QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Haggan’s ruling came in a set of consolidated Middlesex County cases in which drug defendants are seeking to overturn their convictions because the evidence was tested at Hinton. “Judge Haggan’s order has let the truth out. Now there can be justice for thousands,” said James P. McKenna, who represents two of those defendants."
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: With 61,000 drug convictions already dismissed by the state’s highest court because of the pervasive misconduct at Hinton and the state laboratory in Amherst, the crisis has become the largest crime lab scandal in U.S. history. Dookhan and former Amherst chemist Sonja Farak were collectively sentenced to less than five years behind bars after pleading guilty to either tampering with evidence or stealing drugs in two separate prosecutions. No other Hinton employee has ever been prosecuted even though the referrals indicate the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe” other workers and supervisors “violated state criminal law” while working at the lab between 2002 and 2012. Last September, without explanation, now-retired Superior Court Judge John T. Lu originally sealed the referrals released today for 50 years. The referrals were made to officials in the offices of former Attorney Generals Martha Coakley and Maura T. Healey. Coakley is now a private attorney and Healey is the governor. They were discovered last year among the inspector general’s Hinton investigative files by a prosecutor as he looked for exculpatory evidence in several Middlesex County cases in which defendants were challenging their convictions due to the misconduct at Hinton. The referrals were made between December 2013 and June 2015 and indicate the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe” numerous other employees at the lab – beyond Dookhan – were “in violation of state criminal law.”
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The inspector general’s office has long maintained its office did not find evidence of criminal conduct by anyone at Hinton. Dookhan pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence at Hinton and was sentenced to three years in prison. In July 2018, the agency’s general counsel, Julia Bell Andrus, told a Suffolk Superior Court judge she was not aware of any criminal referrals made by her office relative to Hinton. Her comment came in a Suffolk County drug case in which the defendant, Justino Escobar, was challenging his conviction. Judge Christine Roach asked Andrus: “… there were no referrals, criminal referrals?” “There are none mentioned in the (Hinton) report, Your Honor, and there are none that I am aware of,” Andrus responded, according to a transcript of the hearing. The following day, Andrus wrote to apologize to the judge, stating she was prohibited by law from discussing any referrals. “I misspoke during the hearing, and I am writing to correct the record,” Andrus wrote. In September, 2019, in a filing in another Middlesex County case in which drug defendant Eugene Sutton was challenging his conviction based on evidence tested at Hinton, Andrus stated: The OIG “did not find evidence that any other chemist at the Drug Lab committed any malfeasance with respect to evidence testing or knowingly aided Dookhan in her malfeasance."
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STORY: "State Hid Criminal Referrals of Other Chemists, Supervisors at Hinton Drug Lab for Years," by Maggie Mulvihill, published by The Crime Report, on February 13, 2023. (Maggie Mulvihill is an Associate Professor of the Practice in Computational Journalism at Boston University and former media lawyer who has been writing about the drug lab crisis in Massachusetts for four years. This story has been updated to include quotes from and a link to Judge Patrick M. Haggan’s decision.)
SUB-HEADING: "Newly unsealed records reveal multiple criminal referrals at the Massachusetts William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute that could undermine countless cases."
GIST: "In a stunning development today in Massachusetts, a Middlesex County Superior Court judge unsealed records revealing the state concealed information for years that showed other chemists and supervisors may have engaged in wrongdoing at a beleaguered crime lab where rampant misconduct led to tens of thousands of wrongful drug convictions.
An investigative report issued in March 2014 by the state Inspector General’s office previously concluded disgraced chemist Annie Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute.
But nine sets of records unsealed today by Judge Patrick M. Haggan show the agency referred other Hinton chemists and supervisors to the state Attorney General for potential criminal prosecution. The reported conduct includes lying to police, misidentifying drug samples or certifying substances as illegal under state law—including a piece of a nut—when they were not drugs.
Those actions led to wrongful convictions in a number of cases for defendants who had drug evidence tested at Hinton, the records show.
In his ruling, Haggan rejected arguments from the inspector general that the documents should remain sealed, stating the drug defendants’ constitutional rights trumped the state law that mandates the agency’s investigative materials are confidential.
“The OIG’s statutory privileges, however, do not override defendants’ constitutional rights, and full transparency and disclosure of any criminal misconduct at the Hinton Lab is in furtherance of the OIG’s statutory responsibilities,” Haggan wrote. “As a result, the OIG’s policy of maintaining confidentiality must yield to defendants’ right to a fair trial.”
“Moreover, the public has a considerable interest in obtaining information pertaining to allegations of government misconduct or ineptitude,” Haggan wrote.
A spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s office did not immediately respond to two requests for comment.
Haggan’s ruling came in a set of consolidated Middlesex County cases in which drug defendants are seeking to overturn their convictions because the evidence was tested at Hinton.
“Judge Haggan’s order has let the truth out. Now there can be justice for thousands,” said James P. McKenna, who represents two of those defendants.
One referral was made in December 2013, months before the former inspector general Glenn A. Cunha released the findings from his $6 million probe of the Hinton lab. That 121-page report, the result of a 14-month “top-to-bottom” probe of Hinton, stated Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at the lab.
Cunha, who now teaches at Boston College, declined to comment, stating in an email: “I cannot comment on pending litigation as the rules of professional responsibility prohibit me from doing so.”
A spokeswoman for the Inspector General’s office also declined comment.
With 61,000 drug convictions already dismissed by the state’s highest court because of the pervasive misconduct at Hinton and the state laboratory in Amherst, the crisis has become the largest crime lab scandal in U.S. history.
Dookhan and former Amherst chemist Sonja Farak were collectively sentenced to less than five years behind bars after pleading guilty to either tampering with evidence or stealing
drugs in two separate prosecutions.
No other Hinton employee has ever been prosecuted even though the referrals indicate the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe” other workers and supervisors “violated state criminal law” while working at the lab between 2002 and 2012.
Last September, without explanation, now-retired Superior Court Judge John T. Lu originally sealed the referrals released today for 50 years. The referrals were made to officials in the offices of former Attorney Generals Martha Coakley and Maura T. Healey. Coakley is now a private attorney and Healey is the governor.
They were discovered last year among the inspector general’s Hinton investigative files by a prosecutor as he looked for exculpatory evidence in several Middlesex County cases in which defendants were challenging their convictions due to the misconduct at Hinton.
The referrals were made between December 2013 and June 2015 and indicate the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe” numerous other employees at the lab – beyond Dookhan – were “in violation of state criminal law.”
The referrals include:
- A December 11, 2013 referral of former Hinton lab supervisor Julianne Nassif for misleading state police in its probe of the drug lab. The referral was sent to the first Assistant Attorney General under Coakley, Edward R. Bedrosian Jr. The two-page letter signed by former inspector general counsel Audrey Mark states Nassif told investigators for the state police that Dookhan had improperly written another chemist’s initials on a document, among other things. Nassif also told investigators she provided that information to a Department of Public Health investigator, who denied under oath Nassif ever provided the information to him.
- The investigator testified that Ms. Nassif had not relayed that information to him and if she had, he would have noted that in his interview notes,” the letter states.
Mark wrote the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe, based on these facts . . . there has been a violation of state criminal law by Ms. Julianne Nassif, specifically that she willfully misled a police officer in violation of M.G.L. Ch. 268, 13B,” the letter states. That citation refers to the state’s obstruction of justice law. - An August 18, 2014 referral of a former Hinton supervisor Charles Salemni and other employees, sent to former Assistant Attorney General Sheila Calkins. The two-page referral signed by Mark states “pursuant to M.G.L. 12A section 10, I am writing to you to report that I have reasonable grounds to believe that there has been a violation of state criminal law by former Hinton drug lab employees related to their reporting of the drug BZP ass a controlled substance.” The letter also states “there is evidence to suggest that chemists including Hinton drug lab supervisor Charles Salemi knew that BZP was not a controlled substance under Massachusetts general laws but caused certificates of analysis to be issued stating that BZP was an illegal class E substance.”
Mark also wrote that “certain criminal defendants were convicted “related to Hinton’s false reporting of BZP as a Class E substance.” She stated in the letter that her office was in the process of identifying and notifying state prosecutors “which defendants had been wrongfully convicted.” - A June 10, 2015 referral letter sent by Mark to former Deputy Attorney General Colin Owyang stating the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe” there was a violation of criminal law by Dookhan and former chemists Kate Corbett and Sosha Hayes regarding the misidentification of nine Hinton drug samples. Additional testing of the samples showed either there were no drugs, even though the chemists certified there were, or they were different substances, the letter states. The chemists’ actions led to wrongful convictions, including one involving a Dorchester man who was arrested with a small piece of a nut, which police claimed was drugs and Dookhan later certified was cocaine.
The entire story can be read at:
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RELATED NOSTON GLOBE STORY: "Annie Dookhan took the blame for the state drug lab scandal, but she wasn’t the ‘sole bad actor,’ new documents show'; State Inspector General quietly referred at least four other lab employees for prosecution — but no charges were brought.By Andrea Estes Globe Staff,Updated February 13, 2023, 2:59 p.m.
GIST: Disgraced state chemist Annie Dookhan was falsely labeled the “sole bad actor” who submitted bogus test results in the biggest drug lab scandal in US history, according to just released court documents that suggest other employees at the Hinton Lab in Jamaica Plain may have escaped accountability for their roles.
Former State Inspector General Glenn Cunha famously concluded that Dookhan alone bore criminal responsibility for falsifying drug evidence that led to thousands of convictions being thrown out over the last decade. But, by the time Cunha released his report in 2014, he had already quietly referred another lab employee to then-Attorney General Martha Coakley for criminal prosecution, according to the new documents.
Eventually, Cunha referred at least three more Hinton Lab chemists or supervisors to Coakley’s successor Maura Healey for alleged misconduct — including falsely labeling substances illegal drugs when they weren’t, spiking samples with illegal drugs or lying to investigators.
None of the four lab employees that Cunha identified was ever charged and their identities were not disclosed until now. A fifth referral was found in the former IG’s documents, but it appears that referral was never forwarded to the attorney general’s office.
The Dookhan case was politically sensitive for Coakley, unfolding as she was mounting her unsuccessful 2014 campaign against Charlie Baker for governor. During the campaign, she vowed that there would not be another drug lab scandal under her administration. Some defense attorneys suspect that Cunha, a former assistant attorney general, was trying to help Coakley by blaming Dookhan alone.
But legal experts note that criminal referrals are just recommendations and prosecutors sometimes decline to seek charges if they don’t think the evidence is strong enough.
Middlesex Superior Court Judge Patrick Haggan ordered the Inspector General’s records to be released to the public on Monday, capping a months-long campaign by defense attorneys who suspected the records could show potentially criminal misconduct by other lab employees aside from Dookhan.
In his decision, Haggan wrote that defendants caught up in the scandal as well as the public at large have a “valid interest” in reviewing documents from the former inspector general’s investigation — despite Cunha’s desire to keep them confidential.
The “policy of maintaining confidentiality must yield to defendants’ rights to a fair trial,” Haggan wrote in his nine-page decision, noting that allegations of misconduct by government employees “could affect the integrity of criminal convictions.”
Cunha, who completed his second five-year term as inspector general last year, said he wanted to review the decision before commenting.
Greg Batten, who represents Ricky Simmons, one of the defendants who fought for the release of these documents, called the decision “a big deal for thousands of people and the criminal justice system. It’s a big deal for the courts and everybody who has been lied to.”
Defense lawyers say they will now ask judges to throw out any conviction that was obtained through testing at the Hinton Lab between 2003 and 2012 — regardless of who the chemist was.
They say that could result in the overturning of tens of thousands of cases in addition to the more than 35,000 cases that involved testing by Dookhan and another chemist in Western Massachusetts that the state Supreme Judicial Court already ordered dismissed.
On the other hand, some judges may decide that, unless a chemist was actually prosecuted or at least charged, any conviction tied to their testing should remain in place.
Former Attorney General Martha Coakley, who is now a lawyer in private practice, declined comment on the cases, but pointed out that her office received many referrals for criminal prosecution from a variety of agencies.
“We would do our best to evaluate them on their merits,” Coakley said. “There were a lot of referrals that wouldn’t necessarily result in charges being pursued.”
Dookhan went to prison for three years after pleading guilty to evidence tampering including contaminating samples intentionally and testifying on results for tests she never did. In one case, she falsely certified that table salt was a class E controlled substance, authorities said.
Another time she said a cashew was cocaine.
She was released on parole in 2016.
The fallout from Dookhan’s 2012 arrest prompted then-Governor Deval Patrick to permanently close the Hinton Lab where she worked.
Patrick asked Cunha in November 2012 to provide an “independent assessment” of the drug lab operations, outside of the attorney general’s office. In the first of three reports, issued in 2014, Cunha concluded that Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at the lab, which was beset by mismanagement and poor standards.
In all three reports, he said he did not find evidence that any other employees “engaged in misfeasance or malfeasance that impacted the reliability of drug testing.” The newly released documents show that lawyers for the IG repeatedly denied making any criminal referrals.
In fact, Cunha, who previously worked for Coakley in the attorney general’s office, did refer several other Hinton employees for possible criminal prosecution, the newly released records show.
It is unclear how serious the allegations were against the other lab employees because the attorney general’s office never brought charges against them.
According to the newly released documents, three months before he issued his 2014 report on the drug lab, Cunha referred to the attorney general’s office Julie Nassif, who oversaw the Division of Analytical Chemistry within the Department of Public Health at the time of Dookhan’s crimes.
He alleged that she misled the state police when they interviewed her about Dookhan’s misconduct. She was fired in 2012, according to published reports.
A lawyer for Nassif declined to comment.
In July 2014, Cunha made criminal referrals for another supervisor, Charles Salemi, as well as other unnamed chemists. Cunha said they certified that a substance called BZP was an illegal drug when they knew that under Massachusetts law it was not, the new records show. Salemi retired in 2012.
Salemi could not be reached for comment.
Then, in a June 2015 e-mail, the IG’s general counsel Audrey Mark referred two other chemists to the attorney general’s office: Sosha Haynes and Kate Corbett. Both were accused of spiking samples to make them appear as illegal drugs, according to the new documents.
In one case, Mark wrote, Haynes tested a single sample five times, initially detecting no cocaine, but by the fifth try, she detected a strong presence of the drug. Haynes worked at the lab in 2004 and was gone before the Dookhan scandal unfolded, according to state records.
Corbett, meanwhile, tested one sample for oxycodone three times, initially finding a weak presence, but, by the third try, she found clear presence of the drug. She was fired in 2013 for falsely claiming she had a chemistry degree, according to published reports, but her attorney Doug Brooks said that Merrimack College later acknowledged she was entitled to the degree.
“Any IG referral against Kate Corbett was baseless,” Brooks said. “Kate even went on to testify on behalf of the government in a subsequent federal matter.”
Staff in the inspector general’s office wrote e-mails alleging that various unnamed Hinton employees had mishandled drug tests, raising the possibility that even more employees were involved in wrongdoing. Mark, the IG general counsel, prepared a criminal referral letter for multiple chemists, but they were never sent to the attorney general.
Dookhan became a household name in the months after her arrest in September 2012, leaving a long trail of falsified drug analyses as well as e-mails that showed she was anything but a neutral witness in the justice system. Instead, Dookhan viewed herself as part of the prosecution team, openly saying that her goal was “getting [drug dealers] off the street.”
It took many more months after Dookhan’s guilty plea before the misdeeds of a second chemist, Sonja Farak, working in a different lab, came to light. Farak, who primarily worked in Amherst, was accused of using drugs she stole on the job.
Lawyers representing four drug defendants began seeking documents related to Cunha’s investigation in 2021 because, after the Farak case, they suspected other chemists engaged in wrongdoing.
Last July, Middlesex Superior Court Judge John Lu ordered the former IG to allow prosecutors to review his records. A Middlesex County assistant district attorney, Ryan Rall, combed through more than 100,000 electronic records from Cunha’s office until he discovered the documents related to referrals and potential wrongdoing by other chemists.
But the documents remained unavailable to the public until Monday when Haggan released them.
Robert McGovern, a spokesman for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, called the release of the documents “the first important step in a longer process during which we hope to learn more about the full extent of the ongoing drug lab scandal. ... The legitimacy of the legal system has been tested throughout this dark moment.”
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
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