01x02 - Episode 2

[bunniefuu]

[horns blaring]

These are the criminal files.

This is a vault,

where we keep any contraband drugs.

For instance, this is, uh,

68 grams of cocaine,

seized in a, um an arrest 14 years ago.

Thousand grams of heroin.

And we have a control number that the, um,

State Police and the analysts use,

and it goes into a clear plastic bag

and it's heat-sealed.

This is, uh, 2,360 bags of heroin.

Close to a kilo of cocaine.

It was analyzed by Sonja Farak.

This is assigned by Sonja Farak.

Cocaine, analyzed by Miss Farak.

Here's another one, Miss Farak.

All these are from 2004 to 2012

when, uh, Sonja Farak was an analyst here.

[heavy rainfall]

[distant siren wailing]

[reporter 1] A Hampshire County chemist

accused of tampering with drug evidence

pleaded not guilty

at her arraignment today.

[reporter 2]

Thirty-five-year-old Sonja Farak

was arrested on two counts

of evidence tampering

and two counts of drug possession.

[man] If you post the bail,

you're released on a series of conditions.

- Mm-hm.

- You report to probation once a week.

You'll be tested for being drug-free.

[Linda Farak] After posting bail,

they said that I could drive around

to the side door to pick her up.

And, you know, a couple of officers

brought her out to the car,

and the reporters that were around

[woman] Sonja, can you say anything

to your co-workers?

[man] Are you embarrassed at all?

[Linda] I mean, they were

completely blocking everything.

And I just told them. I said,

"Get out of my way or you're gettin' hit."

And that's when we realized

it was gonna be

a little bit more involved.

[sighs] It just

It just wasn't something

we were ready for, I guess.

[Luke Ryan] When I was in law school,

it was the only thing I knew I did not

wanna do, was do criminal defense.

- [interviewer] Really?

- Yeah.

- [interviewer] What happened?

- [Luke] I think what I realized is that

the search for the truth

that happens in criminal cases

on the prosecution side

is a search for a truth

for a very narrow period of time,

and that they want to know

what happened

in the exact moment

that a crime was committed,

and they really don't care at all

about what happened to defendants

up to that moment

that, uh, caused them to be in that

position where they made those choices.

And I realized that the work

of a criminal defense attorney

often is about the ways

in which systems fail people

and create environments

where these, uh, choices end up happening.

So, I think because

that's a truth that is unpopular

and people don't like to hear about it,

I was just drawn to it as a way to, um

you know, do something

that I thought was worthwhile.

How's your dad doing?

- Good.

- He still working at Squire's?

- Yep.

- Yep.

Tell him Luke Ryan said hi, all right?

- [boy] Oh, no!

- [laughter]

[Jared Olanoff] I've known Luke for years,

and I knew him to be a fighter.

- Oh! Oh!

- [girl] So good!

- Oh, my God!

- Aaaah!

- [laughter]

- We won!

[Jared] And Luke and I felt the same way.

We both believed that Sonja Farak

must have been tampering

with drugs for years.

I think it was our common sense

that told us that.

Because, usually,

you don't just start with an addiction

when you're 30-some odd years old.

And Luke, he had

the same goals that I did.

That is, you know,

it's our burden to prove something here,

and we've got to do it.

We're trying to prove

that these defendants'

drug convictions should be thrown out.

[Madelyn Vasquez] Rafael

I think he started using drugs

when he was 14.

He was young.

I hid it from my kids

because I didn't want them to

to see that he had that problem.

I wanted them to see,

like, the superhero dad.

Um

And they didn't learn about it

till he was in jail.

[murmur of voices]

And he called me from jail

and he said, you know,

Sonja Farak did his evidence.

Then he said, "Call my lawyer.

Call Luke Ryan."

[birdsong]

[Luke] If the government wants

to convict a defendant,

then the government and all of its actors

have to be above reproach.

They have to exemplify

the law-abiding behavior

they demand from all of us

and they've gotta prove it.

They have to prove every element

of every offense that they charge

for which they want to find

somebody criminally responsible.

You know, if you think about

what's going on in the big picture

with drug cases,

you have people whose liberty

is being taken from them

and they're in court

and the process can't go forward

until somebody at the lab says,

"Yep. That's heroin,"

or "Yeah. That's cocaine,"

or "Yeah. That's marijuana."

So, Sonja Farak was the chemist

in Rafael Rodriguez's case back in 2010.

And after Farak's arrest,

I filed a motion for a new trial.

And Rafael got a stay of his sentence.

[clanking]

So he got released on bail

only while the case

against Farak was pending.

- [Robin Whitney] What time did you get in?

- [Sonja Farak] Uh, 6:30-ish.

[Robin] Okay, and what was your purpose

of being there that early?

[Luke] The investigation

kind of shed a light

on a systemic problem at the Amherst lab.

The chemists perpetually had a backlog

and were perpetually fighting to

to keep up.

Springfield is another

of these former industrial towns

that has pretty significant poverty

and a population susceptible

to drugs like heroin,

crack cocaine and methamphetamine.

And so, Springfield functions

as a kind of Western Massachusetts capital

of ill*gal distribution.

[Luke] The journey of a bag of heroin

would begin at its point of harvest,

the poppy fields of Afghanistan.

It gets manufactured locally,

transported to our borders,

smuggled in,

and ends up at a distribution center,

someplace like New York City.

Uh, when it arrives there,

it will receive a distinctive brand name,

so you know you've got "Sunshine" heroin.

From there,

it will make its way up Route 95,

then end up on Route 91 through Hartford

and often to a place like Springfield.

When it ends up there,

it's usually gonna

be given to local dealers.

Local dealers will then sell it,

either to smaller dealers or to users.

And then, if that person is busted,

that bag will end up

in a cruiser with the police.

It goes to the station

[Daniel Marx] At the police station,

it's typically taken

to a kind of evidence control locker.

We don't know at that point

whether it's drugs or not.

And it ends up in a lab.

In the lab, it's supposed

to be kept under lock and key.

Uh, some chemist is assigned to it.

It's supposed to be taken out.

It's supposed to be tested.

All this is supposed

to be very well controlled

and documented, um

And then at that point,

once there's a result, um,

a certification is produced.

A document is produced saying,

"This substance which was taken out

of that guy's pocket

on that street corner

in Springfield is heroin."

Or "It's cocaine."

[Luke] And the chemists,

they're under enormous pressure

to churn out these certificates,

and the prosecutors are calling them up

saying, "Hey, we've got this case.

I'm getting hell from the judge.

The defense attorney's in court,

jumpin' up and down.

He wants his bail lowered. When

am I gonna get a drug cert for this case?"

And so that's the kind of pressure

that the analysts are under,

and it becomes a factory-type mentality.

And nobody, I think, really wanted to

to take and professionalize

the drug testing.

They were really content to see

how cheaply it could be done

and how many samples they could churn out.

[Paul] There's no cameras in the lab,

and there was no

even routine weekly inventory

of the drugs.

So whoever wants to help themselves

can open the drug fridge and get high.

And that was Sonja in early 2005.

She is getting high

with liquid methamphetamine

several times a day.

So, this bottle of liquid meth

was big enough

and bountiful enough

to get her through 2009.

And then in 2009,

her boss, Jim Hanchett,

does a perfunctory audit.

the first that anybody's done

at Amherst in many years.

And he announces

that he's going to be doing a roundup

of all the standards in the lab,

and Sonja begins to panic, um

not just at being discovered,

but being arrested and going to prison.

I knew that the level

had gone down dramatically

because of what I had taken,

and so in my haste,

I added some water to it.

Well, oil and water don't mix very well,

so it separated.

[Paul] So Hanchett opens the fridge.

He finds this bottle.

Due to the age of the sample,

he assumed that it was just breaking down

and so he got rid of it.

[Paul] Sonja was someone

who desperately needed

something more

than what her life presented.

She was an anonymous person

doing this anonymous function

in an industry that no one cares about.

[Sonja] I started looking around

at the different standards,

hoping that there might be something

that I could take to help me.

And getting high had become

the way to reward herself.

[Sonja] I found that we had

a big jar of amphetamine.

And the amphetamine made me feel better,

and had the desired effects.

[distorted audio]

[Heather Harris]

I don't think Sonja was a bad chemist.

You know, I think that

a lot of her actions were questionable,

but she seemed to show up every day

and do her job and do her job well.

I am not an expert on addiction,

but I don't think that being on drugs

makes you stupid automatically.

Particularly stimulants,

you know, amphetamines and the like,

which are really

somewhat performance-enhancing.

Uh, I I'm not condoning

a drug chemist being on drugs

while they do their casework,

but I don't think it necessarily implies

that she was incapable.

I mean, she's not Annie Dookhan.

She's not falsifying data.

[Scott Allen] In Massachusetts,

there were two main drug labs

that were run by the State.

One out in Western Massachusetts,

and the other lab in Boston.

And they geographically handle

tens of thousands of cases, west and east.

So the Hinton drug lab handled

thousands of cases a year.

And Annie Dookhan was the key person

in one of the biggest

miscarriages of justice

in the history of Massachusetts.

But she was not a famous person,

and she's not somebody

who strove to be publicly known,

but she was a first-generation American

and, I mean,

like many children of immigrants,

they feel that they've got

to try harder to get ahead.

And so she was very much a a striver.

[crowd cheering]

In high school, at Boston Latin Academy,

she was hardworking, she was athletic,

she was a track star,

and she was, you know, a solid citizen.

And by all accounts,

she was a model employee

inside of the Hinton drug lab in Boston.

At a place that few people

had given any thought to

prior to this enormous scandal.

The Hinton lab, it's big. It's giant.

It's got, like,

17 different sub-labs within it,

doing everything from testing HIV

to testing drug samples.

They're processing thousands of cases

for police departments around the state.

It's one of the biggest labs, uh, in

in Massachusetts that tests drug samples.

And Annie Dookhan is

the superwoman of the Hinton lab.

She does more cases than anybody.

She's operating at an incredible rate,

just churning through samples.

So, if the Hinton lab wanted

to point to one of its star employees,

it was Annie Dookhan.

She sets herself apart by virtue

of her extremely high level of output.

Annie was showing up at break of dawn

and was the last one

to turn out the lights

every night at work.

[Scott] And she was quite popular

with the managers

because she was very productive

and they felt like

they were badly overworked

because the w*r on Drugs

had become so large.

And she moved things

through the system really, really quickly.

So she was a prized employee,

and she was sometimes envied

by the other drug chemists

because she did

such a huge volume of work.

[James Connolly] So the first time I heard

about Annie Dookhan was in 2012.

One of the evidence techs

discovered a discrepancy.

They were concerned about

the volume of cases Annie was producing.

Probably four times the average chemist.

They couldn't understand

how she could possibly do that.

But her supervisor explained to us

that there was no longer an issue.

It was something

that they took care of internally.

But they didn't speak

to any of the chemists.

They really didn't do

any kind of investigation

as to why her cases are so high.

If I was running a crime lab

and I had someone that was doing work

four times more than someone else,

I'd bring her in and say,

"Show me how you do this,

'cause I wanna teach everybody else."

And we found out that the chemists

had been complaining

about Dookhan for years,

saying that she wasn't

balancing her scales,

she wasn't performing her quality checks.

So the supervisors were told

"Something's wrong here,"

and they failed to act.

So I asked for an investigation.

We needed to find out what had happened.

We had spoken to several of the chemists,

but we needed to hear from Dookhan.

Some officers met with her at her house.

She agreed to speak to them.

They asked her about the complaints,

and they asked how

could she do so many cases.

I think Annie liked to feel

like the go-to person.

You know, the DAs would call her directly.

She got things done.

So, everybody assumed

that she was doing the right thing.

But she broke down and cried

and confessed

to everything that she had done.

So, the detective called me,

after he spoke to Annie,

and I knew that, uh, we were gonna

have to shut that lab down.

[reporter] Stay with us. Coming up,

the Massachusetts State Police

are now detailing the possible extent

of damage at a now-closed state crime lab.

I'm Deborah Becker.

I am a reporter

for WBUR public radio station in Boston.

this is Radio Boston

I covered the Annie Dookhan story

and the Sonja Farak story

pretty aggressively.

I remember when the story first broke,

they said a chemist at the lab

had mishandled some drug evidence,

and they were closing the lab.

And so as we're gathering

all of this information,

the picture of Annie Dookhan

that emerged was a very hardworking,

ambitious young woman

who wanted to succeed in chemistry.

And she thought that she would do so

by working for the state in this lab.

[Paul] She was diligent

and incredibly hardworking.

She was also,

almost from the beginning

of her tenure at the Hinton crime lab,

doing something called dry-labbing.

Dry-labbing, where she didn't test at all.

She would look at something

and say that it was the drug,

heroin, cocaine, whatever.

But she didn't really test it.

[Heather] So what Annie Dookhan was doing

was gathering, say, 13, 15 cases

that all looked

to be the same type of evidence.

So, maybe they all looked to be cocaine.

She's taking these cases out for analysis

all at one time,

and maybe only one of them is actually

going through the testing process

and then she's just applying those results

to the other untested cases.

[Scott] It saves a lot of time.

You can do a lot more volume that way.

But sugar can look a lot like cocaine

and and there's a reason

that you do the tests.

[Deborah] So, after her arrest,

we get this data and it showed us

classifications going on

that, uh, weren't completely accurate.

For example, he finds that Annie Dookhan

certifies a substance

as being an ill*gal substance

when that substance was,

in fact, sodium chloride.

Table salt.

[Paul] She was faking. She was cheating,

and doing no actual chemical testing

of the substance.

Um, not putting it under a microscope,

not putting it through a spectrometer.

She was simply signing off

and getting these cases out the door.

So, we start thinking,

was she part of a bigger problem?

Was it a lab problem?

Was it a prosecutorial problem?

I mean, nobody knew at that point.

The story really came out piecemeal.

First it was "This lab is closing."

Then it was "This chemist is a problem."

And then we realized

she had been there nine years,

and it got bigger and bigger.

[reporter 1] A major breach could have

jeopardized thousands of drug cases,

all allegedly because

of this chemist, Annie Dookhan.

[reporter 2] Annie Dookhan has been coming

and going all morning from her home.

Her family made it very clear they're

not happy with the media attention.

They put up a "No Trespassing" sign.

But if the allegations

against her prove true,

she'll have a lot more

to worry about than TV cameras.

Do you have anything to say at all

about the allegations?

- No.

- Can you tell us what happened?

[woman] There's simply no good answer.

The fact is the chemist

violated the public trust.

[reporter 2] More personnel fallout

at the drug lab

[Deborah] The head of

the Department of Public Health resigned.

Then she's arrested.

- Talk to us.

- Get off the property.

Why did she do it?

- Leave.

- Why did she do it?

- How are you doing?

- What did she say?

How are you doing?

[shutters clicking]

[Martha Coakley] Good afternoon.

Today's arrest is one step further towards

making sure that there is accountability

for this corruption of the system.

[Deborah] So, the Attorney General speaks

about the arrest of Annie Dookhan

And as this investigation is ongoing

and says that she really compromised

the integrity

of the entire criminal justice system.

Miss Dookhan,

is there anything you want to say?

[Deborah]

That Annie Dookhan was this rogue actor

who wanted to test

as many samples as possible.

[woman] This is a terrible black mark

for people that are in

the criminal justice system.

No one wants anyone to be in jail, uh

because of something

that went wrong in a testing procedure.

[Deborah] There were a lot of defendants

who were very concerned about this.

First and foremost,

people who were incarcerated

for drug tests that had been

handled by Annie Dookhan.

[man] My perception was anything

that she touched should be tossed out.

[reporter] State police have now notified

district attorneys and defense lawyers

that the chemist was involved

in testing thousands

[man] I was a prosecutor,

Assistant District Attorney.

I started off in the District Court level

and then I moved to the Superior Court

level, prosecuting, uh, felonies.

I got promoted into the drug unit.

At first, it was very stressful.

You handle probably 40, 50 cases a day,

and all these cases

were submitted for lab analysis

in one lab at the time.

Thousands of cases,

all going back to the Hinton drug lab.

But I was a big government believer.

I felt like I was wearing the white hat.

And there was a letter

that was sent to the DA,

and that letter was

immediately forwarded to us.

And it said there were issues

in the drug lab

and that Annie Dookhan had participated in

misconduct in the lab in testing issues.

And one of them was a case that I handled.

So, the first thing that I did

was call the defense attorney

that we handled the case together.

And I said,

"We have to go back into court."

Ethically and constitutionally

at this point,

we feel that it is

in the best interests of justice,

that this defendant be released,

uh until

"We have to make sure

that this is corrected."

Motion to vacate the guilty plea

has been allowed.

[reporter] The Superior Court judge

vacated a guilty plea

of alleged drug dealer David Danielli,

all because the evidence in the case was

handled by rogue chemist Annie Dookhan.

[man] Everyone who's been convicted

of a crime related to drugs

in Suffolk and Norfolk counties

in the last five to six years

is possibly the victim of

a very substantial miscarriage of justice.

[reporter] Formerly convicted drug dealer

David Danielli rushes off to a waiting car

moments after he's set free.

Family members say it's only fair.

Well, if the Constitution

isn't upheld for one of us,

the Constitution

is not upheld for anybody.

Well, we know at this point that

the letters that were initially sent

And it really shook the foundation of

what I believed to be true in the system.

It gave me a heightened sense of worry

because what she had done

affected so many people.

[interviewer] When did you first hear

the name Annie Dookhan? Where were you?

More likely than not,

I don't have a specific memory,

but more likely than not,

I was in my office

and I received a phone call

from the Massachusetts State Police.

I was

the Suffolk County District Attorney,

which is the city of Boston, primarily,

- and three small cities north of Boston.

- [siren wailing]

It's the most densely-populated county,

uh, in our state.

When we initially got word of the breach,

it had serious implications

for our past work.

There was a real question

as to whether or not

these convictions had integrity.

And if they did not,

then we were gonna either have

to re-litigate them or dismiss them.

So, we first cross-checked everybody

who was actually in custody.

They were either serving

a prison sentence,

a house of corrections sentence,

or awaiting trial based on her work.

And we looked to get those individuals

before the court

and got them out of custody.

[man] The latest in

the Massachusetts drug lab scandal.

More cases are headed to court tomorrow.

That's right. Prisoners are asking

to be released from jail.

[Scott] The idea of a crime wave

is a scary thing,

and that you're doing it

by opening the prison doors

and turning out hardened criminals.

The reality of what really did happen

wasn't quite like that.

The vast majority of the people

who were convicted

with Annie Dookhan evidence

were people that were, shall we say,

familiar to the justice system.

They were either habitual drug users

or drug distributors

of one kind or another.

And so, a lot of them

when they got back out,

they may have gone back to drugs,

but they didn't turn to violence.

So it became this

just incredibly large case

with thousands of, uh, convictions

and guilty verdicts being questioned

because of what Annie did.

[Deborah]

The state called her a rogue chemist.

Many people thought

that it was, sort of, her problem

more than anything else.

But, uh, there were clearly

other problems going on here

in the criminal justice system.

[Scott] Early on in the reporting process,

my colleague Andrea obtained

all of the email correspondence

from Annie to others and back to her.

And when we started to read through

what she was saying to people

and how she conducted herself,

we realized it was a much bigger story

than just one person's incompetence

or one person's bad behavior.

The emails told us

that Annie did not view herself

as a neutral party.

She viewed herself as part

of the law enforcement team.

She identified with the prosecutors.

She identified with the police.

She didn't see herself

as a neutral arbiter of the evidence.

In fact, when she was contacted

by defense attorneys

representing the accused,

she would always check

with the prosecutors or the police

as to how she should converse with them.

[Daniel] The email exchanges

between Annie Dookhan and the ADAs

about cases and about defendants

certainly puts the lie to the argument

that people who work in drug labs,

they're not they're not soldiers in

the drug w*r, they're just scientists.

But that's not the impression you get

from Annie Dookhan's emails.

I think she saw herself

as very much on the team

and very much supporting the prosecution

that was going on in court.

[Heather] We cannot get away from the fact

that the product of the crime lab

is a report and testimony,

and that product is being used

by the prosecution.

No prosecutor should be seeking me out

to specifically work on a case.

No prosecutor should be

feeding me information about a defendant,

explaining to me why it's so important

they get the result that they're seeking.

I know what result the prosecutor wants.

They need a controlled substance,

and if I don't deliver

a controlled substance,

I'm not useful to them.

That's understood.

[Scott] As time went on,

we got a pretty complete picture

of what was really happening.

And we began to see in the emails

that there was something sicker

and darker going on there,

and that would include embellishing

her professional achievements.

She claimed to be going

to Harvard night school

and getting an advanced degree,

and she repeated it so often

that the people in the lab believed it

and had a celebration congratulating her

on her advanced degree

when there was no advanced degree.

She wasn't doing anything of the kind.

So, she was willing to lie

if she could get away with it

and have people think more of her.

That seemed to be what she fed on,

was getting approval from other people.

And we certainly saw that she was close

with one particular prosecutor.

[George] I was getting phone calls

from defense attorneys,

indicating that, um, reporters

were sneaking around the courthouses

and asking about, "Hey,

did you hear about George and Annie?"

Questions started being asked,

intimating that I had an affair with her.

And I was like,

"Where the f*ck is this thing going?"

[notification chime]

[Scott] "Hi, Annie, surprise,

another case in Federal Court.

There are four more with your name

for January and February.

We've all decided

that you need a boyfriend.

You work too hard. What!

It's been three months since the divorce.

I called Julie and Betsy to find out

your schedule for next week

and we had a long conversation.

As for your schedule, they laughed."

And it's from a person

named Susanne Sullivan,

and it's addressed to Annie Khan.

That's Annie Dookhan's maiden name.

So, this is a forgery.

This is an email

that Annie Dookhan created herself

to give the impression of two things.

One, that she was divorced, right?

"Three months since the divorce."

And two, that she's highly desirable

and her co-workers think

that she needs a boyfriend.

So she makes this fraudulent document

from a person named Susanne Sullivan,

who's an attorney.

But the name is misspelled.

S-U-S-A-N-N-E should be S-U-Z-A-N-N-E.

And forwards it to George Papachristos,

the object of her affection,

so that he'll see,

one, that she's divorced,

and two, that her friends all think

she's wildly desirable

and should have a boyfriend.

But it's all fabricated, just like

her Harvard degree was fabricated,

just like a lot

of other things in her life

were just fantasy and not real.

And then she's, like, so wonderfully

sincere, she writes back to Sue.

[Scott reads email]

[George] I was hoping that people

would see that email and see that

she was that

that she had an issue.

That's where I was hoping

the story would have gone

because, "Hey, guys,

we're dealing with somebody

that is writing fake emails, right?

Why are we talking about me?"

[Scott] So, Annie forwarded this email

saying that she was divorced

when she's not.

But she's writing to him

in this sort of flirtatious way

where she's admitting to him

that she's unhappy in her marriage

and she's telling him personal things

about herself

and encouraging him

to be very personal back to her.

It's just very clear that she's trying

to draw closer to this guy.

But it's an inappropriate relationship,

because she's not supposed

to be conversing socially

with prosecutors at all.

[interviewer] What role does a chemist

play in a prosecutor's day-to-day work?

Well, normally very minimal.

I didn't work directly with the lab.

The cases were assigned

randomly through the office.

We didn't know who the chemists were.

And most of the cases plead out,

so 80% of the time,

you normally don't have any contact

with the chemists, as a prosecutor.

I would say we were friendly.

I mean, friendly through email.

I mean, I met I met this woman once,

under under, you know,

circumstances that were monitored.

But then our emails circulated

and they landed in the news.

It was kind of insane to me.

And the problem with those emails

was that they were put in the news

after it was discovered

what Miss Dookhan was doing.

So, without further explanation,

it seemed that I had knowledge

of what she was up to in that lab.

[reporter] Is there any more to this

relationship than just email exchanges

between prosecutor and the chemist

at the heart of all of this?

Being in the news

and being talked about like that

He work from

And my family was in the news.

eight o'clock in the morning

to ten o'clock at night,

even on the weekends.

I just didn't know what to do.

I had lost my sense of reality.

Everything that I'd come to know

as real and what I held

I was, uh

I realized that it was gonna be

way more than I could handle.

I put in my resignation.

Being a prosecutor, that was my dream job.

I really loved it. I really enjoyed it.

That was the life I wanted.

But I couldn't imagine going back to it.

I never anticipated

becoming a defense attorney,

but that's who I am.

So now it's a totally

different experience,

and coming into a courtroom,

defending somebody,

is one of the most powerless experiences

that you can feel.

You walk into a courtroom,

you're not the prosecutor anymore.

You are coming in and you're taking on

the accusation yourself.

And it's a totally, totally uh

uh humbling experience.

[Luke] So, Sonja Farak had been

arrested in January,

and now we're in March,

and so I thought,

"We're just gonna go through

and have a similar process

to what took place in the Boston area

with the Dookhan litigation

and the discovery."

And I assumed that

the AG's office

is gonna throw the book at Farak,

they're gonna investigate

the piss out of this lab,

and they're gonna want to find

everything wrong that Sonja Farak did

and gonna want to hold her

totally accountable.

[Jared] The Attorney General was tasked

with figuring out what Farak had done

and which cases might be affected.

So, Luke and I,

we felt that any conviction

where she produced evidence that led

to that conviction should be thrown out.

So, I was expecting the AG's office

to go charging away at Sonja Farak

and that would help our clients,

because defendants have an absolute right

to get access

to any potentially exculpatory evidence.

There's a constitutional rule

that as a criminal defendant,

you're entitled to have the government

share with you all exculpatory evidence.

[Luke] Exculpatory evidence

could be forensic evidence.

A third party's fingerprint

at a crime scene is exculpatory

if their theory is that the only person

who could have left the fingerprint

is the defendant.

Evidence that suggests

the person, uh, is guilty of the crime

but they were,

you know, heavily intoxicated,

then that's exculpatory.

[Daniel] That was later expanded

to include all evidence

that would tend to show

a jury shouldn't

really believe a police officer,

shouldn't believe the cooperator,

shouldn't believe a prosecution witness.

So, it creates a very broad set of rights

as a defendant to basically be told

if the government knows things

that tend to undermine

its own prosecution.

[Paul] Prosecutors have

this very strange conundrum,

because they're the parties

who get the evidence first from the cops.

Cops are charged with arresting

and then investigating crime,

and the person they send that evidence to

is the prosecutor's office.

So, the prosecutor

always gets the evidence first

and then decides

how much to share with the other side.

[Daniel] You're essentially asking,

in an incredibly intense

adversarial system,

one side share with the other guy

the stuff that may hurt your case

and may help him to win.

So, I mean, even the best of people,

even the best intentions

can easily go wrong

in a situation like that.

[interviewer] Do you think

it's difficult for people to self-police

and hand over material

that may hurt their own cases?

No, that's the oath

that you take as a prosecutor.

I mean, that's part of your job.

Somebody's got to be the gatekeeper.

I can only speak for my jurisdiction.

I mean, our prosecutors, they

they know, just give everything over.

I mean,

unless it's a very special exception

and then you litigate it with the judge

whether it should be turned over.

I think the most important thing

for prosecutors,

and I tell it to the new ones,

is "Just remember,

you have a lot of power,

so make sure that justice is done

and that the truth is discovered."

[Luke] One of the weird things

about the case that unfolded here

was the two different entities

that were prosecuting.

The Attorney General's Office

was prosecuting Sonja Farak,

but the Hampden County

District Attorney's Office

was prosecuting our clients.

And so that meant

anything in the Farak prosecution

that suggested Sonja Farak broke the law

would be exculpatory evidence

in our cases.

So, if it was bad for Farak,

it was good for us.

And I was hoping that we were going

to get stuff out of the Farak prosecution

that we could turn around and say,

"Samples have been compromised.

Our clients' rights have been violated.

Criminal charges against them

should be dismissed."

So, August 2013,

I get an email saying,

"Here's all of the evidence provided

by the Attorney General's Office."

The email said, "Here's all of

our evidence in the Farak investigation.

Here's everything that we have."

[Luke] And they sent this document dump.

There's thousands of pages.

The first 2,500 were

like, manuals

for the microscope at the lab,

operating instructions

for the spectrometer.

But the other things that I was

really expecting and wanting to see

um were were hinted at,

but were not disclosed.

So, we did get photographs

that were taken of her car.

The car was just a complete mess.

The trunk had so many things in it,

so many pieces of garbage.

Um, so many different papers

that the State Police spent hours

just taking papers out

of the back of her car

and trying to put them

in some sort of box.

[Luke] Then we get

a three-page police report

that itemized things that were taken

from Sonja Farak's car

when they ex*cuted the search warrant

the day after her arrest.

And so when they went to classify,

"Well, what was found

in Sonja Farak's trunk?"

they put, quote, "assorted lab paperwork."

There are these repeated references to

"assorted lab paperwork" that were found.

[Jared] But that's all they told us

is, you know,

uh, "Exhibit number X,

assorted lab paperwork."

And so we had to guess what that meant.

[Paul] And the State Police had delivered

to the Attorney General's Office

three cartons of what they call

"assorted lab paperwork."

It it just made it very, very clear

to me that I wanted to see

this "assorted lab paperwork."

[Paul]

So, in the Attorney General's Office,

there are 11 different departments,

and one of those departments

deals only with appeals

and subpoena motions.

Um, and the Attorney General's Office

assigned this young,

um, very inexperienced

Assistant Attorney General, Kris Foster.

[David] As I understood it,

she was a pretty green prosecutor.

She really,

uh, didn't have much experience.

And, uh, you know,

I just expected, uh, the A-team.

[interviewer] But it was the B-team?

Uh, I'd say the C-team.

[Luke] I write to Kris Foster,

who I learn has been

designated the point person

for the Attorney General's Office.

And I send her an email that said,

"Hey, Kris, I'm gonna need to see

all this evidence that was seized

and hasn't been disclosed.

So, can you help me

figure out a time and a place

to go and and view the evidence?"

[Jared] Luke asked me to email Kris Foster

and to say, "Look, you know, we'd

like to come and look at the evidence.

[Luke] And she wrote back,

uh, a couple of days later

and said that because this was

an ongoing prosecution of Sonja Farak,

that they would not permit me

to look at any of the evidence.

I think the email was something like,

"I've spoken to my superiors

and you're not going to be allowed

to look at the evidence."

And so the answer was a hard no.

Luke Ryan and several of his colleagues,

they begin to file motions

demanding to see the contents

of these three cartons.

I filed a motion to inspect the evidence.

[interviewer] What happens?

They hand over all the evidence, right?

They did not hand over all the evidence.

Kris Foster sent me the motion

to quash your subpoena.

"We don't wanna give you anything."

[typing]

I've been covering courts

for almost 15 years now,

and it's actually been my favorite beat

of all the many beats I've covered.

I like it because

I like to see how "justice"

in its amorphous, um, concept plays out.

And this is where the story

of Sonja Farak played out.

The small pieces of the larger picture

all happened in this courthouse.

[murmur of conversation]

[Paul] So, by late summer of 2013,

there are 15 or 16 defendants

who have filed motions

in Western Massachusetts.

And the state court system assigns

a magistrate named C. Jeffrey Kinder

to oversee this universe of cases.

[gavel taps]

Basically, Judge Kinder's task

was to decide

when Sonja Farak

started mishandling evidence.

And he was known

as a very straightforward judge, um

Didn't like a lot

of argument from lawyers.

[Jared] So, the main question

at the Kinder hearings

was to examine the scope

and timing of Sonja Farak's misconduct,

to find out how long

had tampering gone on.

How long she might have been using drugs.

So, we had to make sure that we had

all of the evidence in the case,

the exculpatory evidence.

[Buffy] Kris Foster was

sort of the star of that hearing

in that she actually got

Judge Kinder to be emotional,

and, um, that's really rare.

So, she just didn't want

to answer his questions

and he really wasn't used to that.

[Luke] Judge Kinder asked her,

"Tell me, in, you know, general terms,

what you haven't disclosed."

She tells the judge

that she can't really say

because she hasn't looked at the file.

And she said, "Judge,

this is just irrelevant evidence.

There's no smoking g*n.

Like, Attorney Ryan is

on a fishing expedition."

[Paul] And Kinder explodes at her

and says,

"What do you mean,

there's nothing relevant here?

I'll be the person who decides that.

Go back, examine the evidence,

and submit it to me."

So, Foster goes back

with her tail between her legs

to the office,

tells her superiors,

and then what she does is write a letter.

She wrote a letter to Judge

"Dear Judge Kinder,

After reviewing the files,

everything's been turned over."

"After carefully reviewing the file,

every document in it

has already been disclosed.

Therefore, there's nothing

for me to turn over."

And so Judge Kinder denied

my motion to inspect.

[Jared] And then Judge Kinder found

that tampering had only gone back

as far as the summer of 2012.

[Buffy] I was surprised.

You know, how can you say

she's fine before then,

she was a great worker, no problem,

and then decide she, like,

"went bad" at a certain date?

Kinder decides

that these criminal acts of Farak's

only go back to July of 2012.

And this meant that anybody

who had been convicted by Sonja Farak

before July 2012

had absolutely no recourse.

[Jared] The Judge Kinder decision meant

that anyone who had the substances

in their case tested by Sonja Farak

before the summer of 2012

were out of luck.

[Luke] Judge Kinder's decision meant

that I'd hit a dead end

and I wasn't gonna be able

to help my client.

I stood up and I said, "You know,

the Attorney General's Office

has not given us access to evidence.

It has attempted to minimize

and downplay,

uh, Sonja Farak's misconduct.

And they've demonstrated

a clear conflict of interest.

We have been forced

throughout this process

to accept that a person spent

nine and a half years as a chemist,

but only in her last six months on the job

developed a very serious drug addiction.

So this process has been tainted by that."

[Jared] Judge Kinder ordered everyone

who had their sentences stayed,

people who were out of jail,

he ordered them to report to court

to go back to state prison.

These people had gone back

to their families and their friends

and their kids

and they lived normal lives again.

And to tell them that they have

to go back in, it was extremely

um painful and harsh.

We'd gotten all these people out

and then they all had to go back in.

Say what you will

about people who commit drug crimes.

Say what you will about the w*r on Drugs.

These were good people.

They all have good hearts.

And when they went back in,

that was the hardest thing

I've ever had to be a part of in

as an attorney, or maybe in anything.

[Luke] I show up to watch Rafael Rodriguez

go back to jail and, um

that was heartbreaking.

Um

I mean, for him

to have to show up in court

and kiss his wife goodbye again

It was just a brutal thing

to watch happen.

He

I don't know, it's 'cause when they

when he came out on bail,

he was with us,

and then he had to go back.

Remember, he had to go back.

And it was hard for just letting him go,

it would be like, "Okay

He had to go back."

[Luke] It felt like a punch in the gut.

[door slams]

[Jorge Diaz] I was free.

And one day they say,

"Look, there's gonna be a hearing

and everybody gotta be there."

I feel like I was betrayed.

All you gotta do is look at her.

Just by the look of her,

you can tell that she was into drugs.

I think she was having this

for a long, long time back.

[Robin speaking]

[lawyer] Were there other standards

you tried like the amphetamine sample?

[Sonja] I mean,

at some point during that year,

I tried the cocaine standard

that was in the lab.

I was snorting that.

But we didn't have as much of it,

and we did go back to use that standard

because we got a fair number

of cocaine submissions to the lab.

So I really wasn't using much of it.

Is there any time during this period

that you moved beyond

the use of standards in the lab?

Yes, there was.

I tampered with

my first piece of evidence.

[Paul] Every Wednesday,

there were these big deliveries

from the biggest municipality

in Western Massachusetts, Springfield.

So Sonja, who was now hunting around

for a drug that would maintain her,

suddenly realizes

there's this 500 gram seizure

involving the US Postal Service

and pauses over it.

I was concerned with the cocaine standard

and the volume going down.

I had been assigned a sample

from the USPS, the postal service.

[Paul] And, in that moment, she reflects

that she's about

to overstep a very bright line.

[Sonja] That was

a large amount of cocaine,

and after I analyzed it,

I did take some off to the side

for personal use.

[lawyer] Did you testify in that case?

Yes, I did.

[lawyer] How do you remember

that case specifically?

[Sonja] I remember

due to the quantity of it.

I remember actually sitting in the stand

and looking at it and knowing

that I had analyzed the sample

and that I had tampered with it.

I remember it.

[lighter clicks]

[lighter clicks]