The Northwestern District Attorney's Office is digging through its files in the wake of reports that evidence tampering by former chemist Sonja Farak at the state police crime lab in Amherst might go back to 2004 It had been thought that Farak's drug use (she was addicted to cocaine, methamphetamines and other drugs) went back to 2012, but a Boston Globe story reported that she told her therapists it began in 2004.........Northampton lawyer Luke Ryan was one of the defense lawyers who obtained Farak's medical records in order to dig deeper into the case. Those records show that Farak's drug theft and use began in 2004, a full eight years before the state contended, and never stopped, The Globe reported. Farak told her therapists she used multiple drugs during the workday, the story said Ryan told the Globe that Farak was assigned to test about 29,000 drug samples over the course of her nine-year career, and that the estimate of 10,000 affected defendants was "fairly conservative.".........Farak's case surfaced months after another state chemist, Annie Dookhan, was arrested in September 2012 and found to have fabricated evidence in thousands of samples she tested at a second state lab in Jamaica Plain, possibly tainting as many as 40,000 cases. Dookhan is serving a three-to-five-year prison sentence. The Dookhan case is not believed to be connected to the Farak case. Farak pleaded guilty in Hampshire Superior Court in early 2014 to four counts of tampering with evidence, four counts of stealing cocaine from the lab, and two counts of unlawful possession of cocaine, and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars. She has since been released from custody, officials said Thursday. In April, the state's highest court found that top state law enforcement officials had failed to fully investigate the scope of Farak's wrongdoing, noting that fewer than 10 samples for which she was the primary analyst were retested. The Supreme Judicial Court gave officials 30 days to decide whether to reopen the inquiry into thousands of evidence samples tested by Farak.
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/07/northwestern_da_expands_invest.html
