PUBLISHER"S NOTE: After all this time, this is the Annie Dookhan/Sonja Farak story I have been waiting for. It has been well worth the wait.
Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "This is the second
massive scandal in five months. In August 2012, a chemist named Annie
Dookhan was busted for faking tens of thousands of drug tests at her
Boston lab, always in favor of the prosecution. Worse, when she was
feeling especially helpful, she'd add bogus weight to a borderline
sample, pushing the charge from distribution to narco-trafficking. (She
seems to have been motivated by scorn for addicts, saying that she
wanted to get drug dealers "off the street.") Her crimes had blown the
top off the state's justice system. Countless convictions were cast in
doubt, inmates jammed court dockets with appeals, and both the state's
district attorneys and attorney general's office scrambled to protect
their tainted verdicts. It was the worst-ever scandal in the state's war
on drugs. If the defendants in Farak's cases were to learn of her
crimes, there wouldn't be enough lawyers on the Eastern Seaboard to
staunch the run on the courts. Between them, the two chemists had
potentially helped wrongfully convict more than 32,000 defendants. But
those defendants were never notified of Farak's misconduct. In fact,
five years after her arrest on January 19th, 2013, very few of the
people she helped to imprison have been told that they're the victims of
state crimes. Instead, in the days after Farak was taken in and charged
with drug theft and tampering, the attorney general's office embarked
on an egregious fraud. It lied to the DAs in Western Massachusetts, gave
false information to two Superior Court judges and covered up documents
that proved Farak's years-long addiction, blocking every legal bid to
view them. Lastly, it contrived to keep thousands of people in jail,
even after the evidence came to light. "It was a catastrophic failure by
the attorney general's office, and calls into question the idea that
prosecutors are beacons of fairness," says Daniel Medwed of Northeastern
University, author of
Prosecution Complex: America's Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent.
"There's no accounting for what they did, and this could just be the
tip of the iceberg. Prosecutorial misconduct is rampant in America."
STORY: "And Justice For None: Inside Biggest Law Enforcement Scandal in Massachusetts History," by reporter Paul Sototaroff, published by 'Rolling Stone' on January 3, 2018. (
Paul Solotaroff is a former editor at The Village Voice and a journalist whose work has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has written for a number of national magazines, including Esquire, GQ, Vogue, and Rolling Stone.)
SUB-HEADING: "How the system covered up tens of
thousands of falsified drug tests – and how two teams of crusading
lawyers exposed the wrongdoing."
GIST: Sonja Farak is in the grip of a rubbed-raw depression
that hasn't responded to medication. It's been like this forever, or at
least since girlhood. She attempted suicide in high school and was
hospitalized in college, but somehow soldiered through to graduate with
high distinction from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. A bright,
curious kid who was passionate about science, she found a job at a state
drug lab and settled down with a woman she met in her twenties. But
even on her best days, she felt alien and unseen, a ghost floating
through her own life. Now, at 35, she's landed in a ditch. Her
performance at work has fallen off a cliff, and she walks into nightly
conflict at home, where her wife, disabled by a stew of mental ailments,
spends her hours surfing the Web in a haze. Farak's arms are pocked
with welts from compulsive scratching; she's been thinking a lot about
killing herself, and driving rashly enough that she just might do it –
if she doesn't have a heart attack first. But none of those things are her chief concern on this chapped winter
morning in 2013. No, what's eating Farak today, as she sits in a county
courthouse in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, is that she needs to
get high this nanosecond. Since 2004, when she started pilfering drugs
from her longtime place of employment – the Amherst crime lab of the
Massachusetts State Police – her addiction to stimulants has galloped
away and grabbed the reins of her life. She's a chemist who performs
forensic analysis of the street drugs cops bring in, running samples
through complex machinery to determine the chemical makeup of each
substance. Her findings, based partly on instrument data and partly on
her veteran intuition, form the basis for criminal cases brought against
people charged with coke and heroin sales in Western Massachusetts.
Until recently, Farak has been a standout performer. In less than nine
years, she's helped send away between 8,000 and 10,000 defendants. The
only thing more prolific than her output is her drug use. Farak's been
high since virtually the day she was hired. For years, her drug of
choice was liquid methamphetamine; she discovered a big bottle of it in
the fridge of her lab. When she polished off the meth oil, Farak
switched to cocaine, helping herself to big and small chunks of the
seizures cops sent in. It was absurdly easy to do so. The Amherst site
was decrepit and woefully mismanaged. It performed no routine audits and
placed no cameras in the halls; employees had carte blanche access to
the drug safe. So rudderless was the lab that Farak smoked crack in the
restroom and cooked batches beneath the site's one working fume hood.
Legally unfit to drive home at night, she was nonetheless allowed to do
sensitive tests on samples she'd smoked or snorted herself. Each time
she did so, she committed two crimes: theft of narcotics from a
dispensary and possession of a Class B drug. And though she wasn't a
cop, she shared a duty with them – to zealously protect each sample she
tested as it made its way to court. On the countless occasions when she
altered a drug – stealing a couple of grams here, a half pound there –
and replaced the missing weight with ersatz powder, she committed a
third, and most onerous, felony: tampering with evidence. Meanwhile,
Farak's crack jones is burning a hole in her soul. She's been smoking
it 10, 12 times a day; the urges, she'll later testify, are
"ridiculous." Finally, come lunchtime, she runs out to her car and beams
up behind the wheel. She's feeling a lot better when she returns in an
hour to take the stand at a drug trial. But as she enters the courtroom,
she's stopped by state troopers and taken to a conference room. It
seems someone's finally noticed that coke has been wandering off from
the Amherst evidence room. A search that morning turned up two torn
mailers that contained what was left of the seizures. Those mailers,
along with a makeshift crack pipe, were recovered from Farak's desk by
state cops. The troopers at the courthouse try to get her talking.
Farak will have none of it. She lawyers up and declines to let them
search her car; she's arrested and formally charged the next morning. By
then, the state's leaders are on wartime footing: This is the second
massive scandal in five months. In August 2012, a chemist named Annie
Dookhan was busted for faking tens of thousands of drug tests at her
Boston lab, always in favor of the prosecution. Worse, when she was
feeling especially helpful, she'd add bogus weight to a borderline
sample, pushing the charge from distribution to narco-trafficking. (She
seems to have been motivated by scorn for addicts, saying that she
wanted to get drug dealers "off the street.") Her crimes had blown the
top off the state's justice system. Countless convictions were cast in
doubt, inmates jammed court dockets with appeals, and both the state's
district attorneys and attorney general's office scrambled to protect
their tainted verdicts. It was the worst-ever scandal in the state's war
on drugs. If the defendants in Farak's cases were to learn of her
crimes, there wouldn't be enough lawyers on the Eastern Seaboard to
staunch the run on the courts. Between them, the two chemists had
potentially helped wrongfully convict more than 32,000 defendants. But
those defendants were never notified of Farak's misconduct. In fact,
five years after her arrest on January 19th, 2013, very few of the
people she helped to imprison have been told that they're the victims of
state crimes. Instead, in the days after Farak was taken in and charged
with drug theft and tampering, the attorney general's office embarked
on an egregious fraud. It lied to the DAs in Western Massachusetts, gave
false information to two Superior Court judges and covered up documents
that proved Farak's years-long addiction, blocking every legal bid to
view them. Lastly, it contrived to keep thousands of people in jail,
even after the evidence came to light. "It was a catastrophic failure by
the attorney general's office, and calls into question the idea that
prosecutors are beacons of fairness," says Daniel Medwed of Northeastern
University, author of Prosecution Complex: America's Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent.
"There's no accounting for what they did, and this could just be the
tip of the iceberg. Prosecutorial misconduct is rampant in America." (This is a long, insightful important, maddening, infuriating read. I invite our readers to read the entire story - word by word - at the link below):
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the
Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my
previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put
considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith
and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic
pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses
on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please
send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest
to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy;
Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
