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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); NEXT: Zoning Makes the Green New Deal Impossible. She had unrestricted access to the evidence room. Kaczmarek is one of three former prosecutors whose role in the prosecution of Farak later became the focus of several lawsuits and disciplinary hearings. After she was caught, Farak pleaded guilty to stealing drugs from the lab and was sentenced to prison time of 18 months. 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." Penate is seeking a new trial, contending the conviction should be reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct and evidence tainted by Farak. After high school, Sonja went on to major in biochemistry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in western Massachusetts. The last contact information provided by her, in response to Penates allegations, placed her residence in Hatfield, Massachusetts. She was arrested in 2013 when the supervisor at the Amherst lab was made aware that two samples were missing. TherapyNotes. Coakley assigned the case against Dookhan to Assistant Attorney General Anne Kaczmarek and her supervisor, John Verner. Fue arrestada el 19 de enero de 2013. Netflixs How to Fix a Drug Scandal tells the story of two women whose actions brought to light the negligence of the system that is supposed to deliver justice to everyone. When defense lawyers asked to see evidence for themselves, state prosecutors smeared them as pursuing a "fishing expedition.". I felt euphoric, Kogan wrote of Farak. Her role was to test for the presence of illegal substances, which could be instrumental in thousands of . According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Farak graduated with awards and distinctions. The next month, Ryan asked again. "It would be difficult to overstate the significance of these documents," Ryan wrote to the attorney general's office. 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. 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! One of the reasons for the decrepit state and standard of the Amherst lab was the lack of funds. She played as the starting guard for Portsmouth High Schools freshman team. She even made her own crack in the lab. "It would be difficult to overstate the significance of these documents, Ryan 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. Since her release, she has kept a low profile and managed to stay out of the public . Privacy Policy | 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. In a March 2013 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. Verner, who testified that he didn't "micromanage" Kaczmarek, escaped criticism. 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.". Farak worked under the influence of drugs for nine years - from 2004 to 2013 - before she was caught. 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. It's not as bad as Dookhan, they asserted and implied over and over. Penate alleged Kaczmarek's actions violated his "Brady rights," which require prosecutors to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel. It declined Farak's offer of a detailed confession in exchange for leniency, nixing the offer without even negotiating terms. And then the bigger investigation was going to be someone else.". Soon after Dookhan's arrest, Coakley's office asked the governor to order a broader independent probe of the Hinton lab. Farak signed a certification of drug samples in Penate's case on Dec. 22, 2011. Another three days later, state police conducted a full search of Farak's workstation, finding a vial of powder that tested positive for oxycodone, plus 11.7 grams of cocaine in a desk drawer. This threw every sample she had ever tested into question. She had never quashed a subpoena before, but supervisors told her to fend off motions about Farak. Farak trabaj en el laboratorio Amherst desde el verano de 2004 y poco despus comenz a tomar las drogas del laboratorio. He emailed them to Kaczmareksubject: "FARAK Admissions." 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. El 6 de enero de 2014, Farak se declar culpable de los cargos en su contra. Episode 2. Support GBH. 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. Tens of thousands of criminal drug cases were dismissed as a result of misconduct by Dookhan and Farak. 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. "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.". Between Farak and Dookhanwho's also featured in How to Fix a Drug Scandal38,000 wrongfully convicted cases have been dismissed, according to the Washington Post. Name. Defense lawyers doubled down on challenges to every case she might have taintednot just her own, which district attorneys ultimately agreed to dismiss, but also her co-workers', based on Farak's admission that she stole from other chemists' samples. ", In 2004, her first full year at the lab, Dookhan reported analyzing approximately 700 samples per month. Two weeks after Ryans discovery, the Attorney Generals Office It was an astoundingly light touch for the second state chemist arrested in six months. If Farak found a substance was a true drug, the person it was confiscated from could be convicted of a substance-related crime. Joseph . Instead, Kaczmarek proceeded as if the substance abuse was a recent development. February 2013 email, to which he attached the worksheets. 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. "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. Former chemist Annie Dookhan was convicted in 2013 on charges of improperly testing drug evidence at a drug lab in Boston. May 2003 started working in Hinton drug lab p. 14. 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. And so, when she pleaded guilty in January 2014, Farak got what one attorney called "de facto immunity." Shown results suggesting otherwise, she copped to contaminating samples "a few times" during the previous "two to three years.". Why Won't Maryland Sell Me a Goddamn Beer? They wrote that Lee, disabled by a stew of mental ailments, [spent] her hours surfing the Web in a haze.. Sonja Farak (Netflix) An ex-lab chemist Sonja Farak's negligence and misdeeds shocked US when she was arrested in 2013 for stealing and using drugs from the lab where she worked. 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. "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.". Due to the conviction, prosecutors were forced to dismiss more than . 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. 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. 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. A status hearing on Penate's suit, which was filed in 2017, is scheduled for July. 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. Thus, only defendants whose evidence she tested in the six-month window before her arrest could challenge their cases. 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. Farak had started taking drugs on the job within months of joining the Amherst lab in 2004. 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. What Did Sonja Farak Do, Exactly? In worksheet notes dated Thursday, Dec. 22, Farak "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. They pulled her aside as she walked back to the courthouse from her car, where she had smoked "a fair amount of crack" during her lunch break. On the surface, their crimes dont seem as injurious and they dont seem to enjoy inflicting pain on others. In January 2014, she pleaded guilty to evidence tampering and drug possession. The four years since Ryan discovered Farak's diaries have been a bitter fight over this question of culpabilitywhether Kaczmarek, Foster, and their colleagues were merely careless or whether they deliberately hid crucial evidence. The lead prosecutor on Farak's case knew about the diaries, as did supervisors at the state attorney general's office. 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. Without access to the diaries, the Springfield judge in 2013 found that Farak had starting stealing from samples in summer 2012. In the aftermath of Farak's arrest, it's been argued that because she was under the influence, all of the cases she tested could be considered to have been wrongfully convicted. 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. motion on behalf of another client to see the evidence. A drug chemist . (Netflix) A former state chemist, Sonja Farak, made headlines in 2013 when she was arrested for stealing and using drugs from a laboratory. Several defense attorneys who called for the Velis-Merrigan investigation say the former judges and their state police investigators got it wrong. Foster replied that because the investigation against Farak was ongoing, she couldnt let him see it. Among other items, Kaczmarek 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. Before her sentencing, Farak failed a drug test while out on bail, according to Mass Live. She later called this dismissive exchange a "plea to God.". "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. Farak was released from prison in 2015 and has kept a low profile since. But unlike with Dookhan, there were no independent investigations of Farak or the Amherst lab. "These drugswere tested fairly," Coakley claimed the day after Farak's arrest. After weeks of hearings, a "special hearing officer" selected by the board recommended potential sanctions against them all. During the next four years, she would periodically sober up and then relapse. Our streamlined software is accessible wherever and whenever you . Without even interviewing Foster, they determined there was "no evidence" of obstruction of justice by her, by Kaczmarek, or by any state prosecutor. "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. 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. They were all rendered unacceptable. 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.
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