Together, we can create a more connected and informed world. ", In 2004, her first full year at the lab, Dookhan reported analyzing approximately 700 samples per month. State prosecutors gave Farak the immunity they had declined to grant two years earlier, then asked when she started analyzing samples while high. Sonja Farak stole, ingested or manufactured drugs almost every day for eight years while working as a chemist at a state lab in Amherst, Massachusetts. For people with disabilities needing assistance with the Public Files, contact Glenn Heath at 617-300-3268. Shawn Musgrave is a reporter who was until recently based in Boston. A second unsealed report into allegations of wrongdoing by police and prosecutors who handled the Farak evidence, overseen by retired state judges Peter Velis and Thomas Merrigan, drew less attention. Meier put the number at 40,323 defendants, though some have called that an overestimate. "The mental health worksheets constituted admissions by the state lab chemist assigned to analyze the samples seized in Plaintiffs case that she was stealing and using lab samples to feed a drug addiction at the time she was testing and certifying the samples in Plaintiffs case, including, in one instance, on the very day that she certified a sample," Robertson's ruling reads. Only a few months after Dookhan's conviction, it was discovered that another Massachusetts crime lab worker, Sonja Farak, who was addicted to drugs, not only stole her supply from the. 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. Exhausted from the ongoing scandal in Boston, state officials were desperate for damage control. Lost in the high drama of determining which individual prosecutors hid evidence was a more basic question: In scandals like these, why are decisions about evidence left to prosecutors at all? She had been accused of intentional infliction of emotional distress in addition to the conspiracy to violate [Penates] civil rights.. The twin Massachusetts drug lab scandals are unprecedented in the sheer number of cases thrown out because of forensic misconduct. Still, the state was acquiring evidence. Months after Farak pleaded guilty in January 2014, Ryan filed a
| For years, Sonja Farak was addicted to cocaine, methamphetamine, and amphetamines, the kind of drugs usually bought from street dealers in covert transactions that carry the constant risk of arrest. Since then, she has kept a low profile. And yet, due to their actions, they did injure people and they did inflict a lot of pain, not just on a couple of people, but on thousands. Farak worked under the influence of drugs for nine years - from 2004 to 2013 - before she was caught. In worksheet notes dated Thursday, Dec. 22, Farak wrote she "tried to resist using @ work, but ended up failing." Although the year she wrote the notes wasn't listed . Over the next four years, Farak consumed nearly all of it. ", Prosecutors maintained that Faraks rogue behavior spanned just a few months. The governor didn't appoint the inspector general or anyone else to determine how long Farak was altering samples or running analyses while high. It was. Farak apparently still tested each caseunlike Annie Dookhan, another Massachusetts chemist who was arrested five months prior to Farak for fabricating test results. In a letter filed with the Supreme Court, Julianne Nassif, a lab supervisor, wrote that Hinton had "appropriate quality control" measures. In December 2011, after police in Springfield, Mass., had arrested Renaldo Penate for allegedly selling heroin, the drugs from that case were tested at a state drug lab by technician Sonja Farak. Our posture is to not delve into the twists and turns of the investigation or the report and to let it stand on its own, Merrigan said. Kaczmarek got a note from Sgt. She was arrested in 2013 when the supervisor at the Amherst lab was made aware that two samples were missing. "Whether law enforcement officials overlooked these papers or intentionally suppressed them is a question for another day.". The staff in the new lab was also doubled, and the number of trainees was also increased. He didn't buy her quibbling that there's a difference between an explicit lie and obfuscation by grammar. Finding that there did not appear to be enough slides in Dookhan's discard pile to match her numbers, the colleague brought his concerns to an outside attorney, who advised he should be careful making "accusations about a young woman's career," he later told state police. But unlike with Dookhan, no one launched a bigger investigation of Farak. Damning evidence reveals drug lab chemist Sonja Farak's addictions. "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.". Over time, Farak's drug use turned to cocaine, LSD and, eventually, crack. Coakley's office finally launched a criminal investigation in July 2012, more than a year after the infraction was discovered by Dookhan's supervisors. Poetically, that landmark case originated from the Hinton lab, although Dookhan didn't conduct the analysis in question. As the state's top court put it, the criminal investigation into Farak was "cursory at best.". Heres what you need to know about Sonja Farak: Farak was born on January 13, 1978, in Rhode Island to Stanley and Linda Farak. Farak worked for the Amherst Drug Lab in Massachusetts for 9 years when she was convicted of stealing and using them. On top of that, it was also ensured that no analyst would ever work without supervision. . This scandal has thrown thousands of drug cases into question, on top of more than 24,000 cases tainted by a scandal involving ex-chemist Annie Dookhan at the state's Hinton Lab in Jamaica Plain. Kaczmarek argued for qualified immunity after she was sued by Rolando Penate, who spent five years in prison on drug charges in which the evidence in his case was tested by Farak. In 2019, she was seen leaving the Springfield Federal Court but declined to comment on the status of the case. "It would be difficult to overstate the significance of these documents," Ryan wrote to the attorney general's office. Coakley did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. When the Farak scandal erupted, that misconduct came into view. Such strong claims were too hasty at best, since investigators had not yet finished basic searches; three days later, police executed a warrant for a duffel bag they found stuffed behind Farak's desk. Thanks largely to the prosecutors' deception, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in October 2018 was forced to dismiss thousands of cases Farak may never have even touched, including every single conviction based on evidence processed at the Amherst lab from 2009 to the day of Farak's arrest in 2013. The drug lab technician was sent to prison for 18 months, but was released in 2015. 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. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. You can try, Suspensions and a reprimand proposed for prosecutors admonished in drug lab scandal. Grand Jury Transcript - Sonja Farak - September 16, 2015 Contributed by Shawn Musgrave (Musgrave Investigations) p. 1. It didnt matter whether or not she was the one who did the testing or some other chemist. Farak received a sentence of 18 months in jail and 5 years of probation. Introduction. Without even interviewing Foster, they determined there was "no evidence" of obstruction of justice by her, by Kaczmarek, or by any state prosecutor. "Forensic evidence is not uniquely immune from the risk of manipulation," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. She first worked at the Hinton State Laboratory in Jamaica Plain for a year as a bacteriologist working on HIV tests before she transferred to the Amherst Lab for drug analysis. From the March 2019 issue, "Tried to resist using @ work, but ended up failing," the forensic chemist scribbled on a diary worksheet she kept as part of her substance abuse therapy. Thank you! Kaczmarek is one of three former prosecutors whose role in the prosecution of Farak later became the focus of several lawsuits and disciplinary hearings. But she worried they might be privileged as health information. memo to Judge Kinder the next week, Foster said she reviewed the file, and said every document in it had already been disclosed. If Farak found a substance was a true drug, the person it was confiscated from could be convicted of a substance-related crime. 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. Foster replied that because the investigation against Farak was ongoing, she couldnt let him see it. YouTube Sonja Farak was a chemist for a state crime lab in Massachusetts. The report
GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting. Most of the heat for thisincluding formal bar complaintshas fallen on Kaczmarek and another former prosecutor, Kris Foster, who was tasked with responding to subpoenas regarding the Farak evidence. But the Farak scandal is in many ways worse, since the chemist's crimes were compounded by drug abuse on the job and prosecutorial misconduct that the state's top court called "the deceptive withholding of exculpatory evidence by members of the Attorney General's office.". motion with Hampden Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Kinder to see the evidence for himself. "I suspect that if another entity was in the mix"perhaps the inspector general or an independent investigator"the Attorney General's Office would have treated the Farak case much more seriously and would have been much more reluctant to hide the ball," Ryan writes in an email. Per her own court testimony, as shown in the docu-series, Farak started working at a state drug lab in Amherst in 2004. The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the state drug lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, for more than eight years. She couldn't be sure which cases these were, Dookhan told investigators. "I was totally controlled by my addiction," Farak later testified. "As the gatekeeper to this evidence, she failed to turn over documents, and she adamantly opposed the requests for access. That motion was denied, and the notice letters will explain Farak's tampering without any mention of prosecutorial misconduct. It included information about the type of drugs she tampered with. The lone dissenting justice called the decision "too little and too late" and argued that the severity of the scandal required tossing all the cases. Would love your thoughts, please comment. Or she just lied about her results altogether: In one of the more ludicrous cases, she testified under oath that a chunk of cashew was crack cocaine. Between 2005 and 2013, Sonja Farak was performing laboratory tests at a state drug lab in Amherst while under the influence of narcotics. The civil lawsuit was one of the last tied to prosecutors' disputedhandling of the case against disgraced ex-chemist Sonja Farak, who was convicted in 2014 of ingesting drug samples she was supposed to test at the Amherst state drug lab. In the series, it's explained that Farak loved the energy the meth gave her. A local prosecutor also asked Ballou to look into a case Farak had tested as far back as 2005. Shortly into her role at Amherst, Farak decided to try liquid methamphetamine to ease her personal struggles. As Kaczmarek herself later observed, Farak essentially had "a drugstore at her disposal" from her first day at the Amherst lab. Sonja Farak is in the grip of a rubbed-raw depression that hasn't responded to medication. The Attorney Generals Office, Velis and Merrigan and the state police declined to answer questions about the handling of the Farak evidence. And so, when she pleaded guilty in January 2014, Farak got what one attorney called "de facto immunity." The former judges and the state police officers who helped them conducted a thorough review, said Emalie Gainey, spokeswoman for Attorney General Maura Healey. You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. Looking back, it seems that Massachusetts law enforcement officials, reeling from the Dookhan case, simply felt they couldn't weather another full-fledged forensics scandal.