Did Falsified Drug Tests Lead to Wrongful Convictions? - Rolling Stone She was arrested in 2013 when the supervisor at the Amherst lab was made aware that two samples were missing. The information showed that Farak sought therapy for drug addiction and that her misconduct had been ongoing for years. "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." But why were a small handful of prosecutors allowed total control over evidence about one of the worst criminal justice failures in recent memory? How to Fix a Drug Scandal: behind a staggering Netflix crime docuseries 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. Dookhan had seeded public mistrust in the criminal justice system, which "now becomes an issue in every criminal trial for every defendant.". 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. noted the mental health worksheets found in Faraks car, which had not been released. Report shows more than 24k wrongful convictions dismissed in drug lab 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. The Farak scandal came as the state grappled with another drug lab crisis. ", The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the state drug lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, for more than eight years. But without access to evidence showing how long Farak had been doing this, defendants with constitutional grounds for challenging their incarceration were held for months and even years longer than necessary. It included information about the type of drugs she tampered with. 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. Four months after Ryan found the worksheets, Judge Kinder "I was totally controlled by my addiction," Farak later testified. Over time, Farak's drug use turned to cocaine, LSD and, eventually, crack. Psychotherapy Progress Notes, as shown above, can be populated using clinical codes before they are linked with a client's appointments for easier admin and use in sessions. While Dookhan had tampered with evidence and indulged in dry-labbing, Farak stole from her workplace. Her job consisted of testing drugs that have. Mucha gente que vio el programa se pregunta: dnde est Sonja Farak ahora? She couldn't be sure which cases these were, Dookhan told investigators. Name. 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.". Sonja Farak is in the grip of a rubbed-raw depression that hasn't responded to medication. As the state's top court put it, the criminal investigation into Farak was "cursory at best.". Judge Kinder ordered her to produce all potentially privileged documents for his review to determine whether they could be disclosed. Penate argued the court should follow those findings. Like Hinton, the Amherst lab had no cameras. Most important, they found seven worksheets from Farak's substance abuse therapy. In Sonja Farak drug lab scandal, Mass - The Washington Post Sgt. Hearings could help decide how many of thousands of convictions tainted by Farak's testing may be overturned. Per her own court testimony, as shown in the docu-series, Farak started working at a state drug lab in Amherst in 2004. 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. Kaczmarek had obtained the evidence at issue while she was prosecuting Farak on state charges of tampering with evidence and drug possession. Kaczmarek also oversaw the prosecution for the attorney general's office in that case. ", Officials rushed to downplay the situation in Amherst. 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. "All Defendant had to do to honor the Plaintiffs Brady rights was to turn over copies of documents that were obviously exculpatory as to the Farak defendants or accede to one of the repeated requests from counsel, including Plaintiffs counsel, that they be permitted to inspect the evidence seized from Faraks car," Robertson wrote in her ruling. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. When she got married, it turned out that her wife, too, suffered from her own demons, and their collective anguish made Sonja desperate for a reprieve from this life. On top of that, it was also ensured that no analyst would ever work without supervision. The lawsuit names Kaczmarek, Farak and three members of the state police. That motion was denied, and the notice letters will explain Farak's tampering without any mention of prosecutorial misconduct. 3.3.2023 5:30 PM, Joe Lancaster Deborah Becker Twitter Host/ReporterDeborah Becker is a senior correspondent and host at WBUR. On paper, these numbers made Dookhan the most productive chemist at Hinton; the next most productive averaged around 300 samples per month. Joseph . Velis said he stood by the findings. This was not true, as Nassif's department later conceded. When the Farak scandal erupted, that misconduct came into view. Who is Sonja Farak, the former state drug lab chemist featured in the show? | How to Fix a Drug Scandal (TV Mini Series 2020) - IMDb 3.3.2023 4:50 PM, 2022 Reason Foundation | Instead, Kaczmarek proceeded as if the substance abuse was a recent development. Maybe it's not a matter of checklists or reminders that prosecutors have to keep their eyes open for improprieties. We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. Local prosecutors also remained in the dark. She soon crossed all these lines. Her medical records included notes from Faraks therapist in Amherst, Anna Kogan. "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.". At the very least, we expected that we would get everything they collected in their case against Farak. Flannery, now in private practice, said the substance abuse worksheets are clearly relevant to defendants challenging Faraks analysis. She recovered, made it through college and got a job as a chemist at the Amherst Crime Lab, where she tested confiscated drugs. On a Friday afternoon in January 2013, a call came in to Coakley's office: "We have another Annie Dookhan out west.". Sonja Farak had admitted to stealing and using drugs from the drug lab where she worked as a chemist for around 9 years. Despite such unequivocal findings of misconduct, the court removed language about Kaczmarek and Foster from notification letters to those whose cases have been dismissed, which will be sent out in early 2019. As a teenager, she had attempted suicide. Having barely investigated her, prosecutors indicted Farak only for the samples in her possession the day she was caught. The scandal led. Penate and other defendants are asking see all of Fosters emails regarding Farak and other materials relating to the handling of evidence in the chemist's case. The governor also tapped a local attorney, David Meier, to count how many individuals' cases might be tainted. 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. Cleverly omitting pronouns, she wrote that "after reviewing" the file, "every documenthas been disclosed." One thing that How to Fix a Drug Scandal makes clear is that it wasnt all Sonja Faraks fault. The Netflix docuseries ends by acknowledging that Farak received an 18-month sentence, and that defense attorney Luke Ryan was able . Her reporting focuses on mental health, criminal justice and education. You can check your records electronically by following this link: https://icori.chs.state.ma.us. Why Won't Maryland Sell Me a Goddamn Beer? Who Are Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan? How to Fix a Drug Scandal True Story Farak started at Amherst lab in Aug 2004 p. 32. The worksheets, essentially counseling notes, showed that Farak had been using drugs often on the job for much longer than the attorney general's office had claimed. It features the true story of Sonja Farak, a former state drug lab chemist in Massachusetts who was arrested in 2013 for consuming the drugs she was supposed to test and tampering with the evidence to cover up her tracks. A scandal erupts, raising questions for the thousands of defendants in her cases. Poetically, that landmark case originated from the Hinton lab, although Dookhan didn't conduct the analysis in question. 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. Chemist was high at work for 8 years: court docs - CBS News Even as they filed numerous motions for information about how long Farak had been using drugs, the defense attorneys had no idea these worksheets existed. The Hinton drug lab, operated by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, appears to have been run largely on the honor system. During the next four years, she would periodically sober up and then relapse. The justices ordered Healey's department to cover all costs of notifying all defendants whose cases were dismissed. Defense attorneys say withheld Farak notes implicate prosecutors - News She married Lee after starting her job, but their marriage was rocky. This is the story of Farak's drug-induced wrongdoings, and it's the. Sonja Farak was a chemist at a state drug lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, from 2005 to 2013. Foster protested that portions of the evidentiary file in question might be privileged or not subject to disclosure. Kaczmarek is one of three former prosecutors whose role in the prosecution of Farak later became the focus of several lawsuits and disciplinary hearings. 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. "Going to use phentermine," she wrote on another, "but when I went to take it, I saw how little (v. little) there is left = ended up not using. One colleague called her the "super woman of the lab. It features the true story of Sonja Farak, a former state drug lab chemist in Massachusetts who was arrested in 2013 for consuming the drugs she was supposed to test and tampering with the. State officials rushed to condemn her loudly and publicly. But in a But when the relevant police reports were released to defense attorneys, there was no mention of the diary entries' existence, much less that they went back so far. As federal food benefits decline, Mass. After her arrest, she received support from her parents, who showed up to her court appearances, the Daily Hampshire Gazette reported. The number is 888-999-2881. Nassif put Dookhan on desk duty but allowed her to finish testing cases already on her plate, including some of the samples she had taken from the locker. It was. Judge dismisses 'qualified immunity' claim in suit against ex - WBUR Foster's first stepper ethical obligations and office protocolshould have been to look through the evidence to see what had already been handed over. The actions of Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan caused a racket of such a scale that the state had to recompense for it with millions of dollars and had to make a historic move in the dismissal of wrongful convictions. Since then, she has kept a low profile. Sonja Farak: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know | Heavy.com Her access to evidence was not restricted, and she continued testifying in court. Ryan finally viewed the file in the attorney generals offices in October 2014. PDF United States Court of Appeals A drug chemist . The newest true crime series from Netflix, How to Fix a Drug Scandal, was released on April 1, 2020. Between the two women, 47,000 drug convictions and guilty pleas have been dismissed in the last two years, many for misdemeanor possession. February 2013 email, to which he attached the worksheets. Her wrongdoings were exposed when unsealed cocaine and a crack pipe were found under her desk. In Farak's car, police found a "works kit"crack cocaine, a spatula, and copper mesh, often used as a pipe filter. They wrote that Lee, disabled by a stew of mental ailments, [spent] her hours surfing the Web in a haze.. 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. . "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. Verner, who testified that he didn't "micromanage" Kaczmarek, escaped criticism. shipped nearly 300 pages of previously undisclosed materials to local prosecutors around the state. When she got married, it turned out that her wife, too, suffered from her own demons, and their collective anguish made Sonja desperate for a reprieve from this life. Netflix's How to Fix a Drug Scandal: A staggering true story of - Vox Investigators gave that information to Kaczmarek and the state AG's office,according tohearings before thestate board that disciplines attorneys. Sonja Farak | MA Drug Lab Scandals - GitHub Pages Farak received a sentence of 18 months in jail and 5 years of probation. Over the next four years, Farak consumed nearly all of it. NORTHAMPTON Sonja J. Farak told a nurse at the Western Massachusetts Regional Women's Correctional Center in Chicopee in December 2013 that she used methamphetamines and other stimulants "whenever she could get her hands on them." And since her job as a chemist was to test drug samples at a state drug lab in Amherst, that opportunity came daily. A judge sentenced Dookhan to three years in prison; she was granted parole in April 2016. High Massachusetts Lab Chemist Causes Thousands Of Drug Cases To Be Dismissed. Penate alleged Kaczmarek's actions violated his "Brady rights," which require prosecutors to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel. Sonja Farak, a chemist with a longterm mental health struggle, is the catalyst of the story, but it doesn't end with her. Farak saw Kogan in 2009 and 2010, and her therapist wrote: She obtains the drugs from her job at the state drug lab, by taking portions of samples that have come in to be tested., Kogan also wrote that Farak told her she had taken methamphetamines at another lab in an old job, but she didnt get much from it. Kogan wrote that after moving to western [Massachusetts] for her job at the state drug lab, [Farak] tried it again and really liked it. The Amherst lab had called state police when the two missing samples were noticed in 2013. Because state prosecutors hid Farak's substance abuse diaries, it took far too long for the full timeline of her crimes to become public. At the time of Penates trial, the state Attorney Generals Office contended Faraks misdeeds dated back only as far as 2012. Yet state prosecutors withheld Farak's handwritten notes about her drug use, theft, and evidence tampering from defense attorneys and a judge for more than a year. At the time of her arrest, she had resided in 37 Laurel Park in Northampton. They tend to be more freeform notes about the session and your impressions of the client's statements and demeanour. After high school, Sonja went on to major in biochemistry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in western Massachusetts. Former State Chemist High At Work For Nearly 8 Years, Documents Say ", Prosecutors nationwide pretty uniformly backed this argument, which the Supreme Court rejected in a 54 opinion. "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. After serving just a year of her 18 month sentence, Farak was released from prison in 2015. In June 2017, following hearings in which Kaczmarek, Foster, Verner, and others took the stand, a judge found that Kaczmarek and Foster together "piled misrepresentation upon misrepresentation to shield the mental health worksheets from disclosure.". After she was caught, Farak pleaded guilty to stealing drugs from the lab and was sentenced to prison time of 18 months. READ NEXT: Netflixs How to Fix a Drug Scandal Story: 5 Fast Facts, Sonja Farak: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Please review our privacy policy here: https://heavy.com/privacy-policy/, Copyright 2023 Heavy, Inc. All rights reserved. mentioned a New England Patriots game on Saturday, Dec. 24 which corresponded with a game date in 2011. Sonja Farak pleaded guilty to stealing samples of drugs from an Amherst drug lab. More than 24,000 convictions in 16,449 cases tainted by former state chemist Sonja Farak have been dismissed in a court case brought by the ACLU of Massachusetts, the Committee of Public Counsel Services (CPCS), and law firm Fick & Marx LLP. 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. This immediately provoked questions about the thousands of cases in which her findings had contributed to the imprisonment of an individual. Where is Sonja now? 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. Nassif considered it a lapse in judgment, but not a disqualifying one; Nassif's boss didn't think it necessary to alert the prosecutors whose cases relied on the samples, much less the defendants. As How to Fix a Drug Scandal explores, Farak had long struggled with her mental . 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. Sonja Farak in How to Fix a Drug Scandal. What Netflix's How To Fix a Drug Scandal didn't tell you - Esquire If there's ever any uncertainty over "whether exculpatory information should be disclosed," the Supreme Judicial Court later wrote, "the prosecutor must file a motion for a protective order and must present the information for a judge to review.". Due to the conviction, prosecutors were forced to dismiss more than . She started working shortly after for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health in July 2003 until July 2012, and from July 2012 until January 2013 for the Massachusetts State Police when the lab fell under their jurisdiction. "That was one of the lines I had thought I would never cross: I wouldn't tamper with evidence, I wouldn't smoke crack, and then I wouldn't touch other people's work," Farak said. Sonja Farak exposed - full extent of her drug use and where she is now | According to a newspaper article from 1992, she was the first female in Rhode Island to be on a high school football team. Sonja Farak now: what happened to the chemist featured in How to Fix a Its no big deal, 14-year-old Farak said to the Panama City News Herald. The state and attorneys for some of the defendants agreed to a $14 million settlement to reimburse 31,000 defendants for post conviction-related costs, such as probation and parole fees, drug analysis and GPS monitoring. Episode 2. He also With the Dookhan case so fresh, reporters immediately labeled Farak "the second chemist. She is not active on any social media platform and has kept her distance from the press. It didnt matter whether or not she was the one who did the testing or some other chemist. And when defense attorneys tried to do it themselves, Coakley's office blocked their efforts. Months after Farak pleaded guilty in January 2014, Ryan filed a This is the story of Farak's drug-induced wrongdoings, and it's the story of the Massachusetts Attorney General's office apparently turning a blind eye on those wrongfully convicted because of Farak's mistakes. Her role was to test for the presence of illegal substances, which could be instrumental in thousands of . 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. His is one of what lawyers say could be thousands of convictions questioned in the wake of the Farak scandal. Its unclear if Farak is still with Lee, as they have both remained out of the public eye since the case. Farak signed The state's top court took an even harsher view, ruling in October 2018 that the attorney general's office as an institution was responsible for the prosecutorial misconduct of its former employees. Together, we can create a more connected and informed world. One was clearly dated November 16, 2011a year and two months before her arrest. According to an Attorney General Offices report, Farak attended Temple University in Philadelphia for graduate school, which is where she became a recreational drug user. As extensively detailed in How to Fix a Drug Scandal, Farak was arrested on January 19, 2013. Read More: Where is Sonja Farak Sister Now? The Farak documents indicate she used drugs on the very day she certified samples as heroin in Penates case. "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. Her notes record on-the-job drug use ranging from small nips of the lab's baseline. In an August 2013 email, Ryan asked Assistant Attorney General Kris Foster to review evidence taken from Farak. wrote to the Attorney Generals Office two days later. The defense bar also demanded answers on how such crucial evidence stayed buried for so long. Farak wasn't the first Massachusetts chemist to tamper with drug evidence. You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. He didn't buy her quibbling that there's a difference between an explicit lie and obfuscation by grammar. 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. 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. Despite being a star child of the family, Sonja suffered from the mental illnesses that haunted her even in adulthood. Coakley assigned the case against Dookhan to Assistant Attorney General Anne Kaczmarek and her supervisor, John Verner. The drug lab technician was sent to prison for 18 months, but was released in 2015. food banks expect a surge, As streaming services boom, cable TV continues its decline. Sonja Farak, a chemist with a longterm mental health struggle, is the catalyst of the story, but it doesn't end with her. Her ar-rest led to the dismissal of thousands of drug cases in Massachusetts. Given the account that Farak was a law-abiding citizen, it is questioned as to how an Chemist Sonja Farak pleaded guilty to "tampering with evidence" back in 2014 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The attorney general's officeKaczmarek or her supervisorscould have asked a judge to determine whether the worksheets were actually privileged, as Kaczmarek later acknowledged. Coakley did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Regarding the cases that she had handled, the Massachusetts courts threw out every case in the Amherst lab during her tenure. T he day Sonja Farak's world unraveled - the day a crack pipe and sliced evidence bags of cocaine were found at her workstation - started like many others: she attended court. 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? Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters, Sonja Farak is the subject of Netflix's "How To Fix a Drug Scandal. 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. Penate was convicted in December 2013 and sentenced to serve five to seven years. "I dont know how the Velis report reached the conclusion it did after reviewing the underlying email documents, said Randy Gioia, deputy chief counsel at the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the states public defender office. It's not as bad as Dookhan, they asserted and implied over and over. Without access to the diaries, the Springfield judge in 2013 found that Farak had starting stealing from samples in summer 2012. Who Is Sonja Farak From Netflix Docu-Series How To Fix A Drug Scandal "As the gatekeeper to this evidence, she failed to turn over documents, and she adamantly opposed the requests for access. But she proceeded on the hunch that Farak only became addicted in the months before her arrest, and her colleagues stonewalled people who were skeptical of that timeline. With your support, GBH will continue to innovate, inspire and connect through reporting you value that meets todays moments. The last contact information provided by her, in response to Penates allegations, placed her residence in Hatfield, Massachusetts. When grand jury materials were eventually released to defense attorneys, then, they did not mention that these documents existed. Meanwhile, other top prosecutors, including Coakley, largely escaped criticism for their collective failure to hand over evidence that they were bound by constitutional mandate to share with defendants. Two Massachusetts drug-testing laboratory technicians are caught tampering with and falsifying drug evidence, and prosecutors are reluctant to disclose the full extent of their criminal behavior. She started smoking crack cocaine in 2011 and was soon using it 10 to 12 times a day. And yet, despite explicit requests for this kind of evidence, state prosecutors withheld Farak's handwritten notes about her drug use, theft, and evidence tampering from defense attorneys and a judge for more than a year.
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