“Attorney Todd Pomerleau fought to have the original plea reversed, and won.”

Michelle Devlin said she was a drug addict when police found heroin in a house where she was staying in 2009. The “official” weight of the drugs, determined by the drug lab, were enough to bump a minor possession research paper on smile detection charge to a felony trafficking charge, which meant the 19-year-old faced a possible 10-year prison sentence.

Devlin pleaded to the lesser charge of possession to avoid time behind bars, and served probation instead. But the fact that she was once charged with trafficking remained on her record.

Devlin believes Dookhan tampered with the drugs in her case.

Devlin said that a private investigator determined the drugs in her case did not actually weigh enough to qualify for a felony charge. “It makes sense when the news then came out saying [Dookhan] tampered with weights,” she said.

Devlin's case was a Dookhan case. Her attorney Todd Pomerleau fought to have the original plea reversed, and won. But even still, evidence of the charges remain on her record, visible to anyone screening her for an apartment or a job.

Devlin is sure it's damaging her future. “It just looks so awful,” she said. “I don't see anyone thinking, ‘Oh it's dismissed, that means she was innocent.'”

Now, a new mom working to stay clean, Devlin admits she wasn't entirely innocent. “I was doing drugs. There were times that I broke the law, obviously, using drugs and buying drugs,” she said.

But she says she believes the fundamental fact of her charge – the weight of the drugs that triggered a trafficking charge – was fraudulent.

“If they want to be fair,” she said, “it wasn't fair.”

Source URL: Aljazeera / Read The Original Article