Sonja Farak is at the center of Netflix's new true crime docuseries, How To Fix a Drug Scandal. Maybe it's not a matter of checklists or reminders that prosecutors have to keep their eyes open for improprieties. Read More: Where is Sonja Farak Sister Now? Carr weaves Farak's story into that of another Massachusetts chemist, Annie Dookhan, who worked across the state at the Hinton drug lab in Boston. 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. Patrick appointed the state inspector general to look into it. Fue arrestada el 19 de enero de 2013. You can try, Suspensions and a reprimand proposed for prosecutors admonished in drug lab scandal. Given the account that Farak was a law-abiding citizen, it is questioned as to how an Perhaps, as criminal justice scandals inevitably emerge, we need to get more independent eyes on the evidence from the start. The premise revolves around documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr following the effects of crime drug lab chemists Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan and their tampering with evidence and its aftereffects.. Dookhan was accused of forging reports and tampering with samples to . Instead, she submitted an intentionally vague letter to the judge claiming defense attorneys already had everything. On top of that, it was also ensured that no analyst would ever work without supervision. One colleague called her the "super woman of the lab. food banks expect a surge, As streaming services boom, cable TV continues its decline. The court decided to uphold a ruling dismissing charges against the defendant, a juvenile at the time of the alleged offense identified only as Washington W. The justices didnt name his prosecutor, David Omiunu, who was identified by The Eye from other court records. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. After weeks of hearings, a "special hearing officer" selected by the board recommended potential sanctions against them all. 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. 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. Kaczmarek is one of three former prosecutors whose role in the prosecution of Farak later became the focus of several lawsuits and disciplinary hearings. In June 2011, Dookhan secretly took 90 samples out of an evidence locker and then forged a co-worker's initials to check them back in, a clear chain-of-custody breach. According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Farak graduated with awards and distinctions. After the Supreme Court's decision, a skeptical colleague started tracking how many microscope slides Dookhan used to test samples for cocaine. With the lab's ample drug supply, she was able to sneak the drug each day from a jug that resided in the shared workspace. She said, It was about coping; it certainly wasnt about having fun; I dont think shes had fun in quite a while.. Many more are likely to follow, with the total expected to exceed 50,000. Farak admitted in testimony that she began using drugs almost as soon as she started working at the Massachusetts State Crime Lab in Amherst. Compromised drug samples often fit the definition. ", Prosecutors nationwide pretty uniformly backed this argument, which the Supreme Court rejected in a 54 opinion. A judge sentenced Dookhan to three years in prison; she was granted parole in April 2016. 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. . 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. 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. After graduating from Portsmouth High School, Farak attended the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she got a bachelor of science degree in biochemistry in 2000. Dookhan was now spending less time at her lab bench and more time testifying in court about her results. She was sentenced to 18 months in jail plus five years of probation. Farak had started taking drugs on the job within months of joining the lab. The surveillance of the chemists as well as the standards and the confiscated drugs has also been increased considerably. 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.". "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.". What Did Sonja Farak Do, Exactly? 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. Since her release, she has kept a low profile and managed to stay out of the public . Due to the conviction, prosecutors were forced to dismiss more than . 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. But a crucial issue was not before the court. 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. He didn't buy her quibbling that there's a difference between an explicit lie and obfuscation by grammar. The civil lawsuit was one of the last tied to prosecutors' disputed handling of the case against disgraced ex-chemist Sonja Farak, who was convicted in 2014 of ingesting drug samples she was. Despite being a star child of the family, Sonja suffered from the mental illnesses that haunted her even in adulthood. | The criminal prosecution wasn't the only investigation of the Dookhan scandal. She is not active on any social media platform and has kept her distance from the press. 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. 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. Her notes record on-the-job drug use ranging from small nips of the lab's baseline standard stock of the stimulant phentermine to stealing crack not only from her own samples but from colleagues' as well. She recovered, made it through college and got a job as a chemist at the Amherst Crime Lab, where she tested confiscated drugs. In 2019, she was seen leaving the Springfield Federal Court but declined to comment on the status of the case. In January 2014, she pleaded guilty to evidence tampering and drug possession. 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. This story is an effort to reconstruct what was known about Farak and Dookhan's crimes, and when, based on court filings, diaries, and interviews with the major players. They never searched Farak's computer or her home. It was an astoundingly light touch for the second state chemist arrested in six months. 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. Sonja Farak, a chemist with a longterm mental health struggle, is the catalyst of the story, but it doesn't end with her. The responsibility of the mess that she created should also rest upon the shoulders of her workplace that allowed her the opportunity to indulge so freely in drugs in the first place. Despite being a star child of the family, Sonja suffered from the mental illnesses that haunted her even in adulthood. 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. Farak is amongst one of the 18 defendants battling the lawsuit filed by Rolando Penate. Foster, now general counsel at the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission, and Kaczmarek, now a clerk magistrate in Suffolk Superior Court, declined to comment for this story. 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.". "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. another filing. 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. A final decision is still pending and must be approved by the state Supreme Judicial Court. In a letter filed with the Supreme Court, Julianne Nassif, a lab supervisor, wrote that Hinton had "appropriate quality control" measures. The Amherst lab had called state police when the two missing samples were noticed in 2013. Because of all that, it's no surprise that Farak was sent to prison in Massachusetts. Farak was getting high off the confiscated drugs police sent her way before replacing the evidence with fake drugs. Several defense attorneys who called for the Velis-Merrigan investigation say the former judges and their state police investigators got it wrong. The lead prosecutor on Farak's case knew about the diaries, as did supervisors at the state attorney general's office. Below is an outline of her charges. The Farak scandal came as the state grappled with another drug lab crisis. Investigators either missed or declined opportunities to dig very deep. 1. Foster Sonja Farak is in the grip of a rubbed-raw depression that hasn't responded to medication. In a March 2013 The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the Amherst crime . "If she were suffering from back injurymaybe she took some oxys?" Over the next four years, Farak consumed nearly all of it. In an August 2013 email, Ryan asked Assistant Attorney General Kris Foster to review evidence taken from Farak. Penate is seeking a new trial, contending the conviction should be reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct and evidence tainted by Farak. Kaczmarek had obtained the evidence at issue while she was prosecuting Farak on state charges of tampering with evidence and drug possession. 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. 1. She had been accused of intentional infliction of emotional distress in addition to the conspiracy to violate [Penates] civil rights.. The next month, Ryan asked again. Shown results suggesting otherwise, she copped to contaminating samples "a few times" during the previous "two to three years.". This is merely a fishing expedition, Foster wrote in Our posture is to not delve into the twists and turns of the investigation or the report and to let it stand on its own, Merrigan said. 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. 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. The Farak documents indicate she used drugs on the very day she certified samples as heroin in Penates case. Despite clear indications that Farak used a variety of narcoticsher worksheets mentioned phentermine, and that vial of powdered oxycodone-acetaminophen had been found at her benchKaczmarek also proceeded as if crack cocaine were Farak's sole drug. Her answer: more than eight years before her arrest. But Ryan, who represented Penate, suspected it was more extensive. Farak wasn't the first Massachusetts chemist to tamper with drug evidence. How to Fix a Drug Scandal is an American true crime documentary miniseries that was released on Netflix on April 1, 2020. Grand Jury Transcript - Sonja Farak - September 16, 2015 Contributed by Shawn Musgrave (Musgrave Investigations) p. 1. This very well could have been the end of the investigative trail but for a few stubborn defense lawyers, who appealed the ruling. Farak was released from prison in 2015 and has kept a low profile since. Since the takeover, the budget for all forensic labs across the state has been increased, by around twenty-five per cent. 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. Penate was convicted in December 2013 and sentenced to serve five to seven years. In 2014, former Amherst drug lab chemist Sonja Farak was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison after it was discovered that she stole and used drugs that she was entrusted to test. Even the master's degree on her rsum was fabricated. She was arrested in 2013 when the supervisor at the Amherst lab was made aware that two samples were missing. The twin Massachusetts drug lab scandals are unprecedented in the sheer number of cases thrown out because of forensic misconduct. Coakley assigned the case against Dookhan to Assistant Attorney General Anne Kaczmarek and her supervisor, John Verner. Instead, Kaczmarek provided copies to Farak's own attorney and asked that all evidence from Farak's car, including the worksheets, be kept away from prying defense attorneys representing the thousands of people convicted of drug crimes based on Farak's work. Regarding the cases that she had handled, the Massachusetts courts threw out every case in the Amherst lab during her tenure. At this point, Farakunlike Dookhandidn't admit anything. The scandal led. 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. Farak started at Amherst lab in Aug 2004 p. 32. She was trying to suppress mental health issues, depression in specific, and she attempted to kill herself in high school, according to Rolling Stone. Without access to the diaries, the Springfield judge in 2013 found that Farak had starting stealing from samples in summer 2012. Stream GBH's Award-Winning Content For Parents And Children. Shortly into her role at Amherst, Farak decided to try liquid methamphetamine to ease her personal struggles. Farak signed 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.". 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. One was clearly dated November 16, 2011a year and two months before her arrest. Scalia may as well have been describing Dookhan. As the state's top court put it, the criminal investigation into Farak was "cursory at best.". Foster replied that because the investigation against Farak was ongoing, she couldnt let him see it. Its unclear if Farak is still with Lee, as they have both remained out of the public eye since the case. Foster protested that portions of the evidentiary file in question might be privileged or not subject to disclosure. 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. 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. 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. Farak apparently still tested each caseunlike Annie Dookhan, another Massachusetts chemist who was arrested five months prior to Farak for fabricating test results. Sonja Farak. Poetically, that landmark case originated from the Hinton lab, although Dookhan didn't conduct the analysis in question. The attorney general's representative at these hearings was Assistant Attorney General Kris Foster, a recent hire. Her medical records included notes from Faraks therapist in Amherst, Anna Kogan. motion on behalf of another client to see the evidence. 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 . The staff in the new lab was also doubled, and the number of trainees was also increased. ", Officials rushed to downplay the situation 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. In addition to ordering the dismissal of many thousands of cases, the Supreme Judicial Court directed a committee to draft a "checklist" for prosecutors, clarifying their obligation to turn over evidence to defendants. wrote she "tried to resist using @ work, but ended up failing." That settlement awaits approval by a judge. mentioned a New England Patriots game on Saturday, Dec. 24 which corresponded with a game date in 2011. noted the mental health worksheets found in Faraks car, which had not been released. Fortunately, the courts largely ignored this shallow investigation. 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! Listen Live: Classic and Contemporary Celtic, Listen Live: Cape, Coast and Islands NPR Station, Boston nonprofit Street2Ivy is producing this generation's entrepreneurs. 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. Martha Coakley, then attorney general for the state, argued in Melendez-Diaz that a chemist's certificate contains only "neutral, objective facts." 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. Tens of thousands of criminal drug cases were dismissed as a result of misconduct by Dookhan and Farak. According to the documents released Tuesday, investigators found that Sonja Farak tested drug samples and testified in court while under the influence of methamphetamines, ketamine, cocaine, LSD . The crucial fact of her longstanding and frequent drug use also never made it into Farak's trial, much less to defendants appealing convictions predicated on her tainted analyses. Heres what you need to know about Sonja Farak: Farak was born on January 13, 1978, in Rhode Island to Stanley and Linda Farak. This immediately provoked questions about the thousands of cases in which her findings had contributed to the imprisonment of an individual. 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. At least 11,000 cases have already been dismissed due to fallout from the scandal, with thousands more likely to come. Powered by. Both have since left the attorney general's office for other government positions. 3.3.2023 4:50 PM, 2022 Reason Foundation | 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. TherapyNotes. "It would be difficult to overstate the significance of these documents," Ryan wrote to the attorney general's office. On the surface, their crimes dont seem as injurious and they dont seem to enjoy inflicting pain on others. 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. A federal judge has rejected claims from an embattled former state prosecutor that she is protected from liability in the fallout over a Massachusetts drug lab scandal. Farak was arrested the next day, and the attorney general's office assigned the case to Anne Kaczmarek. Between the two women, 47,000 drug convictions and guilty pleas have been dismissed in the last two years, many for misdemeanor possession. "Annie Dookhan's alleged actions corrupted the integrity of the criminal justice system, and there are many victims as a result of this," Coakley said at a press conference. According to a newspaper article from 1992, she was the first female in Rhode Island to be on a high school football team. The former judges and the state police officers who helped them conducted a thorough review, said Emalie Gainey, spokeswoman for Attorney General Maura Healey. Having barely investigated her, prosecutors indicted Farak only for the samples in her possession the day she was caught. Kaczmarek got a note from Sgt. 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. The hotline is open Monday through Friday, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Subscribe to Reason Roundup, a wrap up of the last 24 hours of news, delivered fresh each morning. In a 61 ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court in 2017, the defense bar, led by public defenders and the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), won the dismissal of almost every conviction based on Dookhan's analysismore than 36,000 cases in all. High Massachusetts Lab Chemist Causes Thousands Of Drug Cases To Be Dismissed. Kaczmarek, along with former assistant attorneys general Kris Foster and John Verner, all face possible sanctions. If Farak found a substance was a true drug, the person it was confiscated from could be convicted of a substance-related crime. Mucha gente que vio el programa se pregunta: dnde est Sonja Farak ahora? Thanks to Farak's testimony and those diary worksheets, we now know that, soon after joining the Amherst lab in 2004, Farak started skimming from the methamphetamine "standard," an undiluted oil used as a reference against which suspected meth samples are compared. While Dookhan had tampered with evidence and indulged in dry-labbing, Farak stole from her workplace. She was also testifying in court while high. And when the tests she did run came back negative, Dookhan added controlled substances to the vials. 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. Episode 1. GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting. "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.".
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