I had to think about how it could be plausible to anyone, and then I remembered what my late father (a chemistry major who later worked as an industrial engineer) used to tell me about working in chemistry labs. Sometimes you have to sit around and wait while an assay runs, but I suppose an efficient person (who has enough equipment) could run more than one assay at a time, and monitor each result in turn. I have no specialized knowledge about what a normal rate of doing tests would be in a well administered state crime lab.

I like that you ran the numbers, and think you have a good question.

One remark in the original article said she had access to files and samples for many cases that she was not primary on. Perhaps that's the issue -- the ability to taint results across the whole departmental workload.

Excellent question and one that raises another one. Could she possibly have tainted that many cases working alone? If not, we should be looking at every one around her including the DA.

Simple network analysis of every person (arresting officer, DA and other crime lab technicians) involved in these ~34k cases should be able to come up with a dozen or so people that warrant additional scrutiny.

Actually, it says that someone was let out because she was a secondary chemist. So in other words, if she even came close to working on a case, then it's suspect.

Not to mention, she falsified lab results to the degree that she didn't even do any testing at all on many samples. That's pretty much close to zero time to file the report.

When it comes to intent - she deliberately tainted some samples! Gotta ask yourself why.