B. ut when Penates lawyer tried to obtain the documents not certain what was in them before his clients 2013 trial, he was rebuffed by state prosecutors who said the papers were irrelevant according to emails included in investigative reports unsealed earlier this month. Foster, now general counsel at the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission, and Kaczmarek, now a clerk magistrate in Suffolk Superior Court, declined to comment for this story. She consumed meth, crack cocaine, amphetamines, and LSD at the bench where she tested samples, in a lab bathroom, and even at courthouses where she was testifying. "I dont know how the Velis report reached the conclusion it did after reviewing the underlying email documents, said Randy Gioia, deputy chief counsel at the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the states public defender office. Even as they filed numerous motions for information about how long Farak had been using drugs, the defense attorneys had no idea these worksheets existed. The governor also tapped a local attorney, David Meier, to count how many individuals' cases might be tainted. But in a Two Massachusetts drug lab technicians Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan were caught tainting evidence in separate drug labs in different but equally shocking ways. Would love your thoughts, please comment. Grand Jury Transcript - Sonja Farak - September 16, 2015 Contributed by Shawn Musgrave (Musgrave Investigations) p. 1. Relying on an investigation conducted by state police, the judges In a 61 ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court in 2017, the defense bar, led by public defenders and the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), won the dismissal of almost every conviction based on Dookhan's analysismore than 36,000 cases in all. Sonja Farak is in the grip of a rubbed-raw depression that hasn't responded to medication. She was arrested in 2013 when the supervisor at the Amherst lab was made aware that two samples were missing. "These drugswere tested fairly," Coakley claimed the day after Farak's arrest. So, in a way, it is not from her that the queue of the blame should begin; it should be from the lab and the authorities themselves. She stopped the interview when asked about crack pipes found at her bench, and state police towed her car back to barracks while they waited on a warrant. Talking Politics: Should a new government agency protect the coastline from climate change? Each employee had a unique swipe card, but Farak simply used a physical key to get in after hours and on weekends. Over the next four years, Farak consumed nearly all of it. wrote she "tried to resist using @ work, but ended up failing." Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility at GBH, Transparency in Coverage Cost-Sharing Disclosures. She had never quashed a subpoena before, but supervisors told her to fend off motions about Farak. Below is an outline of her charges. Foster It features the true story of Sonja Farak, a former state drug lab chemist in Massachusetts who was arrested in 2013 for consuming the drugs she was supposed to test and tampering with the evidence to cover up her tracks. "A forensic analyst responding to a request from a law enforcement official may feel pressureor have an incentiveto alter the evidence in a manner favorable to the prosecution.". Farak signed a certification of drug samples in Penate's case on Dec. 22, 2011. After she was caught, Farak pleaded guilty to stealing drugs from the lab and was sentenced to prison time of 18 months. Deborah Becker Twitter Host/ReporterDeborah Becker is a senior correspondent and host at WBUR. Meanwhile, other top prosecutors, including Coakley, largely escaped criticism for their collective failure to hand over evidence that they were bound by constitutional mandate to share with defendants. "The need to inform defendants of government misconduct does not disappear when that misconduct was committed by a government lawyer as opposed to a government chemist.". The hotline is open Monday through Friday, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Despite such unequivocal findings of misconduct, the court removed language about Kaczmarek and Foster from notification letters to those whose cases have been dismissed, which will be sent out in early 2019. There is no allegation of misconduct against the local prosecutors who presented the case against Penate in Hampden County Superior Court. According to the notes, Farak thought it gave her energy, helped her to get things done and not procrastinate, feel more positive., Her partner Nikki Lee testified before a grand jury that she herself had tried cocaine, that she had observed Farak using cocaine in 2000, and that she had marijuana in her house when police officers arrived to search the premises as part of their investigation of Farak., In Faraks testimony during a grand jury investigation, she said that she became a recreational drug user during graduate school and used cocaine, marihuana, and ecstasy. She also said she used heroin one time and was nervous and sick and hated every minute of it [and had] no desire to use [it] again., Farak met and settled down with Nikki Lee in her 20s. In January of 2013, Sonja Farak, a chemist at a state crime lab in Massachusetts, was arrested for tampering with evidence related to criminal drug cases (Small, 2020).A year later, Farak pleaded guilty to tampering with drug evidence, theft of a controlled substance, and drug possession .She received a sentence of 18 months with 5 years of probation and was released in 2015. Even the master's degree on her rsum was fabricated. ", Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. Instead, she submitted an intentionally vague letter to the judge claiming defense attorneys already had everything. How to Fix A Drug Scandal takes a one-woman issue in a crumbling police drug lab and follows the way it blew up an entire legal system. The responsibility of the mess that she created should also rest upon the shoulders of her workplace that allowed her the opportunity to indulge so freely in drugs in the first place. But she worried they might be privileged as health information. As he leafed through three boxes of evidence, he found the substance abuse worksheets and diaries. ", The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the state drug lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, for more than eight years. Farak admitted to being on a list of drugs while working between 2004 and her 2013 arrest. In an August 2013 email, Ryan asked Assistant Attorney General Kris Foster to review evidence taken from Farak. You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. Still, the state was acquiring evidence. She had unrestricted access to the evidence room. Two Massachusetts drug-testing laboratory technicians are caught tampering with and falsifying drug evidence, and prosecutors are reluctant to disclose the full extent of their criminal behavior. To multiple courts' amazement, her incessant drug use never caught the attention of her co-workers. . Penate's suit said Kaczmarek withheld evidence that Farak used drugs at the lab for longer than the Massachusetts attorney general's office first claimed, and that he would not have been imprisoned based on tainted evidence. Both have since left the attorney general's office for other government positions. 3.3.2023 5:30 PM, Joe Lancaster You can check your records electronically by following this link: https://icori.chs.state.ma.us. With the Dookhan case so fresh, reporters immediately labeled Farak "the second chemist. "First, of course, are the defendants, who when charged in the criminal justice system have the right to expect that they will be given due process and there will be fair and accurate information used in any prosecution against them." At some point, the attorney general's office stopped chasing leads entirely. She was sentenced in 2014 to 18 months in prison and 5 years of probation. This very well could have been the end of the investigative trail but for a few stubborn defense lawyers, who appealed the ruling. Sonja Farak, a chemist with a longterm mental health struggle, is the catalyst of the story, but it doesn't end with her. It's not as bad as Dookhan, they asserted and implied over and over. "I remember actually sitting on the stand and looking at it," Farak said of her first time swiping from evidence in a trafficking case, "knowing that I had analyzed the sample and that I had then tampered with it.". Her job consisted of testing drugs that have. Penate's lawsuit, which seeks $5.7 million in damages, is believed to be one of the last remaining suits tied to the scandals; the statute of limitations to file such suits has expired. This not only led to people getting a reprieve from prison but also filing their own lawsuits against the injustice they had to suffer. Most important, they found seven worksheets from Farak's substance abuse therapy. In the aftermath, the court felt it necessary to make clear that "no prosecutorhas the authority to decline to disclose exculpatory information.". Gainey added that Healey is pleased with their conclusion that prosecutors and the state police acted appropriately. Perhaps, as criminal justice scandals inevitably emerge, we need to get more independent eyes on the evidence from the start. It had no surveillance cameras, laughable security on evidence safes, and "laissez faire" management, which the state inspector general determined was the "most glaring factor that led to the Dookhan crisis. 3.3.2023 5:45 PM, Jacob Sullum And both pose the obvious question about how chemists could behave so badly for years without detection. Coakley assigned the case against Dookhan to Assistant Attorney General Anne Kaczmarek and her supervisor, John Verner. ", But another co-worker was suspicious, particularly since he "never saw Dookhan in front of a microscope.". In court, she added that there was "no smoking gun" in the evidence. The information showed that Farak sought therapy for drug addiction and that her misconduct had been ongoing for years. Even before her arrest, the Department of Public Health had launched an internal inquiry into how such misconduct had gone undetected for such a long time. She tried to kill herself in high school, according to Rolling Stone. She is not active on any social media platform and has kept her distance from the press. This threw every sample she had ever tested into question. Instead, Coakley's office served as gatekeeper to evidence that could have untangled the scandal and freed thousands of people from prison and jail years earlier, or at least wiped their improper convictions off the books. The results of that intake interview and notes from several of Farak's therapists all detailing Farak's drug use going back years were obtained by defense attorneys on behalf of . In "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," a new four-part Netflix docuseries, documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr presents the stories of Massachusetts drug lab chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, and . Who is Sonja Farak? Joseph Ballou, lead investigator for the state police, called them the most important documents from the car. It features the true story of Sonja Farak, a former state drug lab chemist in Massachusetts who was arrested in 2013 for consuming the drugs she was supposed to test and tampering with the. The attorney general's officeKaczmarek or her supervisorscould have asked a judge to determine whether the worksheets were actually privileged, as Kaczmarek later acknowledged.
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