The latest news came on Thursday of last week when the Supreme Judicial court here ordered the dismissal of an additional thousands of drug cases worked on by chemist Sonja Farak at a lab in Amherst, Massachusetts. More than 11,000 had previously been dismissed when it was found that Farak had herself been high at work for years, using the very drugs she had been tasked with testing. Farak plead guilty in 2014 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
But now the court has found that all of the cases worked on at the lab in question between 2009-2013, not just those Farak dealt with herself, must be dismissed. And, following the finding that two former prosecutors withheld crucial evidence about the extent of her misconduct efforts that resulted in numerous people either remaining in prison, being sent back to prison, or having their tainted convictions needlessly upheld the court has imposed penalties on the Attorney Generals office in a rare instance of misconduct having actual consequences.
You might be thinking that all of this sounds vaguely familiar, but youre probably just remembering the other corrupt drug lab chemist, Annie Doohkan, who served three years in prison back in 2013 and had over 20,000 of the drug cases she worked on dismissed after being found guilty of falsification of records and obstructing of justice.
This all seems a little confusing and overwhelming to understand, but in short, two separate drug lab chemists in Massachusetts went to jail in the past few years one for being fucked up on the shit she was testing all the time, and one for just inventing shit because she wanted to put more addicts in prison and as a result tens of thousands of drug cases have been dismissed. In a way its a victory, but a late arriving one. We shouldnt have ever gotten to this point in the first place.
I spoke with Matthew Segal, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, who has been leading the charge on the Farak case, about what these new dismissals mean, how the two scandals differed, and what happened with the misconduct from state prosecutors.
How do the new developments from last week differ from what weve known about the drug testing scandals in Massachusetts for a while now?
Whats difference about Amherst lab scandal is that after Farak was arrested there were two Assistant Attorneys General that had engaged in a coverup of the extent of what Farak did. They hid evidence about the duration of her misconduct, and one of them even wrote an intentionally deceptive letter to a judge saying all the evidence they had had been turned over. Not only was that not true, she later testified that she had reviewed none of the files. That was bad! It was the most remarkable testimony Id ever seen outside of watching A Few Good Men. She took to the witness stand and confessed to deceiving a judge. ... What were the details of the coverup?
Farak was arrested in January of 2013, and a search of her car was conducted. She was prosecuted by the same Assistant Attorney General who prosecuted Dookhan. Some of this is accounted in Thursdays opinion, but basically a state trooper in 2013, within about a month of when Farak was arrested, sent an email to the prosecutor with the subject Farak Admissions, and attached were these worksheets where Farak had been keeping track of her drug use. One of them was very obviously from 2011. It was the Attorney Generals position, for a good chunk of time after she was arrested, that Farak had only been using drugs for a few months. Based on that people were denied release from prison, people had to serve out their sentences, and at least one person was sent back to prison on the theory that his case was before Farak had started using drugs.