How to Fix a Drug Scandal (2020) s01e01 Episode Script

1
[woman speaking]
[audio fades out]
[audio fades in]
[trooper] Okay.
[speaking hesitantly]
- [trooper] Mm-hm.
- [Farak] Um
- [trooper] Mm-hm.
- [Farak] Um
[trooper] Mm-hm.
[trooper] Um
[man] At these drug labs,
a single chemist can do
a few dozen cases every day.
Hundreds of cases in a month.
It depends on what types
of samples they're analyzing,
how productive they are,
how easy the tests are.
There are a lot of variables to determine
how many cases a given chemist
can go through,
but no matter what, it's a lot.
Thousands of cases a year.
[man 2] People don't think an awful lot
about the drug labs.
I mean, it's sort of one of those
machinery-of-government kind of places
that you just assume
they're doing their job
unless you're told otherwise.
[woman] Thirty-five-year-old Sonja Farak
worked here at the Massachusetts
State Crime Lab in Amherst.
It's amazing to think about the impact,
the ripple effect
of a single person's act.
[Shawn] And it turns out it's not just
one, but two chemists in Massachusetts.
[woman] Chemist Annie Dookhan
mishandling evidence
[man] Essentially, what has happened
is 25 to 30,000 cases
have been dumped into our laps.
[man 3] This isn't just a scandal
about bad science.
It is a scandal about bad law.
Do you have anything to say
[man 3] I mean, if Dookhan had been
a little bit less brazen,
and if Farak had been
a little more careful,
no one would've ever known.
[siren wailing]
[man 4]
Massachusetts is a challenging place
to do criminal defense
and civil rights work.
You know, I think nationally,
we're known as
sort of this liberal outpost.
We produce the Kennedys of the world,
and John Kerry, and Mike Dukakis,
and so people think of it as,
you know, the bluest of blue states.
But when it comes
to criminal justice issues
[exhales] this is not
a progressive place.
You know, I think the story
of the drug lab scandals
Look, it's complicated,
because Eastern Mass and Western Mass,
they're really kind of
two separate worlds.
Different newspapers,
different media cycles,
different legal communities.
And so it wasn't really clear,
the extent to which
things had gone wrong in the labs.
And it took years to figure out
what really had happened.
[gavel bangs]
[man] I would like
to begin an investigation
into the facts and circumstances
of criminal misconduct
at the drug testing laboratory
located in Amherst.
Ma'am, can you please state your name
and spell your last name for the record?
My name is Sonja Farak.
And Farak is spelled F-A-R-A-K.
[man] And how old are you now?
I'm 37.
How long were you employed as a chemist
for the Department of Public Health
and later the Mass State Police,
how many years?
Just under ten years.
How many samples
did you test in that ten years?
Uh Approximately
30,000 different pieces of evidence.
[birdsong]
My name's James Connolly.
I was a homicide investigator
for 20 years,
and after that I was promoted to Major
and I went to the State Police Crime Lab.
I got a call, I think it was January 18th,
from Jim Hanchett.
He was the Amherst lab supervisor.
He called me and said
that the night before,
Sharon Salem, one of the chemists
who'd handle the evidence,
couldn't find two samples.
So we went out to see for ourselves
what had been done.
[trooper] Okay, and so, um
[James] They looked in the evidence locker
and temporary locker and didn't find them.
They went to Sonja's desk.
We opened one of the drawers
and there was a tub
and a piece of manila paper on it.
[trooper] Okay.
[James]
He found the cases in her work area.
The cases were done.
They were completed, they were sealed,
but they were both sliced open.
She had done the work weeks before that.
And initially when she ran it
through the computer,
both of them tested positive for cocaine.
He couldn't understand
why it was still at her desk.
The analysis had been completed.
Why is it still at her desk?
So he tested both cases
and both cases came up negative,
which looked to him
like she took the drugs
and replaced them with, uh, fake drugs.
When Jim Hanchett showed me
the fake drugs,
I called my colonel,
and then I called
the Hampshire District Attorney's Office
and asked them
to help us investigate this.
I was in a training in Central Mass,
and I got a call in the late morning
from a Major Jim Connolly.
Major Connolly was in charge
of the drug labs in Massachusetts.
I remember vividly him saying,
"We have a problem."
Drugs were found
at the desk of Sonja Farak,
a chemist who worked
at the Department of Public Health Lab
located at University of Mass.
They were missing
they were looking around for a file,
and it appears that she's been
tampering with some drugs.
I asked, "How long
has Sonja been working there?"
He said, "2004."
So the State Police unit that's attached
to my District Attorney's Office
was notified.
At that point, they focused on,
"Where is Sonja Farak?"
[David] She was down in Hampden County.
She was going to be testifying
in a Hampden Superior Court case.
So we sent a couple troopers down there
and they followed her, um
while she was at the court.
[woman] I was in Framingham when a call
came in from the drug lab in Amherst.
They were missing some evidence.
And they believed
they knew who might've taken it.
My name is Robin Whitney.
I retired from the State Police
as a Detective Lieutenant
in charge of the District Attorney's
Office in the Northwestern District.
Our goal at that point was
to try and locate Sonja Farak.
Sonja was in the courthouse,
waiting to testify on a drug case.
She went on a lunch break,
went to her motor vehicle.
She sat in her car.
Um
Maybe had lunch, we're not quite sure.
There was a thought that, you know,
"How do we know
that she's not dipping her head
to have clam chowder or drugs?"
You know, you you didn't know.
You couldn't tell.
So I follow her back to the courtroom
and I just, you know, introduce myself.
Said, "We'd like to have a conversation
with you." She agrees to that.
We advised her of her rights
[Robin] Okay.
and sat down and had a conversation.
She almost immediately
decided not to talk,
so she invoked, uh, her Fifth Amendment,
but they did get a search warrant
for her motor vehicle.
[phone ringing]
[woman] I got the original phone call,
like-- What was it?
Midnight, one o'clock in the morning,
you know.
Anytime you get a phone call
at that time of night, something's wrong.
But I had-- I just couldn't understand it.
I couldn't believe it.
I figured there had to be a mistake.
There had to be, 'cause not Sonja.
She didn't say too much on the phone,
basically that, uh she was arrested,
and that there were some drugs in the car.
[David] So the investigation started
here at our office,
but we knew that the scope of this
could be very large.
That this is a case
that our office would not handle
because it would be a direct conflict.
I mean, when you're investigating somebody
who's tampered with evidence,
and we have thousands of cases
that we've prosecuted,
that's a direct conflict.
So we had to get
the Attorney General's Office involved.
That's usually the agency that handles
conflicts with District Attorneys.
[woman] Good afternoon, everybody.
Massachusetts Attorney General
Martha Coakley,
uh, and with me is Colonel
of the State Police Timothy Alben.
In my 25 years as a prosecutor,
both State and Federal,
I have seen prosecutors, police,
even defense lawyers,
who have, in some way,
because of the lure of cocaine,
heroin, the addiction, the money,
fail in a way that has really required us
to develop systems
so that we can identify it
as soon as possible.
As a result of quick action
by the State Police and by our office,
uh, we have been able to bring charges
against Sonja Farak,
age 35, of Northampton.
She was arrested last night
and we have charged her
with two counts of tampering with evidence
and one count of possession
of a Class B substance, cocaine.
She'll be arraigned Tuesday morning
in Eastern Hampshire District Court.â™
[man] Now, uh
can you describe for the grand jurors
your duties and responsibilities
as a chemist at the drug laboratory?
[Sonja speaking]
[lawyer] Can you describe
what are controlled substances?
[Sonja] The most common one is heroin.
Cocaine, marijuana
different pills.
[interviewer] Why does no one know
what a bench chemist is?
[chuckles] Um
Well, I would think any chemist
would know what a bench chemist is.
This is not a term that's specific
to forensic chemistry by any means.
There's bench chemists
in all fields of chemistry.
I think the general public
doesn't know about,
you know, drug chemistry in particular
because it's not on the TV shows.
You're not gonna find a Forensic Files
or a CSI: Miami or whatever
that covers a drug case.
It doesn't make for compelling,
interesting stories.
So I don't think it gets the exposure.
[interviewer] So why are we here?
Well, sometimes it does.
[woman] In Massachusetts tonight,
a drug lab scandal is sending shock waves
through the state's
criminal justice system.
A State Police chemist is suspected
of altering drug samples,
faking test results,
and listing some drug samples as positive
even though she allegedly
never tested them.
[man] So, just six months before
the revelations about Sonja Farak,
the Annie Dookhan scandal
implicated tens of thousands of cases,
created an enormous stir in the press
Do you have anything to say at all
about the allegations? Can you tell us
and an enormous run
on the District Courts.
I've been covering the War on Drugs
for almost exactly 30 years now.
First started in 1988 in the fall,
writing a story called "Dead Boys"
about ten- and 12-year-old kids
selling their bodies
on the West Side Docks
for five-dollar crack rocks.
And nothing has changed in those 30 years
except the size of the population.
Annie Dookhan's alleged actions
corrupted the integrity
of the entire criminal justice system,
and there are many victims
as a result of this.
First, of course, are the defendants who,
when charged in a criminal justice system,
have the right to expect
that they will be given due process
and that there will be fair
and accurate information used
in any prosecution against them.
[man] It was very clear from the beginning
of the Annie Dookhan situation
that you had someone
essentially faking lab results.
Faking it in a way that is resulting
in people being wrongfully convicted.
Annie Dookhan created havoc
for at least six counties.
She may have compromised
thousands of cases
and she cost the State
millions of dollars.
[Daniel] The Farak scandal was different.
I don't think anyone had a sense of the
potential scale when this first started.
The State Attorney General's Office says
that Amherst lab worker Sonja Farak
Are you embarrassed?
allegedly removed
a substance from a case file
that tested positive for cocaine,
and replaced it with one
that did not test positive.
This whole area is private property
run by homeowners.
- Please leave the premises.
- Will you say anything to co-workers--
Just for you guys to please leave now.
Thank you.
[Daniel] When the scandal breaks,
how do you make a statement
that no one's been wrongfully convicted?
How do you know?
We believe, on the face of it,
that these allegations do not implicate
any system-wide practices
that would implicate the reliability
of drug certificates
[Paul] So, it was very clear
in Coakley's remarks,
in the Farak press conference,
that she and her office,
the Attorney General's Office,
were gonna do everything
in their power to limit the damage,
to limit the footprint
of this new scandal,
and to limit the scope to just two cases.
the arrest was made
on those two cases at this time, uh
[David] When you give a press conference,
you talk about what you know
and what you don't know.
So, you really can't say at that point
anything more than, "She was arrested.
There was paraphernalia found,
there was a little bit of drugs in the car
and there was drugs missing from the lab."
But as far as going
out on a limb on day one
and saying, "Hey,
this is what we've concluded"
These drugs were tested,
they were tested fairly
It's just not the way that you do it.
She did not have all the facts.
Nobody had all the facts,
and as soon as this happened,
there was always going to be
a question as to what was reliable,
what was unreliable at that lab.
And I give a lot of credit to Luke Ryan.
He really dug deep,
and the more that he looked at it,
the more he uncovered.
My name is Luke Ryan.
I'm a defense attorney
in Western Massachusetts.
The importance of the chemistry part
of a drug prosecution
cannot be overstated,
but it's the part of the drug case
that is the least sexy.
There are no snitches involved.
There are no cops doing
you know, breakin' down doors.
This is people in lab coats
looking in their microscopes,
and I think the presumption
people have is that, you know,
everything that they take off the street
is what it appears to be.
And so they think that, you know,
most defendants are guilty.
But when you talk about people
who have track records
and who have criminal records,
they are easily, in my experience,
the most vulnerable
to being wrongfully convicted.
And so, when Sonja Farak got arrested,
I knew that I had clients
with drug offenses
where she had done the testing.
So it seemed to me immediately,
"This is gonna be a big deal
for some of the people I represent."
Like Rafael Rodriguez.
[woman] When I was with Rafael,
I felt protected.
I felt like he protected me and my kids.
I don't know, just the times we spent,
we were always together
and we made the best of it.
- Here, he was always making us laugh.
- [laughter on video]
- [giggling]
- [snoring]
Always play-fighting,
like, on my mom's bed.
- That was the fun part.
- [Madelyn] Making the sandwich.
Yeah, we would
all just jump on top of each other.
[mumbles]
[girl] He was kind of more like a friend.
He was kind of like
He was kind of more like
a best friend than a dad.
[Madelyn] I worked,
so he was always with the kids.
You know, like, they would go to the park,
to anywhere, they were always out.
In the summer, they would go to here,
to the the public pool,
and they would be there.
And, um that's where the guy showed up.
He was an informant, he had an open case,
so if he had information on somebody
that had a criminal record,
he would set them up.
He kept on calling my husband
and he set him up.
It was cocaine.
At first, I felt really hurt,
because it was like
I always told him from the beginning,
"When you feel like you're gonna relapse,
let me know so I can help you.
You know, we can get help."
When he went to prison,
I told my kids, you know,
"He did something bad
and he's doing time."
I've never been an addict.
I-- I don't understand
what they go through,
or or what sets them
to to want to use drugs.
We would go visit, we would play dominoes
and just spend time with him.
[interviewer] What was it like to talk to
your friends about that? Or did you not?
I really didn't talk about it that much.
I have my few select friends
that I talk to about my dad.
Every crime has a set of elements,
things the government has to prove
in order to establish
that you're guilty of the crime.
It can be something as simple
as you're charged with drunk driving.
They need to prove
that you were driving on a public street.
You know, a guy takes a golf cart
and drives around the golf course.
Is that a public street or not?
So things that seem
like silly details in a case
actually become important.
In a drug case,
if you are prosecuted
and charged with selling a joint,
the question is, is that really marijuana?
If it's not, you're not guilty.
The government has to prove,
and prove beyond a reasonable doubt,
that the thing
they're accusing you of doing,
which is against the law,
you've actually done.
[Richard Nixon]
This nation faces a major crisis
in terms of the increasing use of drugs.
We have the laws now.
We're going to go out
and enforce those laws.
[man] Officers now do not need
a search warrant
to enter a home suspected
of containing illegal drugs.
[George HW Bush] This
This is crack cocaine.
It's as innocent-looking as candy.
But it's turning our cities
into battle zones.
[Daniel] If you're gonna fight
a war on drugs,
you need to build an entire system
designed around finding those people
who manufacture, ship, sell and use
the drugs you decide are illegal,
and then a system
to prosecute them and imprison them.
There are huge agencies at the local
level, the state level, the federal level.
It's everything from the police officers
to the prosecutors to the court officials
to the prison guards to the administrators
to the lab scientists.
There are billions of dollars
that flood into this system
to perpetuate this war on drugs,
which we've now been fighting
since the 1970s.
In order to convict someone
because of some substances
that we've decided are illegal,
you need a scientist
to look at that substance
and say, "Yes, this is cocaine,"
or "This is heroin," or
"This is marijuana," or not.
[man] Certain substances form
a distinctive crystal.
This is the crystal for heroin.
Here's the crystal for cocaine.
And that's an essential part of the case,
because if the government can't prove
that, then they can't convict anyone.
So, when you get
the evidence to your bench,
you will do
a preliminary description of the evidence.
You want to verify chain of custody,
uh, just making sure
that all the dates and times
and signatures and numbers match up
as you, uh, look
at the various paperwork and items.
You move on to take a weight,
the net weight, which is the weight
of the drug material only.
And then we will go through
a series of tests.
At that point,
we would do a spot color test.
Basically, we put a very small amount
of different reagents in some wells
in a ceramic plate, a drop or two of each,
and certain substances cause
certain color changes with their agents.
With other substances,
we would add some of the sample to a vial
and seal it to be run
on the mass spectrometer.
The mass spectrometer blasts ions
at the chemical,
which breaks the chemical
into kind of like a chemical fingerprint.
And so we can compare that fingerprint
to the fingerprint
of standards or controls.
When we're done,
we put it into a brand-new evidence bag,
and we would initial
and heat-seal it closed.
At that point, we would verify
that the results on the certificate
matched our results in the notebook
and we would sign the certificates.
[Daniel] A drug certificate is
the scientific record
that some independent scientist
looked under a microscope
or in a spectrometer
or used some other technology
to determine,
yes, in fact, what you had,
what you bought or sold
or had in your pocket,
was illegal drugs
of such and such a purity,
of such and such a weight.
But that raises the huge question
of whether or not that's truly
just an objective scientific process.
And as a criminal defendant,
you have a right
to confront your accusers.
And so, if I'm being prosecuted
for a drug crime,
the people in the drug labs,
the chemists who are doing this work,
are effectively my accusers.
They're the ones who are saying
I have heroin,
or cocaine or marijuana or meth.
[Heather] If I'm the person
who did that testing,
I'm the person who signed that report,
the defendant really should be
checking into my credibility.
It doesn't necessarily have anything to do
with the science of what I'm doing,
it has to do with me as a person
and the credibility of me,
and the idea being, I think,
if I don't seem credible,
maybe you should dig a little deeper
and look at the testing I conducted
and and so forth.
When Sonja was arrested,
my initial reaction was, "Wow."
There were a lot of clients
where she had actually tested
the drugs in those cases.
And because the Amherst drug lab
tested all of our drug cases,
and those are the only kinds
of cases, basically,
that I was doing at that point,
um, I-- I said, "Wow, there's gonna be
some work to do here."
The government doesn't have
to prove very much
to find you guilty of a drug offense.
They just have to prove
that you gave drugs to someone,
that you had drugs
either in your house or on your person,
and that the substance is,
in fact, a drug.
And so, if they can't,
then you're entitled
to be found not guilty.
You're entitled to be acquitted
of the drug crime.
So, I went through all my cases
looking for drug certificates,
those pieces of paper
that she had signed and said,
"I tested the drugs and they're drugs."
And people were in prison
based on drug certificates
signed by Sonja Farak.
And people were in court
being charged at that moment.
Jorge Diaz was one of the original
Farak defendants, as they're called.
[Jorge] I was about to be sentenced
And I say, "What do you mean?"
He say, "You see this drug certificate?
See who signed it there?"
I said, "Yeah, well, who's that?"
That's when he say, "Yeah, sit there.
Relax and watch me in action."
[lawyer] Now if you could just please
give me a little background information?
Where were you born?
I was born in San Diego, California.
I lived in San Diego for about a year.
And then my dad got transferred
to Newport, Rhode Island.
He worked in the navy.
I came up with a normal childhood.
You know, it was a middle-class family.
I was provided for in every way.
I wasn't abused.
And yet
[man 1] All right, sound speed.
- [man 2] Speeding.
- [man 1] Okay.
[woman] We moved to Rhode Island in the--
I was one or two,
so it was, you know, 1982,
and then we grew up there.
We were a military family,
but my dad retired,
so we weren't moving around.
It was great having an older sister.
We were a lot alike growing up.
It was Farak and little Farak
[laughs] a lot of times.
Our parents They were relatively strict.
Growing up, it was, you you figure
it out and you tough through it.
I always thought Sonja was quiet.
We were both tomboys,
both really active in sports.
[Linda] Sonja was never the type
to just sit still.
As a child, she was involved
in a lot of different activities.
[Amy] We had a little bit
of sibling rivalry, but in a good way.
Sometimes it was tough
'cause I always felt
she was better at school,
better at softball,
she was better at basketball,
she played football.
[Linda] She was the first girl
in the state of Rhode Island
to play high school football
in a public school system.
She had a full-page layout
from the local paper about it.
[man] I wasn't quite sure
what to expect in Portsmouth today.
We went out to visit Sonja Farak.
She is the first girl
to play high school football
in Rhode Island.
[yelling and cheering]
[Amy] She played through
her freshman year of high school.
[man] She plays the line
on offense and defense.
I want to be accepted like one of them.
You know, no special treatment.
[Amy] She was good.
She would take down guys
twice her size in drills.
[laughs]
In one of the interviews that she had
[chuckles]
she's quoted saying,
"Hitting is the funnest part."
[Sonja] I just like to hit, you know?
[man] Mm-hm.
When you say you like to hit, um
how did you know you liked to hit
before you started playing football?
I don't know. I like beating up
on my sister a little bit.
I didn't give her black eyes, but,
you know, just have a little fun with her.
[Amy] It was amazing watching that.
Of course, you know,
when I was ten, I didn't understand.
Why is this a big deal?
But if she puts her mind to something,
she can do it.
[man] Sonja Farak doesn't like
being called a pioneer,
but she's well aware
of the trail she's blazing.
[whistle blows]
[Sonja] I graduated in 1996.
I received various
varsity letters in sports,
and was also co-class valedictorian.
[lawyer] You attended
a four-year college, correct?
[Sonja] That is correct. It was Worcester
Polytechnic Institute in Western Mass.
I graduated with high distinction
and had a couple
of Student Life Awards presented to me.
- And what was your major?
- Biochemistry.
I noticed there was a posting
for a chemist position
in the drug analysis laboratory,
and so I applied.
And I was accepted, so I took that job.
[lawyer] And that was located
at the Hinton laboratory?
[Sonja] That is correct.
[Amy] Back in Boston,
she was in the chem lab for the State.
It really fit in with kind of what
she went to school for.
There's a lot of detail
that is necessary to go into it.
Um, and I think that's what she enjoys
and that's what she's really good at.
Approximately how many chemists
worked with you at the Hinton laboratory?
There was probably
about 12 or 13 chemists.
[lawyer] And how long did you stay
at the Hinton laboratory?
[Sonja] I was at the lab for about a year,
and I realized I would never be able
to afford to buy a place
in the Boston area,
and I was intrigued with Western Mass,
so I talked to the head of the labs
and mentioned if a position
opened up in Amherst,
I could transfer out there.
Because I like fresh air,
I like, you know, being outside.
[birdsong]
[David] It's really a nice valley
that we live in.
It's the Connecticut Valley.
The Connecticut River goes through.
You know, I think that, uh
people sometimes kinda look, uh at us
as the country folks.
- [laughing]
- [woman] Very good!
- [cheering]
- [woman] All right!
[David] We're about a hundred miles
due west of Boston.
And I've been District Attorney
for almost eight years now.
It's a great place to raise a family.
It's a slower pace.
You know, I mean,
I have two lights on the way to work.
I I live the next town over, so
On a on a tough day,
some days I get both lights.
It's a real nice place to live.
[Sonja] I moved out to Western Mass,
and I thought there would be
a chance for me to buy a house.
[lawyer] Can you just tell us,
what was your partner's name at the time?
Nikki Lee.
[Amy] Sonja met Nikki in college.
Nikki was older.
Moving was beneficial
for both Sonja and Nikki.
Northampton is kind of artsy
and Nikki's very much, um more artsy.
It seemed like
a really close-knit community.
And the house was really cute
and the neighborhood was great.
And Sonja found a great job.
I thought they were happy.
[Sonja] I started at the Amherst lab
in 2004.
It was on the UMass campus.
Can you tell the grand jurors
what the general atmosphere
of the Amherst lab was,
compared to the Hinton laboratory?
[Sonja] There was a little less stress,
more laid back.
It was one of the atmospheres,
if you got your work done,
there wasn't a lot of people
stressing over you, looking over you.
It was friendly.
We all got along.
[Amy] There were only
a couple of people in the lab.
I think that suited Sonja.
I always thought she kept to herself.
So I think she was happy,
just kind of, "Let me do my work
and I'll I'll get my work done."
[lawyer] Can you please describe
what your duties and responsibilities
were at the Amherst laboratory?
[Sonja] At the Amherst lab,
I basically carried over my duties
from the Hinton lab.
So I would get basically
any drug that came in
you know, whatever's next sequentially,
you would pick up.
[lawyer speaking]
[Sonja speaking]
[Heather] The day-to-day, if you will,
of being a drug chemist
can be quite repetitious,
maybe Groundhog Day -ish, in a sense.
You know, once you've seen
400 different types of cocaine packaging,
you've you've really seen most
of what people can come up with.
The cases are coming at you quite quickly,
uh, and they seem to never stop coming.
As long as the cases keep coming
from law enforcement,
the chemists don't have
any reason to stop working.
[Amy] Her job was just testing materials
that came in to figure out what they were.
It seemed really cool.
And I know she went to some trainings
and, um she seemed to enjoy it.
It was, you know, a lot of running the
the lab equipment that she enjoyed.
Um So, yeah. She she liked the job.
[Heather] I've never
been there physically, um
but I've seen some photos and videos.
And honestly,
the Amherst lab, um
was a mess.
[Paul] It was a decrepit,
grotesquely underfunded facility.
There was one working fume hood
at the Amherst lab.
And they were subsisting
on an annual budget of $300,000, um
which was barely enough money
to pay the salaries of these folks
and to keep the lights on.
And yet this lab was put in charge
of drug seizures across
all of Western Massachusetts.
Not only were they out
in the western part of the state,
you know, geographically isolated,
I think they were even,
you know, maybe philosophically isolated.
They were using the right testing
and the right technology
to get to the right answers,
but they just did not have
any sort of good laboratory practices
that were in place.
For example, they did not keep track
of reference materials.
Now, uh
you had referenced earlier
in your testimony standards?
Or national standards?
Were these same standards
at the Amherst laboratory?
Yes. In the refrigerator,
there was probably 50 standards.
[lawyer] Was the refrigerator
in a secure location? Could it be locked?
[Sonja] The refrigerator was in the lab,
and the only way
to get into the lab was with a key.
[lawyer] So the refrigerator itself
was not locked?
Correct.
[Robin] Things went awry there,
and it seemed like maybe there
truly wasn't enough people working there.
There was four of them, I believe.
That's not a lot
for the amount of drugs
they were probably taking in.
One person doing the intake,
and then, what,
three people doing the testing?
I think there wasn't enough control
over what was going on.
[Robin] Two cases were found, um
in her area,
in her tub, as they called it,
um, that were missing drugs.
The weights weren't right
or there was no drugs at all.
[Robin on tape] Do you just work
on one particular town's evidence?
[Luke] Even before she got arrested,
I knew the Amherst lab was underfunded
and didn't have the sort of basics
that you would expect at a place
where science is purportedly taking place.
So the safeguards that existed
at the Amherst lab were minimal,
and they required the good faith
of individuals to abide by them.
For example, uh, chemists were not
supposed to assign samples to themselves.
But at Amherst, chemists routinely
assigned samples to themselves.
Chemists were not necessarily
supposed to be in the lab by themselves,
but they were in the lab
as a practical matter
by themselves routinely.
[Paul] So, at this lab, in this old
State building in Amherst, Mass,
these folks are working crazy hours
for sub-standard wages,
and have almost no contact during the day.
They're not co-workers,
they just inhabit the same space
and do the same thing.
[Heather] They're planets
who are orbiting around the sun together,
but really having no interaction
with each other.
And they didn't need to.
As long as someone's keeping up
their responsibilities
to the lab as a whole,
you don't have to consult with each other
on your casework
because ultimately, it's my case,
I'm the one
who has to go into court
and answer for what's on that report.
And so, I have the independence
and the autonomy to handle it my way.
[lawyer clears throat]
Now, these national standards,
I assume they're fairly pure.
Is that fair to say?
They're pure, period.
Now, have you ever tried methamphetamine?
Have I ever?
No, well, prior to working at the lab?
- Have you ever taken methamphetamine?
- No.
Did you ever take
any of that methamphetamine
from the laboratory standard?
I took part of it. Yes, I did.
[lawyer] And why, why did you do that?
[Sonja] I guess I was curious.
Even while I was in college,
as a freshman,
I was going through
a rough period in my life, like, mentally.
And for some reason,
I had looked up drugs online.
And when I read about it, I said, like,
"That's one I would try,
if I was going to try it."
It would give me energy.
One day I just decided
to try a little bit.
I was alone.
People had gone out to lunch.
It was in liquid form,
so I used a pipette.
It gave me the desired effects.
It gave me energy.
I felt amazing.
I didn't wish it,
but it gave me the pep I was looking for.
You know, I still did the work
that I was assigned to.
If anything, it made me feel more alert.
And did this become daily use,
or was it just this one time?
I might've waited a short period,
but it quickly became daily use.
I would use a small metal spatula,
dip it in,
and, uh I would lick it.
[Paul] Liquid meth,
like all delirium drugs,
makes you much more energized,
raises your mood, raises your energy,
raises your concentration,
raises the intensity
at which you feel alive.
For someone like Sonja,
the feeling of being elevated,
the feeling of being charged
by this substance
was, for her, medicinal.
It was a way of getting out
of the drudgery
of being Sonja Farak.
[Sonja] I started just keeping it at work
and doing it
when I got to work for energy.
It did get to the point
where I was bringing it home, though,
and doing it first thing in the morning.
It became multiple times a day.
I don't think that anyone had a clue.
We all got in at slightly different times.
People would go home,
someone would go out to lunch.
I don't feel that my productivity
worsened at all at that time.
[Jared] She was charged
with evidence tampering in two samples.
But at no time did she ever say
exactly what it is that she had done.
You know, you're talking
about thousands and thousands of cases
where Sonja Farak was the chemist.
Thousands of samples that she had tested.
But all we got were the two samples
that she had supposedly tampered with
right when they looked
at her lab workstation
on January 19th, 2013.
No one went back
and tried to test a sample
from a year ago,
maybe two years ago.
Maybe eight years ago.
Let's get a law enforcement agency
to go back and test drug samples
that Sonja Farak had tested in the past
to see how long she had been doing this.
We asked,
just go back and do some testing.
Nobody did it.
The Attorney General wasn't going
to re-test cases from the past,
the local District Attorney wasn't going
to re-test cases from the past,
because the whole idea was
to keep this as small as possible.
I think it was out here in Western Mass,
they were trying to minimize it.
They just figured, "Oh,
she took some drugs and that'll be it."
And really not looking, uh
beneath the surface.
Certainly, uh we intend to do
a very thorough investigation into
I just think that they didn't want
to pursue the truth.
And I think, when you
when you start a case by saying,
"Well, let's
let's try to contain it"
Your job isn't to contain it.
It's to figure out what's the truth
and how are we gonna do justice?