The new numbers appear in a report issued by a court-designated "Special Master." 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. The judge ordered prosecutors and defense attorneys to coordinate on identifying undisclosed emails related to documents seized from the disgraced state crime lab chemist. A few months before her arrest, Farak's counselor recommended in-patient rehab. Dookhan had seeded public mistrust in the criminal justice system, which "now becomes an issue in every criminal trial for every defendant.". The medical records stated that she did not have an existing drug problem that was amplified by her access to more substances. She received an email from a detective weeks after Farak's arrest containing detailed notes Farak made in conjunction with her own drug treatment, pointedly identified as "FARAK Admissions" but failed to disclose them for years. Kaczmarek has repeatedly testified she did not act intentionally and that she thought the worksheets had been turned over to the district attorneys who prosecuted the cases involved. A year later, in October 2014, prosecutors relented, granting access to the full evidence in Farak's case to attorney Luke Ryan. Inwardly though, Sonja was struggling. In 2012, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court foundegregious prosecutorial misconduct after an assistant district attorney withheldevidence a judge had ordered him toproduce for the defense of a teenageraccused of statutory rape. She started smoking crack cocaine in 2011 and was soon using it 10 to 12 times a day. Several defense attorneys who called for the Velis-Merrigan investigation say the former judges and their state police investigators got it wrong. motion with Hampden Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Kinder to see the evidence for himself. Mucha gente que vio el programa se pregunta: dnde est Sonja Farak ahora? 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. The last contact information provided by her, in response to Penates allegations, placed her residence in Hatfield, Massachusetts. "The gravity of the present case cannot be overstated," Kaczmarek wrote in her memo recommending a prison sentence of five to seven years. The lawsuit names Kaczmarek, Farak and three members of the state police. We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. wrote she "tried to resist using @ work, but ended up failing." Her reporting focuses on mental health, criminal justice and education. Farak was a former lab chemist at a lab in Amherst, Massachusetts and was convicted of stealing and using drugs from the lab where she worked. A judge sentenced Dookhan to three years in prison; she was granted parole in April 2016. 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 . Foster's first stepper ethical obligations and office protocolshould have been to look through the evidence to see what had already been handed over. 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 . 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. Without even interviewing Foster, they determined there was "no evidence" of obstruction of justice by her, by Kaczmarek, or by any state prosecutor. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. Foster replied that because the investigation against Farak was ongoing, she couldnt let him see it. The place was closed as soon as Faraks crimes came to light. According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Farak graduated with awards and distinctions. The lead prosecutor on Farak's case knew about the diaries, as did supervisors at the state attorney general's office. Read More: Where is Sonja Farak Sister Now? "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." Perhaps, as criminal justice scandals inevitably emerge, we need to get more independent eyes on the evidence from the start. Despite her status as a free woman (who has seemingly disappeared from the public eye), Farak's wrongdoings continue to make waves in the Massachusetts courts. As a teenager, she had attempted suicide. In 2019, the chemist was spotted at federal court in Springfield, MA , attending a civil case. ", Prosecutors maintained that Faraks rogue behavior spanned just a few months. Judge Kinder ordered her to produce all potentially privileged documents for his review to determine whether they could be disclosed. Although the year she wrote the notes wasnt listed on the worksheet, in the six years prior to her arrest, 2011 is the only year in which Dec. 22 fell on a Thursday. "Thousands of defendants were kept in the dark for far too long about the government misconduct in their cases," the ACLU and the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state's public defense agency, wrote in a motion. Farak was released from prison in 2015 and has kept a low profile since. The drug lab technician was sent to prison for 18 months, but was released in 2015. Together, we can create a more connected and informed world. That motion was denied, and the notice letters will explain Farak's tampering without any mention of prosecutorial misconduct. 1. Joseph Ballou, lead investigator for the state police, called them the most important documents from the car. How to Fix a Drug Scandal is an American true crime documentary miniseries that was released on Netflix on April 1, 2020. She tried to kill herself in high school, according to Rolling Stone. On a Friday afternoon in January 2013, a call came in to Coakley's office: "We have another Annie Dookhan out west.". Farak admitted to being on a list of drugs while working between 2004 and her 2013 arrest. They were found with their packaging sliced open and their contents apparently altered. Dookhan's output remained implausibly high even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (2009) that defendants were entitled to cross-examine forensic chemists about their analysis. 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. (Conveniently, they also found a Patriots schedule from 2011 in the car.). Lets find out. food banks expect a surge, As streaming services boom, cable TV continues its decline. A federal judge has rejected claims from an embattled former state prosecutor that she is protected from liability in the fallout over a Massachusetts drug lab scandal. Get all the latest from Sanditon on GBH Passport, How one Brookline studio helps artists with disabilities thrive. Martha Coakley, then attorney general for the state, argued in Melendez-Diaz that a chemist's certificate contains only "neutral, objective facts." Inwardly though, Sonja Farak was striving. It ultimately took a blatant violation to expose Dookhan, and even then her bosses twisted themselves in knots to hold on to their "super woman.". The show also delves into the issues of the state in discovering and reporting on the extent of the cases that were affected by Faraks actions. Thanks to Farak's testimony and those diary worksheets, we now know that, soon after joining the Amherst lab in 2004, Farak started skimming from the methamphetamine "standard," an undiluted oil used as a reference against which suspected meth samples are compared. Disgraced drug lab chemist Sonja Farak emerges as her own attorney as defendant in $5.7 million federal lawsuit. Fue arrestada el 19 de enero de 2013. Because she did so, Plaintiff served more than five years in a state prison.". 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. In 2017, a different judge ruled that Foster's actions constituted a "fraud upon the court," calling the letter "deliberately misleading." She played as the starting guard for Portsmouth High Schools freshman team. Her notes record on-the-job drug use ranging from small nips of the lab's baseline standard stock of the stimulant phentermine to stealing crack not only from her own samples but from colleagues' as well. "Please don't let this get more complicated than we thought," Kaczmarek replied when Ballou, the lead investigator, flagged irregularities in Farak's analysis in a case featuring pain pills. This might not have mattered as much if the investigators had followed the evidence that Farak had been using drugs for at least a year and almost certainly longer. "We shouldn't be in the position of having to be saying, 'Don't close your eyes to the duration and scope of misconduct that may affect a whole lot of cases,'" the exasperated Massachusetts chief justice told prosecutors during oral arguments. email highlighted in the Velis-Merrigan report. In 2012, she began taking from co-workers' samples, forging intake forms and editing the lab database to cover her tracks. Dookhan's transgressions got more press attention: Her story broke first, she immediately confessed, and her misdeeds took place in big-city Boston rather than the western reaches of the state. Two drug lab chemists' shocking crimes cripple a state's judicial system and blur the lines of justice for lawyers, officials and thousands of inmates. She even made her own crack in the lab. State police took these worksheets from Farak's car in January 2013, the same day they arrested her for tampering with evidence and for cocaine possession. The story of the intertwining Farak and Penate evidence began in January 2013, when state police arrested Farak and searched her car. denied Penates motion to dismiss the case, saying there was no evidence that Faraks misconduct extended to his case. Meier put the number at 40,323 defendants, though some have called that an overestimate. Kaczmarek got a note from Sgt. The newest true crime series from Netflix, How to Fix a Drug Scandal, was released on April 1, 2020. | Who is Sonja Farak, the former state drug lab chemist featured in the show? Farak started at Amherst lab in Aug 2004 p. 32. 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. Name. She was arrested in 2013 when the supervisor at the Amherst lab was made aware that two samples were missing. They pulled her aside as she walked back to the courthouse from her car, where she had smoked "a fair amount of crack" during her lunch break. And both pose the obvious question about how chemists could behave so badly for years without detection. She had unrestricted access to the evidence room. 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. Farak was getting high off the confiscated drugs police sent her way before replacing the evidence with fake drugs. The attorney general's officeKaczmarek or her supervisorscould have asked a judge to determine whether the worksheets were actually privileged, as Kaczmarek later acknowledged. The Netflix docuseries ends by acknowledging that Farak received an 18-month sentence, and that defense attorney Luke Ryan was able . After contemplating another suicide, she settled on drugs, and the fact that she had such easy access to it at her workplace made it easier for her to get lost in that world. "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. "These drugswere tested fairly," Coakley claimed the day after Farak's arrest. If chemists had to testify in person, Coakley warned melodramatically, misdemeanor drug prosecutions "would essentially grind to a halt. Deborah Becker Twitter Host/ReporterDeborah Becker is a senior correspondent and host at WBUR. Netflix's latest true-crime series, How to Fix a Drug Scandal, dives deep into a shocking Massachusetts scandal, one that started in the humble confines of an underfunded drug testing lab and ended with an entire system in question. With the lab's ample drug supply, she was able to sneak the drug each day from a jug that resided in the shared workspace. Sgt. 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. Introduction. Since then, she has kept a low profile. Follow us so you don't miss a thing! "It was Defendant who had the responsibility within the AGO [attorney general's office] to see that the Farak investigation materials were disseminated to the DAOs [district attorneys' offices]," Robertson wrote, adding there is no evidence anyone from the attorney general's office sent the potentially exculpatory evidence to those offices.". The civil lawsuit was one of the last tied to prosecutors' disputed handling of the case against disgraced ex-chemist Sonja Farak, who was convicted in 2014 of ingesting drug samples she was. This past Tuesday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court filed a report saying that more than 24,000 convictions in 16,449 cases have been dismissed as a result of foul play by a former state drug lab chemist. memo to Judge Kinder the next week, Foster said she reviewed the file, and said every document in it had already been disclosed. Among the papers they seized were handwritten worksheets Farak completed for drug-abuse therapy. (Netflix) A former state chemist, Sonja Farak, made headlines in 2013 when she was arrested for stealing and using drugs from a laboratory. Two detectives found Farak at a courthouse waiting to testify on an unrelated matter. A drug chemist . YouTube Robertson rejected Kaczmarek's claims she should not be held responsible for the turning over of exculpatory evidence because she was not part of the "prosecution team" in Penate's case. Gov. From 2004 to 2013, Farak took advantage of . Maybe fatigue made them sloppy, or perhaps they actively chose to look the other way as evidence piled up about the enormity of Farak's crimes. With the Dookhan case so fresh, reporters immediately labeled Farak "the second chemist. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. Each employee had a unique swipe card, but Farak simply used a physical key to get in after hours and on weekends. concluded there was no evidence of prosecutorial misconduct or obstruction of justice in matters related to the Farak case. When Farak was arrested,former Attorney General Martha Coakley told the public investigators believed Farak tampered with drugs at the lab for only a few months. Most important, they found seven worksheets from Farak's substance abuse therapy. She married Lee after starting her job, but their marriage was rocky. Listen Live: Classic and Contemporary Celtic, Listen Live: Cape, Coast and Islands NPR Station, Boston nonprofit Street2Ivy is producing this generation's entrepreneurs. His email was one of more than 800 released with the Velis-Merrigan report. But Ryan, who represented Penate, suspected it was more extensive. 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. Kaczmarek quoted the worksheets in a memo to her supervisor, Verner, and others, summarizing that they revealed Farak's "struggle with substance abuse." Soon after, the state police took over the control, and the lab was moved to Springfield, where it remains under the supervision of the state police. Grand Jury Transcript - Sonja Farak - September 16, 2015 Contributed by Shawn Musgrave (Musgrave Investigations) p. 1. Subscribe to Reason Roundup, a wrap up of the last 24 hours of news, delivered fresh each morning. Even though Farak found a job after graduation and was settled down with her partner, she continued to struggle with depression and felt like a stranger in her body. Exhausted from the ongoing scandal in Boston, state officials were desperate for damage control. Because state prosecutors hid Farak's substance abuse diaries, it took far too long for the full timeline of her crimes to become public. In fall 2013, a Springfield, Massachusetts, judge convened hearings with the explicit aim of establishing "the timing and scope" of Farak's "alleged criminal conduct.". You can check your records electronically by following this link: https://icori.chs.state.ma.us. As How to Fix a Drug Scandal explores, Farak had long struggled with her mental . Farak as a young. noted the mental health worksheets found in Faraks car, which had not been released. Among the papers they seized were handwritten worksheets Farak completed for drug-abuse therapy. It was an astoundingly light touch for the second state chemist arrested in six months. In a March 2013 Poetically, that landmark case originated from the Hinton lab, although Dookhan didn't conduct the analysis in question. concluded she was usually high while working in the lab for more than eight years before her arrest in January 2013 and started stealing samples seven years ago. In her initial police interview, given at her dining room table, Dookhan said she "would never falsify" results "because it's someone's life on the line."