cuomo for her first interview since Edwards' acquittal on charges of accepting illegal campaign contributions.

In the book, Hunter writes that, as a budding spiritual advisor, she believed she could help him merge his public persona -- which she said appeared shallow and aloof -- with his deeper private persona, so that he could present himself more authentically.

Watch Chris Cuomo's interview with Rielle Hunter tonight on "20/20" at 10 p.m. ET.

The story of their love and scandal began with that hotel encounter.

"He rounded the street corner and it came out of my mouth: 'You're so hot,'" Hunter recalled.

Hunter is well aware that others might take her desire to "help" to mean something else.

"From the outside world looking in, (it's) like, 'Boy, did you sure help him,'" she told Cuomo.

Eventually, Hunter said, Edwards persuaded her to come sit with him on the hotel room bed.

"Something happened internally with me. I responded... I have not experienced it or felt what was happening before. Ever. An intensity like a rock concert. A lot of energy," she told Cuomo.

PHOTOS: Rielle Hunter, John Edwards and Their Daughter

That energy was strong enough that the man who would soon be a candidate for president of the United States risked it all to be with her.

"We could not get enough of each other on the telephone," Hunter said. "If we were not together, we would be talking on the phone about four hours every night. We couldn't hang up."

Any doubts she had about sleeping with a married man were helped, she said, by his insistence that his storybook marriage with Elizabeth Edwards was just that -- a story.

"Their marriage was ruined before I got there. Years before I got there," Hunter said. She said Edwards told her he had had other mistresses -- that she was not the first.

To the public, meanwhile, Edwards presented an entirely different appearance.

"I was disgusted with myself for being in love with a man who was going on national TV with his wife -- and lying," Hunter said.

While Edwards was hot on the campaign trail, Hunter discovered that she was pregnant. Hunter said Edwards had a "gracious" reaction when she told him the news, saying he would support her and that he wouldn't tell her what to do.

"I think he thought the timing was terrible," she said, but Edwards was "kinder and more gentle than I thought he would be."

Hunter called the February 2008 birth of their daughter Quinn, now 4, "difficult and incredible."

"It's like the polar opposites of the pain and agony and oh my God, how difficult it is. But the blessing that comes out of that (is) amazing," she said.

But amid her amazement, Hunter was also devastated by Edwards' initial denial that he was Quinn's father. In an interview with ABC News' Bob Woodruff on Nightline in August 2008, he insisted that he was not Quinn's father. Still, Hunter said she understands why Edwards lied.

"What it meant, though, to me, is that he was temporarily insane. I mean, he had really gone off the deep end a bit there," she said, "but it was painful to witness."

Hunter said at one point she was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement requiring her to keep the identity of Quinn's father secret from everyone except Quinn. She refused.

"I didn't want my daughter growing up under a lie," she said.

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Romney's fate could hang on speech to Latinos

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

For the first time in this presidential election both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney this week will directly address Latinos, a crucial voting bloc that could swing this fall’s race for the White House.

On Thursday, Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, will speak to the annual conference held by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO). On Friday it is Obama’s turn. The dueling speeches highlight both parties’ push to win the support of the nation’s fastest-growing voting bloc.

The battlelines appear to be drawn. Obama enjoys a huge edge among Latinos, as he has dating back to his 2008 victory over Sen. John McCain. That year Obama won 67 percent of the Latino vote – and this year he looks poised to do even better, especially on the heels of his announcement last Friday that his administration would not seek to deport up to 800,000 children of illegal immigrants living in this country. An ABC News/Washington Post poll earlier this spring revealed 73 percent of Latinos backing Obama, compared with only 26 percent for Romney. Since Friday’s move by the White House, polls have shown a nearly double-digit jump in support for Obama among Latinos.

Obama’s decision to relax the country’s deportation laws directly answered one of the main gripes that Latinos had previously expressed about his tenure in the Oval Office: his failure to deal with immigration reform. Despite promising comprehensive reforms when he was on the campaign trail in 2008, Obama never followed through, despite enjoying a Democrat-controlled Congress during his first two years in Washington. Even the DREAM Act, a scaled-back immigration bill that would provide a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants who join the military or attend college, failed to pass the Senate in late 2009. The new White House policy to offer temporary work permits to young illegal immigrants who came into this country as children is similar to the DREAM Act.

“The announcement on June 14 appears to have clearly erased Obama’s enthusiasm deficit among Latinos,” said Matt Barreto, a researcher at Latino Decisions and associate professor of political science at the University of Washington.

If Obama has any cause for concern about Latinos, it may be turnout. The number of registered Latino voters dropped significantly in recent years – and projections on how many Latinos will vote in November, once as high as 12.2 million according to NALEO, now hover around 10.5 million, according to the William C. Velasquez Institute.

Still, Romney is in a much more difficult position. Not only is he facing an opponent who won Latinos by more than a two-to-one margin in the last election, but he has to address criticism from Latinos after a series of controversial comments during the GOP primary. The former Massachusetts governor vowed to veto the DREAM Act, praised Arizona’s controversial new anti-immigrant law, and touted the endorsement of controversial anti-immigration activist Kris Kobach. If Romney cannot boost his standing among Latinos to around 40 percent support, then according to Republican strategist Ana Navarro earlier this year, “He can kiss the White House goodbye.”

Even members of his own party have acknowledged the difficult road ahead for Romney. New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, said Latinos “have been alienated” over the course of the GOP campaign this past year.

Now it appears that Romney’s best hope of convincing Latinos to support him may be capitalizing on their economic struggles. The jobless rate among Latinos is currently 11 percent, higher than the national average of 8.2 percent, and this week the Republican National Committee released a new web video in both English and Spanish that criticizes Obama for the country’s economic woes, especially those faced by Latinos.

“After four years of President Obama, our economy isn’t better,” a graphic in the ad reads.

When asked about Obama’s policy change last Friday, Romney this week called it an attempt to “change the subject” from his comments earlier this month that “the private sector is doing fine.”

Get more pure politics at ABC News.com/Politics and a lighter take on the news at OTUSNews.com

“I believe that the reason this came out is the president is trying to shore up his base with Latino voters and he’s also trying to change the subject from his miserable speech last week – from his gaffe that the private economy is doing fine and from the failure of his economic policies to get this economy going again,” Romney said in an interview with FOX News Radio.

While it will be difficult for Romney to raise his standing among Latinos, he may be heartened by the fact that Latinos cite the economy – not immigration reform – as their top priority. In addition, picking a prominent Hispanic lawmaker such as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., as his running mate could help him even more.

On the heels of a week when it emerged that Romney was not vetting Rubio, a charge the presumptive GOP nominee vehemently denied Tuesday night, not considering a top Latino such as Rubio could damage Romney’s standing among the country’s largest ethnic minority.

On top of that, Romney’s failure to take a stand on Obama’s new immigration policy has put him in a difficult position. He has been criticized for not coming out with a clear stance on it, but while agreeing with the policy could win him support among Latinos, such an approach would hurt his standing with the far right.

Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration reform group, said Romney “has to say something about immigration” at the conference in Orlando, but both options come with risks.

“If he says what he said in the primaries he’ll be booed. If he pulls out his etch-a-sketch the far right will be apoplectic. And if he dodges the issue he will raise questions about whether he has the chops to be president,” Sharry said. “He’s painted himself into a corner and by ducking the issue this week he has only raised the stakes of his speech at NALEO. Given the importance of the Hispanic vote in this election, the fate of his candidacy could hang in the balance.”

The Romney campaign said Wednesday that they would have “a few more things… to say about immigration” on Thursday in Florida. The stakes, clearly, are high.

Matthew Jaffe is covering the 2012 campaign for ABC News and Univision.

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FDA could approve HIV-prevention pill Thursday

  MATTHEW PERRONEWASHINGTON -- A pill that has long been used to treat HIV has moved one step closer to becoming the first drug approved to prevent healthy people from becoming infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that Gilead Sciences' Truvada appears to be safe and effective for HIV prevention. It concluded that taking the pill daily could spare patients "infection with a serious and life-threatening illness that requires lifelong treatment."

On Thursday, a panel of FDA advisers will consider the review when it votes on whether Truvada should be approved as a preventative treatment for people who are at high risk of contracting HIV through sexual intercourse. The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its panels, but it usually does.

An estimated 1.2 million Americans have HIV, which attacks the immune system and, unless treated with antiviral drugs, develops into AIDS, a fatal condition in which the body cannot fight off infections. If Truvada is approved, it would be a major breakthrough in the 30-year campaign against the AIDS epidemic. There have been no other drugs proven to prevent HIV and a vaccine is believed to be decades away.

Gilead Sciences Inc., based in Foster City, Calif., has marketed Truvada since 2004 as a treatment for people who are infected with the virus. The medication is a combination of two older HIV drugs, Emtriva and Viread. Doctors usually prescribe the medications as part of a drug cocktail that makes it harder for the virus to reproduce. Patients with low viral levels have reduced symptoms and are far less likely to develop AIDS.

Researchers first reported that Truvada could prevent people from contracting HIV in 2010. A three-year study found that daily doses cut the risk of infection in healthy gay and bisexual men by 44 percent, when accompanied by condoms and counseling. Another study found that Truvada reduced infection by 75 percent in heterosexual couples in which one partner was infected with HIV and the other was not.

Because Truvada is already on the market to manage HIV, some doctors already prescribe it as a preventive measure. But FDA approval would allow the drugmaker Gilead Sciences to formally market its drug for that use.

FDA reviewers on Tuesday said that patients must be diligent about taking the pill every day if using it as a preventative measure. Adherence to the medication was less than perfect in clinical trials, and reviewers said that patients in the real world may forget to take their medication even more than those in clinical studies.

Some patient advocacy groups say the drug is an important new option to prevent HIV, alongside condoms, counseling and other measures. Last month, advocacy group AIDS United and more than a dozen other groups sent a letter to the FDA, urging approval of Truvada.

"If we're going to reduce the more than 50,000 new HIV infections in this country each year, we need to increase the available options for people," said Ronald Johnson, AIDS United's vice president.

But support for FDA approval is not unanimous.

Although the FDA is legally barred from considering cost when reviewing drugs, health care providers have raised concerns about Truvada's price tag: $900 a month, or just under $11,000 per year. Medicare and Medicaid, the nation's largest health insurance plans, generally cover drugs approved by the FDA, and analysts expect most large health insurers to follow suit.

Additionally, some researchers say the prevention pill is not the chemical equivalent of condoms, which they say remain the best weapon against AIDS. They also worry about Truvada's mixed success rate in preventing infection among women: Last year, a study in women was stopped early after researchers found that women taking the drug were more likely to become infected than those taking placebo.

Researchers speculated that women may require a higher dose of the drug to prevent infection. They also said the disappointing results may have resulted from women not taking the pills consistently.

"We know that if the person doesn't take the medication every day they will not be protected," said Dr. Rodney Wright, director of HIV programs at Montefiore Medical Center in New York and chairman of the AIDS Health Foundation. "So the concern is that there may not be adequate adherence to provide protection in the general population."

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Could your commute be killing you?

  Eyewitness NewsDALLAS (WABC) -- Every day, twice a day, the grind of the commute. In healthy living, doctors are saying that it may the unhealthiest part of your day. The longer it is, the worse for your body.

When it comes to Cindy Abrams' Los Angeles commute, there's one way to describe it - long. In fact, she drives two hours each way.

At some point, every commuter stares straight into the brake lights ahead and thinks it, this is going to kill me. It turns out, it just might.

In a new study, researchers looked at 4,000 frustrated drivers right smack in the middle of one of the worst commutes in the country: Dallas, Texas.

They found that those commuting 10 miles or more had bigger waistlines and higher blood pressure than those with the shorter commute.

"It's the first study that's documented how commuting distance affects objective health outcomes, so namely blood pressure, cardio respiratory fitness and weight," the study's author said.

But the reality is that Americans need to get to work

The average commute is about 25 minutes each way, and if you think your commute is bad, nearly 8 percent of America now spends more than an hour getting to work.

And the evidence is mounting that all that stress and lost time is taking a toll.

Gallup researchers found a third of drivers with 90-minute daily commutes report recurring neck or back problems.

And researchers in Sweden even found couples with long commutes were 40 percent more likely to drive to divorce court.

The advice? Seek out carpooling or public transportation, anything that can get you out of the driver's seat and give you a break from a daily grind that studies are showing really is dangerous.

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Edwards could be indicted within days

  WASHINGTON -- The United States Department of Justice has green-lighted the prosecution of former presidential candidate John Edwards for alleged violations of campaign laws while he tried to cover up an extra-marital affair, ABC News has learned.

A source close to the case said Edwards is aware that the government intends to seek an indictment and that the former senator from North Carolina is now considering his limited options. He could accept a plea bargain with prosecutors or face a potentially costly trial.

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