A year later, in October 2014, prosecutors relented, granting access to the full evidence in Farak's case to attorney Luke Ryan. 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. She couldn't be sure which cases these were, Dookhan told investigators. But unlike with Dookhan, there were no independent investigations of Farak or the Amherst lab. The medical records stated that she did not have an existing drug problem that was amplified by her access to more substances. When Farak was arrested,former Attorney General Martha Coakley told the public investigators believed Farak tampered with drugs at the lab for only a few months. She had unrestricted access to the evidence room. For people with disabilities needing assistance with the Public Files, contact Glenn Heath at 617-300-3268. Below is an outline of her charges. Among the papers they seized were handwritten worksheets Farak completed for drug-abuse therapy. Foster said that Kaczmarek told her all relevant evidence had been turned over and that her supervisor told her to write the letter, though both denied these claims. Investigators found that Sonja Farak tested drug samples and testified in court while under the influence of methamphetamines, ketamine, cocaine, LSD and other drugs between 2005 and 2013. It's not as bad as Dookhan, they asserted and implied over and over. In her June 17 ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Katherine Robertson dismissed former Assistant Attorney General Anne Kaczmarek's claims of qualified immunity a doctrine that gives legal immunity to some public officials accused of misconduct. Even before her arrest, the Department of Public Health had launched an internal inquiry into how such misconduct had gone undetected for such a long time. mentioned a New England Patriots game on Saturday, Dec. 24 which corresponded with a game date in 2011. She later called this dismissive exchange a "plea to God.". He recommended she lose her law license for two years; the Office of Bar Counsel later argued Kaczmarek should be disbarred. . Most important, they found seven worksheets from Farak's substance abuse therapy. After contemplating another suicide, she settled on drugs, and the fact that she had such easy access to it at her workplace made it easier for her to get lost in that world. On another worksheet chronicling her struggle not to use, she described 12 of the next 13 samples assigned to her for testing as "urge-ful.". Penate argued the court should follow those findings. Penate's suit said Kaczmarek withheld evidence that Farak used drugs at the lab for longer than the Massachusetts attorney general's office first claimed, and that he would not have been imprisoned based on tainted evidence. In a separate opinion in October 2018, the Supreme Judicial Court also ordered the state to return most court fines and probation fees to people whose cases were dismissed; one estimate puts that price tag at $10 million. "These drugswere tested fairly," Coakley claimed the day after Farak's arrest. Patrick appointed the state inspector general to look into it. 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. Kaczmarek, along with former assistant attorneys general Kris Foster and John Verner, all face possible sanctions. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2015by which time the current state attorney general, Maura Healey, had been electedthat it was "imperative" for the government to "thoroughly investigate the timing and scope of Farak's misconduct." ", Prosecutors nationwide pretty uniformly backed this argument, which the Supreme Court rejected in a 54 opinion. El 6 de enero de 2014, Farak se declar culpable de los cargos en su contra. At this point, Farakunlike Dookhandidn't admit anything. His email was one of more than 800 released with the Velis-Merrigan report. After serving just a year of her 18 month sentence, Farak was released from prison in 2015. 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. | One of the reasons for the decrepit state and standard of the Amherst lab was the lack of funds. When defense lawyers asked to see evidence for themselves, state prosecutors smeared them as pursuing a "fishing expedition.". Farak wasn't the first Massachusetts chemist to tamper with drug evidence. It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. Our streamlined software is accessible wherever and whenever you . 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. 3.3.2023 4:50 PM, 2022 Reason Foundation | Instead, she submitted an intentionally vague letter to the judge claiming defense attorneys already had everything. The results of that intake interview and notes from several of Farak's therapists all detailing Farak's drug use going back years were obtained by defense attorneys on behalf of . Looking back, it seems that Massachusetts law enforcement officials, reeling from the Dookhan case, simply felt they couldn't weather another full-fledged forensics scandal. The drug lab technician was sent to prison for 18 months, but was released in 2015. Instead, Kaczmarek proceeded as if the substance abuse was a recent development. motion with Hampden Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Kinder to see the evidence for himself. The hotline is open Monday through Friday, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. 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! Rollins said it covers "a period of time in which either now disgraced chemist Annie Dookhan, or another convicted chemist Sonja Farak ," worked there. In her initial police interview, given at her dining room table, Dookhan said she "would never falsify" results "because it's someone's life on the line." The number is 888-999-2881. Defense attorneys had. Over the next four years, Farak consumed nearly all of it. Farak had started taking drugs on the job within months of joining the lab. The latest true crime offering from Netflix is the documentary series "How to Fix a Drug Scandal." It dives into the story of Sonja Farak, a chemist who worked for a Massachusetts state drug. Netflix released a new docu-series called "How to Fix a Drug Scandal." The justices ordered Healey's department to cover all costs of notifying all defendants whose cases were dismissed. 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. The former judges and the state police officers who helped them conducted a thorough review, said Emalie Gainey, spokeswoman for Attorney General Maura Healey. The cocaine, found in an unsealed, completed drug-testing kit, tested negativemeaning Farak had seemingly replaced the formerly "positive" drugs with falsified substances. As Kaczmarek herself later observed, Farak essentially had "a drugstore at her disposal" from her first day at the Amherst lab. A judge sentenced Dookhan to three years in prison; she was granted parole in April 2016. email highlighted in the Velis-Merrigan report. Farak also had an apparent obsession for her therapists husband, as she was reported to have a folder that shed put together about him, documenting her obsession. . chemist, Sonja Farak, had been battling drug addiction and had tampered with samples she was assigned to test around the time she tested the samples in Penate's case. This article originally appeared in print under the headline "The Chemists and the Cover-Up". Episode 2. Kaczmarek quoted the worksheets in a memo to her supervisor, Verner, and others, summarizing that they revealed Farak's "struggle with substance abuse." After graduating from Portsmouth High School, Farak attended the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she got a bachelor of science degree in biochemistry in 2000. Farak had started taking drugs on the job within months of joining the Amherst lab in 2004. noted the mental health worksheets found in Faraks car, which had not been released. Even though Farak found a job after graduation and was settled down with her partner, she continued to struggle with depression and felt like a stranger in her body. In 2009, Farak branched out to the lab's amphetamine, phentermine, and cocaine standards. 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. Farak signed a certification of drug samples in Penate's case on Dec. 22, 2011. Verner, who testified that he didn't "micromanage" Kaczmarek, escaped criticism. Maybe it's not a matter of checklists or reminders that prosecutors have to keep their eyes open for improprieties. Among other items, Kaczmarek Though. "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. 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. Biden Embraces the Fearmongering, Vows To Squash D.C.'s Mild Criminal Justice Reforms, The Flap Over Biden's Comment About 2 Fentanyl Deaths Obscures Prohibition's Role in Causing Them, Conservatives Turn Further Against WarExcept Maybe With Mexico. She was released in 2015, as reported by Mass Live. Process Notes/Psychotherapy Notes Process notes are sometimes also referred to as psychotherapy notesthey're the notes you take during or after a session. That motion was denied, and the notice letters will explain Farak's tampering without any mention of prosecutorial misconduct. She continued to experience suicidal thoughts, but instead of going through with those thoughts, she started taking the drugs that she would be testing at work. Sonja Farak, a chemist with a longterm mental health struggle, is the catalyst of the story, but it doesn't end with her. denied Penates motion to dismiss the case, saying there was no evidence that Faraks misconduct extended to his case. Thus, only defendants whose evidence she tested in the six-month window before her arrest could challenge their cases. The lax security and regulations of the place and the negligent supervision of the employees and the stock of standards are the reasons why Farak was encouraged to do what she did. In November 2013, Dookhan pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, and perjury. Kaczmarek has repeatedly testified she did not act intentionally and that she thought the worksheets had been turned over to the district attorneys who prosecuted the cases involved. Such strong claims were too hasty at best, since investigators had not yet finished basic searches; three days later, police executed a warrant for a duffel bag they found stuffed behind Farak's desk. This is the story of Farak's drug-induced wrongdoings, and it's the. "A forensic analyst responding to a request from a law enforcement official may feel pressureor have an incentiveto alter the evidence in a manner favorable to the prosecution.". The lead prosecutor on Farak's case knew about the diaries, as did supervisors at the state attorney general's office. 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. In "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," a new four-part Netflix docuseries, documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr presents the stories of Massachusetts drug lab chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, and . They were all rendered unacceptable. Join us. Foster replied that because the investigation against Farak was ongoing, she couldnt let him see it. Asked for comment, Foster in January objected through an attorney that the judge never gave her an opportunity to defend herself and that his ruling left an "indelible stain on her reputation.". Velis said he stood by the findings. Regarding the cases that she had handled, the Massachusetts courts threw out every case in the Amherst lab during her tenure. Emma Camp If Farak found a substance was a true drug, the person it was confiscated from could be convicted of a substance-related crime. The Farak documents indicate she used drugs on the very day she certified samples as heroin in Penates case. Farak signed A. She was sentenced in 2014 to 18 months in prison and 5 years of probation. The place was closed as soon as Faraks crimes came to light. Fortunately, the courts largely ignored this shallow investigation. According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Farak graduated with awards and distinctions. Who is Sonja Farak? Stream GBH's Award-Winning Content For Parents And Children. (Conveniently, they also found a Patriots schedule from 2011 in the car.). The judge ordered prosecutors and defense attorneys to coordinate on identifying undisclosed emails related to documents seized from the disgraced state crime lab chemist. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); NEXT: Zoning Makes the Green New Deal Impossible. As he leafed through three boxes of evidence, he found the substance abuse worksheets and diaries. Magistrate Judge Robertson denied a request in Penate's lawsuit that Kaczmarek be prohibited from contesting the special hearing officer's findings. Farak worked under the influence of drugs for nine years - from 2004 to 2013 - before she was caught. Penate was convicted in December 2013 and sentenced to serve five to seven years. And when the tests she did run came back negative, Dookhan added controlled substances to the vials. "Because on almost a daily basis Farak abused narcoticsthere is no assurance that she was able to perform chemical analysis correctly," the judge found. The disgraced chemist was sentenced to less than two years behind bars in 2014, following her guilty pleas for stealing cocaine from the lab. Chemist Sonja Farak pleaded guilty to "tampering with evidence" back in 2014 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. As federal food benefits decline, Mass. She started seeing a substance abuse therapist around this time. Gioia called for evidentiary hearings so prosecutors can be asked about what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did with their knowledge., Luke Ryan, Penates trial lawyer, said that the state police officers working on the report failed to obtain an appropriate understanding of the events that transpired before they were assigned to this investigation.". 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 Attorney Generals Office, Velis and Merrigan and the state police declined to answer questions about the handling of the Farak evidence. Farak received a sentence of 18 months in jail and 5 years of probation. In fall 2012, just five months before her arrest, Annie Dookhan confessed to faking analyses and altering samples in the Boston testing facility where she worked. She started smoking crack cocaine in 2011 and was soon using it 10 to 12 times a day. Sonja Farak in How to Fix a Drug Scandal. Given the account that Farak was a law-abiding citizen, it is questioned as to how an 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. TherapyNotes is a complete practice management system with everything you need to manage patient records, schedule appointments, meet with patients remotely, create rich documentation, and bill insurance, right at your fingertips. "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. She was also testifying in court while high. 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. The prosecutors have been tied to the drug lab scandal involving disgraced former state chemist Sonja Farak, who admitted to stealing and using drugs from an Amherst state lab. The next month, Ryan asked again. In 2019, she was seen leaving the Springfield Federal Court but declined to comment on the status of the case. In 2012, she began taking from co-workers' samples, forging intake forms and editing the lab database to cover her tracks. There is no allegation of misconduct against the local prosecutors who presented the case against Penate in Hampden County Superior Court. 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. Its unclear if Farak is still with Lee, as they have both remained out of the public eye since the case. This might not have mattered as much if the investigators had followed the evidence that Farak had been using drugs for at least a year and almost certainly longer. The Netflix docuseries ends by acknowledging that Farak received an 18-month sentence, and that defense attorney Luke Ryan was able . 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. Still, the state was acquiring evidence. The attorney general's officeKaczmarek or her supervisorscould have asked a judge to determine whether the worksheets were actually privileged, as Kaczmarek later acknowledged. 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. Privacy Policy | Farak as a young. 2. The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the state drug lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, for more than eight years. "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. Soon after Dookhan's arrest, Coakley's office asked the governor to order a broader independent probe of the Hinton lab. Release year: 2020. The defense bar also demanded answers on how such crucial evidence stayed buried for so long. Reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. memo, Kaczmarek told her supervisors that "Farak's admissions on her 'emotional worksheets' recovered from her car detail her struggle with substance abuse. | It was. It ultimately took a blatant violation to expose Dookhan, and even then her bosses twisted themselves in knots to hold on to their "super woman.". Kaczmarek argued for qualified immunity after she was sued by Rolando Penate, who spent five years in prison on drug charges in which the evidence in his case was tested by Farak. A local prosecutor also asked Ballou to look into a case Farak had tested as far back as 2005. Having barely investigated her, prosecutors indicted Farak only for the samples in her possession the day she was caught. In 2017, a different judge ruled that Foster's actions constituted a "fraud upon the court," calling the letter "deliberately misleading." 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. Sonja Farak was a chemist for a state crime lab in Massachusetts. Four months after Ryan found the worksheets, Judge Kinder 1. 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. The fact that she ran analyses while high and regularly dipped into samples casts doubt on thousands of convictions. "No reasonablejury could conclude that this evidence is not favorable.". Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters, Sonja Farak is the subject of Netflix's "How To Fix a Drug Scandal. In court, she added that there was "no smoking gun" in the evidence. Two Massachusetts drug lab technicians Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan were caught tainting evidence in separate drug labs in different but equally shocking ways. 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. "The need to inform defendants of government misconduct does not disappear when that misconduct was committed by a government lawyer as opposed to a government chemist.". We were unable to subscribe you to WBUR Today. Initially, she had represented herself in answer to the complaints lodged against her, but later, she turned to Susan Sachs, who represented her since, not just on the Penate lawsuit, but also on any other case that emerged as the result of her actions in Amherst. 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. It took another three years for the truth to emerge. The twin Massachusetts drug lab scandals are unprecedented in the sheer number of cases thrown out because of forensic misconduct. She was also under the influence when she took the stand during her trial. Who is Sonja Farak, the former state drug lab chemist featured in the show? Per her own court testimony, as shown in the docu-series, Farak started working at a state drug lab in Amherst in 2004. She received an email from a detective weeks after Farak's arrest containing detailed notes Farak made in conjunction with her own drug treatment, pointedly identified as "FARAK Admissions" but failed to disclose them for years. During her trial, her defense lawyer Elaine Pourinski said that Farak wasnt taking drugs to party, but instead to control her depression. Another worksheet had the month and weekdays for December 2011, which police easily could have determined by cross-referencing holidays or looking up a New England Patriots game mentioned in one entry. Inwardly though, Sonja was struggling. Listen Live: Classic and Contemporary Celtic, Listen Live: Cape, Coast and Islands NPR Station, Boston nonprofit Street2Ivy is producing this generation's entrepreneurs. ", Prosecutors maintained that Faraks rogue behavior spanned just a few months. A drug chemist . But in a Between 2005 and 2013, Sonja Farak was performing laboratory tests at a state drug lab in Amherst while under the influence of narcotics. Thanks largely to the prosecutors' deception, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in October 2018 was forced to dismiss thousands of cases Farak may never have even touched, including every single conviction based on evidence processed at the Amherst lab from 2009 to the day of Farak's arrest in 2013.
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