Lab's standards on a fairly regular basis beginning in late 2004 or early 2005," the attorney general's report notes in launching its recounting of the chemist's drug-taking journey . The Dookhan prosecution was barely underway, a grand jury having returned indictments a few weeks earlier. As he leafed through three boxes of evidence, he found the substance abuse worksheets and diaries. 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. Faraks therapist, Anna Kogan, wrote in her notes that Farak was worried about Nikki finding out about her addiction as well as the possible legal issues if she were ever caught. a certification of drug samples in Penates case on Dec. 22, 2011. And yet, due to their actions, they did injure people and they did inflict a lot of pain, not just on a couple of people, but on thousands. 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. Faraks notes also . Per her own court testimony, as shown in the docu-series, Farak started working at a state drug lab in Amherst in 2004. Farak wasn't the first Massachusetts chemist to tamper with drug evidence. If they'd kept digging, defendants might still have learned the crucial facts. In 2009, Farak branched out to the lab's amphetamine, phentermine, and cocaine standards. 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. 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. High Massachusetts Lab Chemist Causes Thousands Of Drug Cases To Be Dismissed. Coakley did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Sonja Farak, a chemist with a longterm mental health struggle, is the catalyst of the story, but it doesn't end with her. In 2019, she was seen leaving the Springfield Federal Court but declined to comment on the status of the case. There is no allegation of misconduct against the local prosecutors who presented the case against Penate in Hampden County Superior Court. They were found with their packaging sliced open and their contents apparently altered. "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. Joseph Ballou, lead investigator for the state police, called them the most important documents from the car. Get all the latest from Sanditon on GBH Passport, How one Brookline studio helps artists with disabilities thrive. The former judges and the state police officers who helped them conducted a thorough review, said Emalie Gainey, spokeswoman for Attorney General Maura Healey. Her answer: more than eight years before her arrest. A hearing on their motions is scheduled next month. Meier put the number at 40,323 defendants, though some have called that an overestimate. 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. One of the reasons for the decrepit state and standard of the Amherst lab was the lack of funds. wrote to the Attorney Generals Office two days later. . According to her teammates, She was the best center in the league last year, and they [felt] stronger with her in there than with some guys.. In worksheet notes dated Thursday, Dec. 22, Farak After serving for 13 months, she was released on parole in 2015. 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. Sonja Farak in How to Fix a Drug Scandal. I felt euphoric, Kogan wrote of Farak. 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. Foster's first stepper ethical obligations and office protocolshould have been to look through the evidence to see what had already been handed over. (Conveniently, they also found a Patriots schedule from 2011 in the car.). "The gravity of the present case cannot be overstated," Kaczmarek wrote in her memo recommending a prison sentence of five to seven years. Farak started at Amherst lab in Aug 2004 p. 32. 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. According to the notes, Farak thought it gave her energy, helped her to get things done and not procrastinate, feel more positive., Her partner Nikki Lee testified before a grand jury that she herself had tried cocaine, that she had observed Farak using cocaine in 2000, and that she had marijuana in her house when police officers arrived to search the premises as part of their investigation of Farak., In Faraks testimony during a grand jury investigation, she said that she became a recreational drug user during graduate school and used cocaine, marihuana, and ecstasy. She also said she used heroin one time and was nervous and sick and hated every minute of it [and had] no desire to use [it] again., Farak met and settled down with Nikki Lee in her 20s. | GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting. The case of Rolando Penate has become a leading example for lawyers calling for further investigation into alleged misconduct by prosecutors who handled documents seized from Sonja Farak, the Amherst crime-lab chemist convicted of stealing and tampering with drug samples. She was released in 2015, as reported by Mass Live. She received the American Institute of Chemists Award in her final year as well as a Crimson and Gray Award from the school a year before, which recognized her dedication, commitment and unselfishness in the enrichment of student life at WPI. A Rolling Stone piece on Farak also indicated that she graduated with high distinction from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Democratic Gov. He recommended she lose her law license for two years; the Office of Bar Counsel later argued Kaczmarek should be disbarred. He was floored when he found the worksheets. A judge sentenced Dookhan to three years in prison; she was granted parole in April 2016. At some point, the attorney general's office stopped chasing leads entirely. Even when she failed a post-arrest drug testprompting the lead investigator to quip to Kaczmarek, "I hope she doesn't have a stash in her house! As federal food benefits decline, Mass. Farak admitted to being on a list of drugs while working between 2004 and her 2013 arrest. Name. 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. Only a few months after Dookhan's conviction, it was discovered that another Massachusetts crime lab worker, Sonja Farak, who was addicted to drugs, not only stole her supply from the. Earlier that day, a chemist at the Amherst drug lab had tracked two samples that were missing from the evidence locker to Sonja Farak's bench. If chemists had to testify in person, Coakley warned melodramatically, misdemeanor drug prosecutions "would essentially grind to a halt. Sonja Farak is at the center of Netflix's new true crime docuseries, How To Fix a Drug Scandal. 3.3.2023 4:50 PM, 2022 Reason Foundation | In the only quasi-independent probe of the Farak scandal ever ordered, Attorney General Healey and a district attorney appointed two retired judges to investigate in summer 2015. In 2017, a different judge ruled that Foster's actions constituted a "fraud upon the court," calling the letter "deliberately misleading." 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. Martha Coakley, then attorney general for the state, argued in Melendez-Diaz that a chemist's certificate contains only "neutral, objective facts." "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. Not only did they not turn these documents over, but I wasnt aware that they existed, said Frank Flannery, who was the Hampden County assistant district attorney assigned to appeals following Faraks arrest. "I was totally controlled by my addiction," Farak later testified. Powered by. Listen Live: Classic and Contemporary Celtic, Listen Live: Cape, Coast and Islands NPR Station, Boston nonprofit Street2Ivy is producing this generation's entrepreneurs. But unlike with Dookhan, no one launched a bigger investigation of Farak. ", Prosecutors maintained that Faraks rogue behavior spanned just a few months. Her reporting focuses on mental health, criminal justice and education. The Amherst lab had called state police when the two missing samples were noticed in 2013. Who is Sonja Farak, the former state drug lab chemist featured in the show? 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. motion on behalf of another client to see the evidence. The governor also tapped a local attorney, David Meier, to count how many individuals' cases might be tainted. The last contact information provided by her, in response to Penates allegations, placed her residence in Hatfield, Massachusetts. When the Farak scandal erupted, that misconduct came into view. As Solotaroff recounts in detail, Massachusetts attorney Luke Ryan represented two people who were accused of drug charges that Farak had analyzed . Farak admitted in testimony that she began using drugs almost as soon as she started working at the Massachusetts State Crime Lab in Amherst. . | This not only led to people getting a reprieve from prison but also filing their own lawsuits against the injustice they had to suffer. A final decision is still pending and must be approved by the state Supreme Judicial Court. But absent evidence of aggravating misconduct by prosecutors or cops, the majority ruled, Dookhan's tampering alone didn't justify a blanket dismissal of every case she had touched. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. "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.". ", Prosecutors nationwide pretty uniformly backed this argument, which the Supreme Court rejected in a 54 opinion. Her wrongdoings were exposed when unsealed cocaine and a crack pipe were found under her desk. "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. 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. B. ut when Penates lawyer tried to obtain the documents not certain what was in them before his clients 2013 trial, he was rebuffed by state prosecutors who said the papers were irrelevant according to emails included in investigative reports unsealed earlier this month. Please note that if your case has been identified for dismissal, it could take approximately 2-3 months for the relevant court records to be updated. Despite being a star child of the family, Sonja suffered from the mental illnesses that haunted her even in adulthood. Kaczmarek quoted the worksheets in a memo to her supervisor, Verner, and others, summarizing that they revealed Farak's "struggle with substance abuse." The Board of Bar Overseers (BBO) is reviewing the actions of three prosecutors in the investigation of the scandal to determine whether any of them deliberately withheld potentially exculpatory evidence. She recovered, made it through college and got a job as a chemist at the Amherst Crime Lab, where she tested confiscated drugs. "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.
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