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. The medical records stated that she did not have an existing drug problem that was amplified by her access to more substances. The staff in the new lab was also doubled, and the number of trainees was also increased. Our streamlined software is accessible wherever and whenever you . Yet Dookhan's brazen crimes went undetected for ages. She had been accused of intentional infliction of emotional distress in addition to the conspiracy to violate [Penates] civil rights.. We couldn't do it without you. After serving just a year of her 18 month sentence, Farak was released from prison in 2015. 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. Between 2005 and 2013, Sonja Farak was performing laboratory tests at a state drug lab in Amherst while under the influence of narcotics. Since then, she has kept a low profile. denied Penates motion to dismiss the case, saying there was no evidence that Faraks misconduct extended to his case. To better estimate how many convictions will have to be reviewed because of Farak, the Supreme Judicial Court Farak's reports were central to thousands of cases, and the fact that she ran analyses while high and regularly dipped into "urge-ful" samples casts doubt on thousands of convictions. | Joseph . Foster consulted Kaczmarek about the files contents, according to an 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. On a Friday afternoon in January 2013, a call came in to Coakley's office: "We have another Annie Dookhan out west.". Coakley's office finally launched a criminal investigation in July 2012, more than a year after the infraction was discovered by Dookhan's supervisors. 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. In 2009, Farak branched out to the lab's amphetamine, phentermine, and cocaine standards. At this point, Farakunlike Dookhandidn't admit anything. Obviously, after a blunder of such scale, no one would want their samples checked from the same lab. 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. 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. "It was Defendant who had the responsibility within the AGO [attorney general's office] to see that the Farak investigation materials were disseminated to the DAOs [district attorneys' offices]," Robertson wrote, adding there is no evidence anyone from the attorney general's office sent the potentially exculpatory evidence to those offices.". 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. "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. Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters, Sonja Farak is the subject of Netflix's "How To Fix a Drug Scandal. Penate was convicted in December 2013 and sentenced to serve five to seven years. According to a Rolling Stone piece on Farak, she struggled with depression from an early age, one that hasnt responded to medication. They wrote that Farak attempted suicide in high school and was also hospitalized while in college. 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. "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.". This is merely a fishing expedition, Foster wrote in ", But another co-worker was suspicious, particularly since he "never saw Dookhan in front of a microscope.". A scandal erupts, raising questions for the thousands of defendants in her cases. Episode 1. 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. Deval Patrick's office didn't learn about the protocol breach until December 2011. Farak. Foster's first stepper ethical obligations and office protocolshould have been to look through the evidence to see what had already been handed over. 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. READ NEXT: Netflixs How to Fix a Drug Scandal Story: 5 Fast Facts, Sonja Farak: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Please review our privacy policy here: https://heavy.com/privacy-policy/, Copyright 2023 Heavy, Inc. All rights reserved. That motion was denied, and the notice letters will explain Farak's tampering without any mention of prosecutorial misconduct. When she got married, it turned out that her wife, too, suffered from her own demons, and their collective anguish made Sonja desperate for a reprieve from this life. It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email. Democratic Gov. 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. Support GBH. Sonja Farak worked as a chemist for the state of Massachusetts, specializing in identifying illegal substances. (Belchertown, MA, 01/22/13) Sonja Farak, 35, of Northampton, is arraigned in Eastern Hampshire District Court in Belchertown on charges that she stole cocaine and heroin while working as a. As a teenager, she had attempted suicide. Accessibility | Grand Jury Transcript - Sonja Farak - September 16, 2015. Ryan then filed a To multiple courts' amazement, her incessant drug use never caught the attention of her co-workers. 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. You have been subscribed to WBUR Today. Privacy Policy | After high school, Sonja went on to major in biochemistry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in western Massachusetts. She was sentenced to 18 months in jail plus five years of probation. 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. On top of that, it was also ensured that no analyst would ever work without supervision. Maybe it's not a matter of checklists or reminders that prosecutors have to keep their eyes open for improprieties. Sonja Farak pleaded guilty to stealing samples of drugs from an Amherst drug lab. When the Farak scandal erupted, that misconduct came into view. Scalia may as well have been describing Dookhan. 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. Even as they filed numerous motions for information about how long Farak had been using drugs, the defense attorneys had no idea these worksheets existed. She later called this dismissive exchange a "plea to God.". "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. 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. Inwardly though, Sonja was struggling. Verner's "marching orders," he later testified, were to prosecute Farak with "what was in front of us, the car, things that were readily apparent. The story of the intertwining Farak and Penate evidence began in January 2013, when state police arrested Farak and searched her car. Poetically, that landmark case originated from the Hinton lab, although Dookhan didn't conduct the analysis in question. "Dookhan's consistently high testing volumes should have been a clear indication that a more thorough analysis and review of her work was needed," an internal review found. He didn't buy her quibbling that there's a difference between an explicit lie and obfuscation by grammar. Shawn Musgrave 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. 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. But she insisted the drugs didn't compromise her worka belief that one judge would aptly declare "belies logic.". Introduction. Verner, who testified that he didn't "micromanage" Kaczmarek, escaped criticism. From the April 2023 issue, Billy Binion Sonja Farak, a state forensic chemist in western Massachusetts, was minutes away from testifying in a drug case in early 2013 when attorneys learned she was about to be arrested on charges of. Heres what you need to know about Sonja Farak: Farak was born on January 13, 1978, in Rhode Island to Stanley and Linda Farak. And so, when she pleaded guilty in January 2014, Farak got what one attorney called "de facto immunity." 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. She recovered, made it through college and got a job as a chemist at the Amherst Crime Lab, where she tested confiscated drugs. Penate argued the court should follow those findings. It's not as bad as Dookhan, they asserted and implied over and over. She started doing drugs almost as soon as she took the job at Amherst, but it was after years of negligence on her superiors part that her actions finally came to light. 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. Why did she do that and where has it left her? Finding that there did not appear to be enough slides in Dookhan's discard pile to match her numbers, the colleague brought his concerns to an outside attorney, who advised he should be careful making "accusations about a young woman's career," he later told state police. Kaczmarek had obtained the evidence at issue while she was prosecuting Farak on state charges of tampering with evidence and drug possession. There is no allegation of misconduct against the local prosecutors who presented the case against Penate in Hampden County Superior Court. And then the bigger investigation was going to be someone else.". It didnt matter whether or not she was the one who did the testing or some other chemist. 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. The scandal led. Farak as a young. 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. 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. That settlement awaits approval by a judge. Months after Farak pleaded guilty in January 2014, Ryan filed a Ryan finally viewed the file in the attorney generals offices in October 2014. A Powerful EHR to Manage a Thriving Practice. The number is 888-999-2881. mentioned a New England Patriots game on Saturday, Dec. 24 which corresponded with a game date in 2011. 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. 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 criminal prosecution wasn't the only investigation of the Dookhan scandal.
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