Probe targets cops over missing drugs Evidence was stored in BPD warehouse

Boston Herald

Some 700 bags of drugs are missing from a Hyde Park evidence warehouse, a 14-month-long audit has revealed, and now police have launched a criminal probe into officers who had access to the facility.

The audit found that, in addition to the missing drugs, someone had tampered with another 265 evidence bags, in some cases replacing prescription narcotics with aspirin tablets.

The scandal creates a nightmare legal scenario for prosecutors and could be a ticket to sentence reduction and early release for repeat offenders, said criminal defense lawyers.

If a person was convicted using the now missing or tainted evidence, and was later arrested for a second drug crime, they could be jailed longer as a repeat offender, said Jack King, staff attorney with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Washington, D.C.

However, if the evidence from their first case has vanished or is compromised, the suspect can appeal the stiffer sentence they received as a repeat offender, King said, and they stand a good chance of winning.

“I saw that come up in my own experience in a couple of cases,” he said. “The defendant who appealed his prior conviction was able to get his sentence on the second conviction reduced. . . . If the evidence is missing, the city or the state doesn’t have much of a case.”

The Suffolk District Attorney’s Office said that while all of the cases involving the drugs have moved through the courts, it is now investigating how many repeat offenders that scenario may apply to. Since many of the cases involving the missing or tainted evidence date back to 1990 and could number in the dozens, spokesman Jake Wark said it is “simply too early to say at this point whether or how any defendants’ subsequent sentences may have been affected.”........