How to Fix a Drug Scandal (2020) s01e03 Episode Script
Episode 3
1
[Sonja] Every day,
you swear you're not going to.
[snorting]
And then, you know, you put it back,
return to the safe
But then a night would come
when I was the only one there.
Or it's the morning,
or whatever time of day it was.
And I would want more.
[Paul Solotaroff]
Sonja was really beginning to come apart.
There's no such thing as stable
in the career of a cokehead,
and she needed more and more and more.
At a certain point,
powder doesn't get it anymore.
At a certain point,
you're either gonna smoke it
or you're gonna shoot it.
And so, Sonja really benefited from having
the keys to this Pandora's box.
So, uh you had left off with me
in approximately early 2011,
when you had started to frequently take
powder cocaine samples from the lab?
Mm-hm.
[lawyer] And you indicated
your drug use got heavier
- by the middle of 2011, correct?
- [Sonja] Correct.
[lawyer] And is it fair to say
that you were under the influence
almost every day at work?
It's fair to say. Yes.
[lawyer] And it's fair to say, Ms. Farak,
that the amount of powder cocaine samples
coming into the lab began to decrease?
That's correct.
In 2011,
we seemed to be getting
less and less cocaine,
both in number of pieces
and evidence, but also quantity.
I mean, at that point,
if we got a tenth of a gram bag,
I couldn't really take anything from it
because it'd be noticeable.
[lawyer] Now, because these powder
cocaine samples were decreasing,
was there any other drug
that you began to experiment with in 2011?
[Sonja] I had already exhausted
the methamphetamine,
amphetamine and ketamine standards.
And then I did start trying
to smoke crack cocaine.
We had a small amount of base cocaine,
which is the chemical name in the lab,
which I tried smoking.
There was not a lot of it,
but I did start trying
to smoke crack cocaine.
And I say "try" because
I wasn't really good at it at first.
[lawyer] Can you explain why?
[Sonja] I had never been
a smoker in general.
I also was not prepared.
I was using aluminum foil pipes.
I was probably more timid
about trying not to get caught
because of the odor and the smoke.
Especially if you're using foil.
But I eventually made a crack pipe
with pipettes in the lab.
I would break off the tips.
Eventually, I got some copper wire
to put in, and when I did that,
I started to get better hits
and quickly became very addicted.
I did it at my workstation.
I actually smoked
in the evidence room.
[lawyer] Was this affecting
your productivity,
as far as you know,
in terms of your testing?
I believe it probably did lower it.
I was very in tune to what pieces
of evidence were coming up,
to try to manipulate the system
so I could get pieces of evidence
I wanted to analyze.
[Paul] So, Sonja, by 2012,
was not only an accomplished drug thief,
she was someone who had figured out
how to game the system.
She had access to drop-off schedules.
And she could manipulate
the rotation of assignments
so that she was next up
when a particularly big seizure
came through.
And it was essential that she keep getting
these seizures
of 20, 50, 100 grams or more,
so that the five percent skim was enough
to get her through the week.
[Sonja] I was going to smoke crack
at work multiple
like, ten, 12 times a day,
and that became longer.
I could sneak across the hallway
to the fume hood,
where I would smoke
just because I could get rid of the smell.
And that wasn't
a quick minute bathroom break.
- It was like--
- So you were just gone
from your workstation?
- Correct.
- Did anybody question you
at this point about absence
from your workstation?
I don't remember anyone commenting on it.
She's so out of control.
She's so unselfconscious
about, uh, what she's doing
and how she's coming off
to her colleagues.
She was leaving work so frequently
to get to the bathroom downstairs,
to get out to her car to smoke,
that her colleagues had
no choice but to notice
that someone was going to hell
right in front of them.
[tape recording playing]
You know
[Robin Whitney] Okay
So, Hanchett pulls her aside
in late 2012
and says, "What's going on with you?"
And she makes excuses.
She says she's going through
all sorts of constant crisis at home,
isn't feeling well,
and that's enough
to get Hanchett off her back.
[Sonja] My habit got bad enough
in the mid and later stages of 2012
where I was taking cocaine
from cases that I'd analyzed
and instead of using it as cocaine,
I would use that cocaine
to make crack for myself.
[Paul] Ultimately,
there wasn't enough powder cocaine
in all of Western Massachusetts
to keep her going.
And she crossed yet another bright line
when she went into work one night
and began cooking powder coke
into crack at her workstation.
[Sonja] Basically, I would make crack
by dissolving the cocaine in water,
adding baking soda
Heat it up, let it precipitate out,
and then I would form the crack.
I do remember one year,
there was one case that was a kilo
of cocaine that we had received
and I took out a good 100 grams of it
to make crack.
So, I wasn't necessarily
making small batches,
if I got a big enough submission
where I could make
a quantity worth my time.
By that point,
I was smoking at the lab,
smoking at home,
I was smoking and driving.
I don't want to say there was
no stopping me where I smoked, but I--
[lawyer] And that was because
of your addiction at this point, correct?
I was totally controlled by my addiction.
[Deborah Becker] At first, it was rumors.
They said, "We think she had
a drug problem for a long time."
You know. "It couldn't have been
a handful of samples.
It had to have been more than that."
The arrest was made
on those two cases at this time
[Deborah] But, was Sonja saying that
to not get in trouble,
or was the state saying that
to hide another drug lab crisis?
It was unclear.
I mean, at the time,
what I understood about Sonja Farak
was that she had been a good student.
She won chemistry awards,
she was her high school valedictorian.
She was described as someone
who was curious, sort of quiet,
athletic, hard-working.
She didn't seem
to stand out as someone
who would've had a drug problem
and would've been
misusing drug samples at all.
You know, it's easier to believe
that maybe Sonja Farak
only tampered with just a few cases.
And the public at the time
still didn't really know
any of these things about Sonja Farak.
I mean, we were still dealing
with Annie Dookhan
[bailiff] Court, all rise.
[Deborah] and in the public's eye,
Annie Dookhan was this rogue chemist.
[bailiff] The Honorable Court is open.
Please be seated.
The bad apple in the lab
lying about her academic credentials
and falsifying thousands of drug tests.
But, even at the sentencing,
it was sort of her problem.
[bailiff] solemnly swear
to make true answers
to such questions put to you by the court
now in hearing, so help you God?
- I do.
- [bailiff] Please step forward.
But there was a system here,
and she was rewarded for nine years
for testing thousands and thousands
of drug samples
when she couldn't possibly
have properly tested them all.
And you're pleading guilty here
because you are guilty?
[Annie] Yes, Your Honor.
Let me go through
your rights that you're giving up
by pleading guilty here today.
The first of those rights
is the right to remain silent
[Scott Allen] You know, Annie became
like this person who bore the burdens
for everybody, in a funny way.
She's the one who goes on trial, the one
that confessed, so she's the bad actor.
And she takes all the blame,
when really, she's just
a cog in a larger system.
[reporter] Why did Annie Dookhan do it?
She declined our request to explain,
but her lawyer says
the mother of a disabled young son
only wanted to help her career.
[lawyer] The furthest thing from her mind
is that this is gonna
ultimately cost millions of dollars,
it's gonna throw the entire
Massachusetts criminal justice system
into a tailspin
[Deborah] Her lawyer actually
argued for less time,
and said that she had not meant
to hurt anyone,
that she was just trying to do her job,
that she was rewarded
for being productive.
And she was very productive.
But she didn't realize the extent of
what she was doing
and how many people it would harm.
[bailiff] Annie Dookhan, the court,
having accepted your plea of guilty,
will now sentence you to be imprisoned
at the Massachusetts
Correctional Institution
[Deborah] So she was convicted
and sentenced to jail.
[bailiff] to a term of not more
than five years nor less than three years.
It was hard to watch.
Her father was very upset.
I can't imagine what that felt like,
to be there in court.
He had likely had
so many dreams for his daughter,
and, um, she obviously
felt pressure to do well and, uh
to watch it end like that,
I can't imagine what that felt like.
[reporter 1] As Dookhan was led away
to begin serving
a minimum three-year sentence,
authorities expect
it could take at least that long
to reconcile thousands of Dookhan cases
and restore faith
in the state's criminal justice system.
[car horn beeping]
[reporter 2] Former Massachusetts chemist
Annie Dookhan
was sentenced to
a three-to five-year prison term
for falsifying drug tests
affecting tens of thousands
of criminal cases,
but there's been little movement
to deal with all of the convictions
based on the lab's testing.
Matt Segal, with the Massachusetts
American Civil Liberties Union,
says his organization
is looking at legal ways
to try to get the state
to deal with the affected cases.
[Matt Segal on radio] The state has spent
hundreds of millions of dollars
on this scandal, and what have we gotten?
It certainly hasn't been justice.
[Matt Segal in interview] I was really
just a few months into the job
when the news hit
that a chemist had been arrested
for inventing the test results
that had put people in prison.
And so that's really when it started
and when we, at the ACLU of Massachusetts,
started to think about
the injustices that had happened
and what we could do to help.
And what we were thinking was
that the justice that needed to be done
was for all these convictions
to be wiped away,
and for the state to bear
the burden of doing that.
It was the right thing to do.
It was the way to do justice.
So the very first thing we did,
we sent a letter to Martha Coakley,
who was then the Attorney General.
We copied all
of the district attorneys and said,
more or less,
"Get rid of all these cases.
And if you don't
there's gonna be a lot of litigation.
There's gonna be a fight."
So we were dismissing cases.
You know, lower level cases,
left and right.
But at some point, the ACLU is saying,
"Treat this like a civil class action suit
and just get rid
of every single case that you have."
But even judges
were not prepared to do that,
because they'd never done that before.
You don't just dismiss cases
and a wave of defendants.
This is an emergency situation,
which is treated that way.
[Conley] Oh, we had defendants who had
been accused of serious trafficking.
Defendants who had been
parts of international gangs.
- [knocking]
- Police!
People who were wreaking havoc
in communities across Massachusetts,
- arrested with guns.
- [siren wailing]
The public reaction
to the Dookhan news was,
from my perspective as a defense lawyer
who cared about the wrongful convictions,
not very good.
There was a lot of misunderstanding
about, "Oh, my gosh,
someone did something wrong in the lab
and now all these crazy defense lawyers
want to let all these dangerous
drug dealers back out onto the street."
[reporter] Look at all these faces.
A fraction of the tens of thousands
of people Dookhan'd -
street slang for anyone
whose evidence she handled.
[Marx] There was very little
public awareness
that the vast majority
of the Dookhan defendants
were people who'd
already served their sentences,
who were non-violent drug offenders,
people who were already back at home
living with their families,
back at work in the community.
And really what we were
fighting about was whether or not
they should have an opportunity
to clear from their criminal record
a tainted drug conviction.
A tainted drug conviction which has
extraordinary collateral consequences
for someone's life.
[reporter] Hundreds of inmates
were serving time in cases
where she tested drug samples.
Officials say most
have violent criminal pasts.
We're not talking about
low-level drug addicts here.
We're talking about
high-level drug traffickers.
This should cause all of us concern.
I don't think
the district attorneys did anything
to kind of disabuse the public
of the misimpression that this was about
whether we were gonna let
a whole bunch of violent drug traffickers
out of prison and back onto the street.
It was never about that.
We weren't prepared to just say,
"We're gonna just wipe all of these out."
We did what we've been trained to do,
and that is resolve criminal cases
one case at a time.
Well, we knew exactly what that meant.
It meant that they were gonna fight
to keep the wrongful convictions.
So I called my friend Dan Marx.
He and I had gone to law school together
and I remembered him as being
one of the smartest people I'd ever met.
I'm in my office and Matt calls.
We had reconnected
after having gone to law school together.
[Matt] He said, "Look, we should
get all these convictions overturned.
We have to sue somebody,
but I'm not sure how we do it
or who we sue."
[Marx] "Would you be interested in trying
to develop a legal strategy
to deal with the lab scandal?"
It was something that, um
no reasonable lawyer
should have said yes to.
Um, well, it took, like, about two seconds
to think about.
Of course I was on board for that.
And so we sort of
immediately started working on it
because there's no blueprint for this.
Uh, you know, we knew a lot of things
that we needed to accomplish.
You know, we needed something
like a class action,
but this wasn't a class action.
We needed something
where we could demand
the court take
some kind of affirmative action
to rectify the situation,
as opposed to just try
to compensate individual people.
It was complicated. There's no precedent.
We'd never dealt with this before.
It's not like you just go into your online
legal research and type in "drug scandal"
and there are a whole bunch of cases
that tell you how to bring these lawsuits.
But, out in Western Massachusetts,
the Farak scandal was different
and potentially more troubling
because the scope
of what Sonja Farak did was not known.
And Luke Ryan was saying,
"There are some people literally locked up
as a result of the failure
of prosecutors to turn over evidence."
[door opens]
[Luke Ryan] Often I have the feeling
that I'm like a battlefield medic.
It's like you fight like hell
to try to save somebody
and, you know, you lose a patient
and you don't have time to grieve.
You just gotta run to the next one
and try to throw a bandage on
or do whatever you can.
And my client Rafael Rodriguez
was back in jail
because we lost at the Kinder hearing.
But I represent people
who have different rights
because they're
at different stages in the process.
So I had another client,
Rolando Peñate,
and he had been arrested
but was not convicted.
He hadn't been to trial
and he was being held in Ludlow
at the Hampden County House of Correction.
[speaking Spanish]
I was in prison in Ludlow,
watching the news,
and that's when her photo comes up.
Hampshire County chemist
says that average lab
I checked my papers,
and I knew that was the woman
who checked my drugs.
I thought they would let me go.
That's what I thought.
[Luke] So Rolando had been arrested
in Springfield.
He's alleged to have sold
to an undercover officer.
Alleged narcotics were
discovered in the house,
but I'd been led to believe
the case against him
was going to be dismissed
because Sonja Farak was
the chemist in his case.
So I proceeded to reach out
to the prosecutor and say,
"Hey, your chemist has been arrested
and she certainly wasn't going to testify,
so I assume
that the charges against Mr. Peñate
are gonna be dismissed."
But the prosecutor announced
that it was gonna be his intention
to have an expert police officer
testify that it sure looked like
heroin and cocaine to him.
So my client's liberty is being deprived
and now I'm being told
that we're gonna go to trial
with some cop
who's gonna get on the stand
and give this testimony
that no judge should allow.
[gavel banging]
And I was just so deflated and frustrated.
There's really nothing worse
in my profession
than giving a client reason to believe
something good is gonna happen,
then at your next visit say,
"Remember what I told you
about you getting out next week?
Well, that's not gonna happen."
[Rolando, in Spanish] So they made me
an offer. Three years in prison.
They were offering me a sentence,
but I didn't want to be found guilty.
And because of that, I went to court.
I told Ryan,
"Let's fight this, let's do this."
[Luke] So Rolando had been arrested
in 2011,
but Judge Kinder had ruled that,
based on all the available evidence,
Sonja Farak's misdeeds
had only occurred since July 2012.
So, because of this Kinder paradigm,
when Rolando went to trial,
I wasn't allowed to raise
Sonja Farak's tampering at all,
or her suspected drug addiction.
And I remember saying to the judge,
"I just want to get this straight.
The chemist in Mr. Peñate's case
is under indictment for evidence tampering
and a jury of his peers
isn't gonna hear about that?"
I felt like I was being forced
to participate in a process
that isn't fair,
and that was so frustrating,
it's difficult to put into words.
The jury found him guilty
of the sale that he allegedly made.
It was a punch in the gut.
I mean, back in March, I'd gone to court
expecting the case against Rolando Peñate
was gonna be dismissed.
And then, nine months later,
I'm sitting there and I'm watching him
get a seven-year prison sentence
for a $20 bag of of heroin,
and it just seemed incredibly excessive.
[Rolando, in Spanish] After I was
found guilty, they sent me to Walpole.
It's another world.
You look at a guard
and they're yelling at you,
"Why you look at me like that?"
And it wasn't easy for me at that time.
I would find myself so angry
about the sentence - seven years.
[bailiff] Sonja Farak, how do you
now plead to those two indictments,
each of which charge you
with tampering with evidence
and possession of
a Class B controlled substance,
that being cocaine?
[Sonja] Guilty.
[judge] Your conduct has,
whether you recognized it
at the time or not,
come at a great cost to the state.
[Amy Farak]
Sonja didn't want to go to jail.
Um nobody does.
But I think she knew it was
it was a real possibility.
[judge] I'm going to impose a sentence
of 18 months at the House of Correction.
[women talking and shouting]
[Amy] I feel like she needed help.
Um I felt that she could get
better help outside of jail.
I wanted her to get
whatever she needed to get better.
I was a little concerned knowing
that she'd worked for the State Police,
how that could be looked at,
um in jail.
Um
So it was it was a little scary,
I guess, for me, thinking about it.
She was really going to jail.
[buzz of conversation]
The first time I went to visit Sonja,
she was behind glass
and you had to talk over the phone.
And that was the communication,
and it was just surreal.
[laughing] I was, like, "This is how
I have to talk to my sister,
is through glass over a telephone."
[David Sullivan]
When I heard that she had pled guilty
and that she got a sentence of 18 months,
I thought that was a major blunder.
Once that plea got done,
I looked at it as a sweetheart deal.
She gets a sentence, but they didn't
get any information from her.
Where's the deal?
You know, I mean,
it's kind of a one-sided deal
that, "Okay, I do my time,
but I don't have to talk to you"?
"I don't have to tell you
exactly what happened"?
[woman 1] A plastic bag of crack cocaine,
copper mesh and a bag
of burnt copper mesh.
These are all items that are used
by someone who is smoking crack.
[woman 2] There were four separate,
distinct samples?
[woman 1] Correct.
[David] To me, that seemed intentional.
It was like they were saying,
"We don't wanna really hear from her.
We wanna make assumptions
that are good for us,
that contains this thing,
and says, 'Hey, we only have to deal
with six months of tampering.'"
And it was really that plea
that got me worried.
Worried that there was
there's somethin' more to this story.
[Jared Olanoff] So, after we lost
to the Attorney General
at the Kinder hearing, I moved on.
Um Luke didn't.
Luke kept fighting.
He kept trying to see the evidence.
The "assorted lab paperwork"
from Sonja Farak's car.
The Attorney General had said that
all the evidence had been emailed to us.
But Luke wanted to go
actually look at it in Boston,
and he spent months, after I was all done,
fighting for his clients
to just go look at it.
[Luke] Kris Foster at
the Attorney General's Office said,
"I cannot let Attorney Ryan
look at this evidence
while we have a pending prosecution
against Sonja Farak."
[Jared] Uh, Sonja Farak
had been sentenced.
Her case was no longer an "open case."
It wasn't an open investigation.
So the Attorney General's Office
had no reason to prevent Luke
from going to look at the evidence.
[Luke] So, I've been looking for this
for a very long time,
but by this point, I thought, "Well,
there's probably nothing for me to see.
Like, it really is inconsequential."
But I felt I had an obligation to do it
just by way of due diligence.
So I made arrangements to go
to the Attorney General's Office.
To the 19th floor,
where these three banker's boxes were
just sitting in a file waiting for me.
And there was a state trooper in the room
who was gonna be there
and watch me go through the boxes.
So I had spent a lot of time
trying to see this stuff,
to see what was in her car
when she got arrested.
It was about 21 months
after Sonja Farak's arrest.
Rafael Rodriguez is in prison,
Rolando Peñate is in prison.
And as I went through these papers,
I started to see things
that immediately were clear
had nothing to do with lab work.
Things that had headings
like "Emotion Regulation Worksheet,"
talking about the internal feelings
that Ms. Farak was experiencing
when getting, quote-unquote,
"a good sample."
This meant that Sonja Farak
was engaged in drug treatment,
and she was telling clinicians
about her drug use.
And I just kind of
went through, page by page,
with my cell phone,
taking a picture of this one
and that one over there
And I have a terrible poker face,
but I was trying
to just keep everything light,
and I was kind of scared
that the state trooper at the end
of the conference room table
was gonna figure out
some reason why this needed to stop.
And then I finally came across something
called the ServiceNet Diary Card.
At the top, it had days of the week
and dates in December, no year,
but on December 22nd,
a Thursday, if you looked down you saw
Sonja Farak checked the box
that made it clear
that she had used drugs on that day.
And then there was a narrative part
at the bottom of the document
where she wrote the words
"Tried to resist using at work,
but ended up failing."
And my heart started racing,
because I was thinking,
"Well, December 2011 is when
she was signing certificates
in Rolando Peñate's case.
I wonder could it possibly,
you know, line up?"
So, I got back to my office.
I need to see
Rolando Peñate's drug certificates
to see when in December she signed it.
And she signed
the first certificate in his case
on December 22nd, 2011.
So the big question in that moment was
what December 22nd
are we talking about here?
Is it December 22nd, 2011,
or some other year?
And as I scrutinized it, I looked
at the bottom, and it said on Saturday,
"Mad about missing part of Pats game."
You know, I'd looked
at the pictures of Sonja Farak's car
dozens and dozens of times.
She had "New England Patriots"
on the steering wheel of her car,
and the game would have been
Saturday, December 24th.
So when was the last time
that the Patriots played
a Christmas Eve game on a Saturday?
And the Internet is great
for warehousing information like that.
And I saw that they played
the Miami Dolphins in 2011.
So that meant that Sonja Farak had
performed the analysis in Rolando's case
on the same day that she tried to resist
using at work but ended up failing.
[lawyer]
Do you recall that day, Ms. Farak?
Yes, I do.
[lawyer] And how do you recall that day?
It was one day if you asked
if I was impaired at work,
I would have to say yes.
[Paul] It began like any other day.
[Sonja] I was using crack.
I remember
the submissions were small bags.
[Paul] She beams up
repeatedly that morning.
And then, sometime late morning,
she takes delivery of a sample of LSD.
[Sonja] Liquid LSD.
I took some and I remember
not being able to function too well.
[psychedelic rock music playing]
[lawyer] Did you take a substantial amount
of this liquid LSD?
I didn't measure the amount,
but I was very impaired.
[lawyer] And when you say "impaired,"
can you describe
I knew I couldn't drive.
There were some hallucinations,
not little green men, you know,
but colors swaying in the wind.
I remember going
to the bathroom to smoke crack.
After taking it and dropping some of it,
totally freaking out,
crawling on the floor trying to find crack
which I thought was there.
[lawyer] Did you do any tests that day?
[Sonja] That morning I analyzed
some tests on cocaine,
just to make sure I knew what it was.
That afternoon, I did not.
[Paul] Sonja Farak declares
in grand jury testimony
that she has no recollection
of doing drug analysis tests
at her workstation
that afternoon,
when in fact her notebook reveals
that she did multiple tests
on several different samples
and that she certified them
as positive for heroin.
And this included a drug certificate
for a Cuban refugee
named Rolando Peñate.
So this is evidence
that I was not given access to
that would have convinced
any juror to acquit Rolando Peñate.
And it meant that Sonja Farak had been
doing this for at least over a year
before she got arrested.
So it basically blew up
the Kinder paradigm.
And it seemed like this could be evidence
of a massive cover-up
by the Attorney General's Office.
The arrest was made on those two cases.
brought this
to our attention immediately.
These allegations do not implicate
the reliability of drug certificates
or fairness of trials against defendants.
[Luke] And maybe I found the smoking gun
in this whole sordid tale.
[reporter]
Today's the final day on the job
for longtime State Attorney General,
Martha Coakley.
After eight years as AG,
she's exiting elected office
after losing
[buzz of conversation]
[bagpipes playing]
[cheering]
[Shawn Musgrave] In 2015, in comes
a new Attorney General, Maura Healey.
Raise your right hand.
So, the Farak case was
under this big giant question mark
- I, Maura Healey
- Do solemnly swear.
and the ACLU was involved
in the Dookhan cases.
- I will bear true faith and allegiance
- To the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
To the Commonwealth
[Shawn] So the question was,
how is Maura Healey,
who's now in the driver's seat,
going to handle things that she inherited?
[Maura Healey]
And when I started in January of 2015,
our office under the prior administration
had prosecuted Dookhan and Farak.
They had been sentenced to jail
and we were in the midst
of learning more information
about just how significant the scope,
the ramifications of that conduct was
on individual cases.
[Marx] During that kind of transition,
there's a sense that it's an opportunity.
So yeah, I mean, I think we were
cautiously optimistic at the time,
but that's Again, that's also part
of being a defense lawyer.
[laughs] You you wouldn't do this
unless you can find a way
to be hopeful all the time.
[jazz band playing]
But I think we weren't kidding ourselves
about, you know,
this was going to be a long slog
and a tough fight.
And so we don't know
the exact number of those convictions.
In fact, we generally haven't been able
to find out these numbers
until the prosecutors give us
lists of cases.
[Matt] Our justice system is set up
to convict people of crimes.
And what we were seeing
with the Dookhan scandal
was that the structure,
the entire system exists
to make it so easy
to hold onto a wrongful conviction
and so hard to overcome it.
So the system is designed
to make it almost impossible
for a mass injustice
to lead to a mass exoneration.
[siren whoops]
[Deborah] So then
the American Civil Liberties Union
is trying to come up with a solution
to deal with all the affected cases.
What do we do with all these people
who are charged with drug crimes
now that Annie Dookhan
has been found guilty
and we know
that drug evidence was mishandled
and we know
that the lab wasn't properly run?
So they bring a lawsuit to
the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
[court official]
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.
All persons having anything to do
before the Honorables, the Justices
of the Supreme Judicial Court,
give your attendance
and you shall be heard.
[judge] SJC-11764.
[Matt] Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice.
May it please the Court,
Matthew Segal for the petitioners.
Thousands of people
whose rights were violated
by misconduct at the Hinton lab
will have no meaningful opportunity
to challenge their convictions.
[Deborah] But the District Attorneys
of Massachusetts do not think
that the cases should be dismissed.
The defendants' due process rights
vis-à-vis that have been addressed
[Matt] There wasn't even
a process in place
to identify the cases.
defendants overwhelmingly
convicted when they've gone to trial
using that defense
And to me, one of the most remarkable
signs of the injustices
that happened over the years
is that it took this lawsuit
and years of time
before we ever actually
got a list together.
[Marx] The fact that it was so hard
just to figure out the list of people
whose cases were processed
by Annie Dookhan
gives you a sense of this chaos.
What was going on there?
It should have been possible
to walk into that lab
and press a button on a computer
and generate a spreadsheet
of all her cases
with all the information
you need to correct those on day one.
It took years even to figure out
what cases she had worked on.
How's that possible?
[Deborah] And then there were rumblings
about the Farak case.
People were concerned that
uh, there may have been
more going on there
and it was actually a bigger story
than the state was letting on.
We hear about Attorney Luke Ryan,
and Ryan is alleging
that the Farak case was
particularly problematic.
[Shawn] So Luke has been one
of the main drivers of an investigation
into what happened
during the Farak prosecution.
He wanted to know
how could these worksheets
have been at the Attorney General's Office
and he was never told about them?
So Luke's really gunning
for an investigation,
specifically on the question
of whether the Attorney General's Office
and the Mass State Police
covered up the evidence.
[Luke] It didn't feel like an accident.
This was not something
that was just plain old human error.
Choices were made.
Somebody decided that this evidence
was not going to see the light of day,
and there needs to be accountability.
So I sent a letter to
the newly-elected Attorney General,
Maura Healey, and I said,
"Somebody needs to look into
the reasons why, uh, this happened."
So to her credit,
Maura Healey read our letter and decided,
"I need to appoint somebody
to look into this."
From the beginning,
we were trying to get this right
and that started with trying to figure out
what is it that actually happened here.
[Shawn] And so to investigate
Luke's claim of misconduct,
the Attorney General
appoints two retired judges.
Two judges,
and then they work with two troopers
from the Massachusetts State Police.
[Luke] They went and got captains
in the state police
and outsourced the investigation to them.
[Matt] Now, this is a bizarre way
to investigate prosecutorial misconduct,
because state troopers don't investigate
prosecutorial misconduct.
- [siren wailing]
- They investigate crimes.
And so they spent many, many months and
interview, uh, some witnesses,
including Kris Foster.
The troopers reviewed
more than 800 emails,
and assembled a bunch of exhibits.
And then the retired judges
submit their report.
And I didn't have to do that.
I didn't
I didn't need to do that report.
I just thought it made sense, as a matter
of having somebody do a look at
what had happened here within the office.
It wasn't the kind of work product
that we were expecting,
um, and it wasn't high quality.
[Matt] People call it a report,
but it's really just a letter,
which says there's nothing to see here.
No prosecutorial misconduct.
Everything's fine.
Essentially what the report amounted to
"Luke Ryan is unprofessional."
They found the only person
who did anything wrong was me.
[sighs]
And it tore into me,
called me unprofessional,
said I made baseless
and negligent allegations
and really just made a mockery
of what I'd been doing
for the last few years.
But their key finding was
this was not a cover-up
because here you can look
from these emails
that people in the Attorney General's
Office and the Mass State Police
knew about these documents,
they talked about these documents,
and said, "See attached disk
with all these emails."
We had to figure out,
how can we get this disk?
And it turns out the only copy
was in Judge Velis' possession.
So I had to call Judge Velis up,
somebody who's just endorsed
a report that said I behaved
in an unprofessional way,
and say, "Hey,
can I have a copy of the disk?"
And he said, "Sure."
And so I was, like, trembling mad at him
but I made arrangements to meet
at a Barnes & Noble at a mall
and took my mother with me
so that there would be a witness
in case we had words about his report.
So, it was a very pleasant conversation.
He gave me the disk.
I took the disk.
I went home. I put it in my computer.
And I remember when the thing popped up
and I suddenly had these threads.
They were in chronological order.
So I began and I clicked on
I think my first email
was a January 23rd one
where they were referring to personal
papers that were found in the car.
And I said, "Uh-oh.
Like, that's not assorted lab paperwork."
Anne Kaczmarek's told,
"Hey, we've got this other case
where it looks like she may have stolen
some oxycodones.
What do you want to do?"
And her response was,
"Please don't let this get
more complicated than we thought.
Maybe if she had a bad back,
that's the reason
she was taking the oxys?"
And then the critical email
from the state trooper.
After Farak was arrested,
the lead investigator
from Mass State Police
emails Anne Kaczmarek.
Subject line, "Farak admissions."
And then he had attached
a copy of the document,
uh, the ServiceNet Diary Card
where Farak disclosed
using drugs at the lab.
Like, the investigators
and the Attorney General's Office,
they were talking
about exactly these worksheets.
And it became clear, like,
they knew about this.
There's a bunch of people
who are talking about this
and they knew
about Sonja Farak's drug addiction.
It was also bizarre,
because I suddenly had
all of this new information
about how I was regarded,
how my work was regarded,
and they did not like me at all.
Anne Kaczmarek said I was rude.
She said I was aggressive.
She said I was untrustworthy.
She told Kris Foster
she really didn't like me.
So I had these mixed emotions
of, like, "Oh my God,
they're calling me an asshole"
and "Thank you so much
for giving me these things
that shows that exculpatory evidence
was not just overlooked,
but that they knew about it
and that they actively took steps
to, uh, keep this investigation
very, very small."
[Marx] Those emails, I think,
are one of the most powerful examples
of the inability of the system
to really ensure
that evidence that needs
to get turned over to defendants
does get turned over.
Um this case really captures that,
because you have the prosecutors
and the cops holding a piece of paper
that says, "On the day
that Sonja Farak tested the drugs
used to prosecute
and convict Luke Ryan's client,
she was high."
They're holding that piece of paper.
But their first instinct is
not to call Luke and say,
"Luke, I got something
really important that you need to see.
I'll send it over to you now."
It's to bury it.
I'm not trying to demonize anyone.
I don't know what was in their mind.
Um, as a defense lawyer,
I don't like to demonize people.
I think good people
give in to bad impulses.
Uh I think people wanna avoid work.
They wanna avoid embarrassment.
They wanna avoid losing cases.
Whatever the rationale was,
they were holding in their hand
damning evidence
about the state chemist in that case
and they didn't give it
to their defense lawyer.
[Maura] You know, um
ultimately, they're the prosecutors
who are in charge of of their cases.
I mean, I wasn't here under
I wasn't involved
with the Criminal Bureau work.
That was the prior administration.
I wasn't part of that, so I don't
I don't know the scope of it.
But, um, I certainly know that
you know, prosecutors
You know, you need to There are ethical
rules that you've gotta follow.
[Matt] It seemed like not only
did Kris Foster and Anne Kaczmarek
at the Attorney General's Office
fail to turn over evidence,
they also may have misled a judge,
Judge Kinder.
And in the spectrum
of prosecutorial misconduct,
that's about as bad as it gets.
I I was getting pretty angry
and pretty agitated.
I felt like this had been, uh
just a huge con job.
[David] So when I heard about the emails
and the scope of it
because Luke Ryan was
good enough to let me know
And that was the real revelation,
that this is this is big.
That really opened up the Pandora's box
for, uh, the Attorney General's Office
that this now was bigger than just,
uh, what they had been, uh, projecting.
Because they wanted to contain it.
They didn't want to pursue the truth.
They didn't want to know the full scheme.
They didn't want to know the truth.
And the truth was
that she'd been using drugs since 2004.
[Sonja] Every day,
you swear you're not going to.
[snorting]
And then, you know, you put it back,
return to the safe
But then a night would come
when I was the only one there.
Or it's the morning,
or whatever time of day it was.
And I would want more.
[Paul Solotaroff]
Sonja was really beginning to come apart.
There's no such thing as stable
in the career of a cokehead,
and she needed more and more and more.
At a certain point,
powder doesn't get it anymore.
At a certain point,
you're either gonna smoke it
or you're gonna shoot it.
And so, Sonja really benefited from having
the keys to this Pandora's box.
So, uh you had left off with me
in approximately early 2011,
when you had started to frequently take
powder cocaine samples from the lab?
Mm-hm.
[lawyer] And you indicated
your drug use got heavier
- by the middle of 2011, correct?
- [Sonja] Correct.
[lawyer] And is it fair to say
that you were under the influence
almost every day at work?
It's fair to say. Yes.
[lawyer] And it's fair to say, Ms. Farak,
that the amount of powder cocaine samples
coming into the lab began to decrease?
That's correct.
In 2011,
we seemed to be getting
less and less cocaine,
both in number of pieces
and evidence, but also quantity.
I mean, at that point,
if we got a tenth of a gram bag,
I couldn't really take anything from it
because it'd be noticeable.
[lawyer] Now, because these powder
cocaine samples were decreasing,
was there any other drug
that you began to experiment with in 2011?
[Sonja] I had already exhausted
the methamphetamine,
amphetamine and ketamine standards.
And then I did start trying
to smoke crack cocaine.
We had a small amount of base cocaine,
which is the chemical name in the lab,
which I tried smoking.
There was not a lot of it,
but I did start trying
to smoke crack cocaine.
And I say "try" because
I wasn't really good at it at first.
[lawyer] Can you explain why?
[Sonja] I had never been
a smoker in general.
I also was not prepared.
I was using aluminum foil pipes.
I was probably more timid
about trying not to get caught
because of the odor and the smoke.
Especially if you're using foil.
But I eventually made a crack pipe
with pipettes in the lab.
I would break off the tips.
Eventually, I got some copper wire
to put in, and when I did that,
I started to get better hits
and quickly became very addicted.
I did it at my workstation.
I actually smoked
in the evidence room.
[lawyer] Was this affecting
your productivity,
as far as you know,
in terms of your testing?
I believe it probably did lower it.
I was very in tune to what pieces
of evidence were coming up,
to try to manipulate the system
so I could get pieces of evidence
I wanted to analyze.
[Paul] So, Sonja, by 2012,
was not only an accomplished drug thief,
she was someone who had figured out
how to game the system.
She had access to drop-off schedules.
And she could manipulate
the rotation of assignments
so that she was next up
when a particularly big seizure
came through.
And it was essential that she keep getting
these seizures
of 20, 50, 100 grams or more,
so that the five percent skim was enough
to get her through the week.
[Sonja] I was going to smoke crack
at work multiple
like, ten, 12 times a day,
and that became longer.
I could sneak across the hallway
to the fume hood,
where I would smoke
just because I could get rid of the smell.
And that wasn't
a quick minute bathroom break.
- It was like--
- So you were just gone
from your workstation?
- Correct.
- Did anybody question you
at this point about absence
from your workstation?
I don't remember anyone commenting on it.
She's so out of control.
She's so unselfconscious
about, uh, what she's doing
and how she's coming off
to her colleagues.
She was leaving work so frequently
to get to the bathroom downstairs,
to get out to her car to smoke,
that her colleagues had
no choice but to notice
that someone was going to hell
right in front of them.
[tape recording playing]
You know
[Robin Whitney] Okay
So, Hanchett pulls her aside
in late 2012
and says, "What's going on with you?"
And she makes excuses.
She says she's going through
all sorts of constant crisis at home,
isn't feeling well,
and that's enough
to get Hanchett off her back.
[Sonja] My habit got bad enough
in the mid and later stages of 2012
where I was taking cocaine
from cases that I'd analyzed
and instead of using it as cocaine,
I would use that cocaine
to make crack for myself.
[Paul] Ultimately,
there wasn't enough powder cocaine
in all of Western Massachusetts
to keep her going.
And she crossed yet another bright line
when she went into work one night
and began cooking powder coke
into crack at her workstation.
[Sonja] Basically, I would make crack
by dissolving the cocaine in water,
adding baking soda
Heat it up, let it precipitate out,
and then I would form the crack.
I do remember one year,
there was one case that was a kilo
of cocaine that we had received
and I took out a good 100 grams of it
to make crack.
So, I wasn't necessarily
making small batches,
if I got a big enough submission
where I could make
a quantity worth my time.
By that point,
I was smoking at the lab,
smoking at home,
I was smoking and driving.
I don't want to say there was
no stopping me where I smoked, but I--
[lawyer] And that was because
of your addiction at this point, correct?
I was totally controlled by my addiction.
[Deborah Becker] At first, it was rumors.
They said, "We think she had
a drug problem for a long time."
You know. "It couldn't have been
a handful of samples.
It had to have been more than that."
The arrest was made
on those two cases at this time
[Deborah] But, was Sonja saying that
to not get in trouble,
or was the state saying that
to hide another drug lab crisis?
It was unclear.
I mean, at the time,
what I understood about Sonja Farak
was that she had been a good student.
She won chemistry awards,
she was her high school valedictorian.
She was described as someone
who was curious, sort of quiet,
athletic, hard-working.
She didn't seem
to stand out as someone
who would've had a drug problem
and would've been
misusing drug samples at all.
You know, it's easier to believe
that maybe Sonja Farak
only tampered with just a few cases.
And the public at the time
still didn't really know
any of these things about Sonja Farak.
I mean, we were still dealing
with Annie Dookhan
[bailiff] Court, all rise.
[Deborah] and in the public's eye,
Annie Dookhan was this rogue chemist.
[bailiff] The Honorable Court is open.
Please be seated.
The bad apple in the lab
lying about her academic credentials
and falsifying thousands of drug tests.
But, even at the sentencing,
it was sort of her problem.
[bailiff] solemnly swear
to make true answers
to such questions put to you by the court
now in hearing, so help you God?
- I do.
- [bailiff] Please step forward.
But there was a system here,
and she was rewarded for nine years
for testing thousands and thousands
of drug samples
when she couldn't possibly
have properly tested them all.
And you're pleading guilty here
because you are guilty?
[Annie] Yes, Your Honor.
Let me go through
your rights that you're giving up
by pleading guilty here today.
The first of those rights
is the right to remain silent
[Scott Allen] You know, Annie became
like this person who bore the burdens
for everybody, in a funny way.
She's the one who goes on trial, the one
that confessed, so she's the bad actor.
And she takes all the blame,
when really, she's just
a cog in a larger system.
[reporter] Why did Annie Dookhan do it?
She declined our request to explain,
but her lawyer says
the mother of a disabled young son
only wanted to help her career.
[lawyer] The furthest thing from her mind
is that this is gonna
ultimately cost millions of dollars,
it's gonna throw the entire
Massachusetts criminal justice system
into a tailspin
[Deborah] Her lawyer actually
argued for less time,
and said that she had not meant
to hurt anyone,
that she was just trying to do her job,
that she was rewarded
for being productive.
And she was very productive.
But she didn't realize the extent of
what she was doing
and how many people it would harm.
[bailiff] Annie Dookhan, the court,
having accepted your plea of guilty,
will now sentence you to be imprisoned
at the Massachusetts
Correctional Institution
[Deborah] So she was convicted
and sentenced to jail.
[bailiff] to a term of not more
than five years nor less than three years.
It was hard to watch.
Her father was very upset.
I can't imagine what that felt like,
to be there in court.
He had likely had
so many dreams for his daughter,
and, um, she obviously
felt pressure to do well and, uh
to watch it end like that,
I can't imagine what that felt like.
[reporter 1] As Dookhan was led away
to begin serving
a minimum three-year sentence,
authorities expect
it could take at least that long
to reconcile thousands of Dookhan cases
and restore faith
in the state's criminal justice system.
[car horn beeping]
[reporter 2] Former Massachusetts chemist
Annie Dookhan
was sentenced to
a three-to five-year prison term
for falsifying drug tests
affecting tens of thousands
of criminal cases,
but there's been little movement
to deal with all of the convictions
based on the lab's testing.
Matt Segal, with the Massachusetts
American Civil Liberties Union,
says his organization
is looking at legal ways
to try to get the state
to deal with the affected cases.
[Matt Segal on radio] The state has spent
hundreds of millions of dollars
on this scandal, and what have we gotten?
It certainly hasn't been justice.
[Matt Segal in interview] I was really
just a few months into the job
when the news hit
that a chemist had been arrested
for inventing the test results
that had put people in prison.
And so that's really when it started
and when we, at the ACLU of Massachusetts,
started to think about
the injustices that had happened
and what we could do to help.
And what we were thinking was
that the justice that needed to be done
was for all these convictions
to be wiped away,
and for the state to bear
the burden of doing that.
It was the right thing to do.
It was the way to do justice.
So the very first thing we did,
we sent a letter to Martha Coakley,
who was then the Attorney General.
We copied all
of the district attorneys and said,
more or less,
"Get rid of all these cases.
And if you don't
there's gonna be a lot of litigation.
There's gonna be a fight."
So we were dismissing cases.
You know, lower level cases,
left and right.
But at some point, the ACLU is saying,
"Treat this like a civil class action suit
and just get rid
of every single case that you have."
But even judges
were not prepared to do that,
because they'd never done that before.
You don't just dismiss cases
and a wave of defendants.
This is an emergency situation,
which is treated that way.
[Conley] Oh, we had defendants who had
been accused of serious trafficking.
Defendants who had been
parts of international gangs.
- [knocking]
- Police!
People who were wreaking havoc
in communities across Massachusetts,
- arrested with guns.
- [siren wailing]
The public reaction
to the Dookhan news was,
from my perspective as a defense lawyer
who cared about the wrongful convictions,
not very good.
There was a lot of misunderstanding
about, "Oh, my gosh,
someone did something wrong in the lab
and now all these crazy defense lawyers
want to let all these dangerous
drug dealers back out onto the street."
[reporter] Look at all these faces.
A fraction of the tens of thousands
of people Dookhan'd -
street slang for anyone
whose evidence she handled.
[Marx] There was very little
public awareness
that the vast majority
of the Dookhan defendants
were people who'd
already served their sentences,
who were non-violent drug offenders,
people who were already back at home
living with their families,
back at work in the community.
And really what we were
fighting about was whether or not
they should have an opportunity
to clear from their criminal record
a tainted drug conviction.
A tainted drug conviction which has
extraordinary collateral consequences
for someone's life.
[reporter] Hundreds of inmates
were serving time in cases
where she tested drug samples.
Officials say most
have violent criminal pasts.
We're not talking about
low-level drug addicts here.
We're talking about
high-level drug traffickers.
This should cause all of us concern.
I don't think
the district attorneys did anything
to kind of disabuse the public
of the misimpression that this was about
whether we were gonna let
a whole bunch of violent drug traffickers
out of prison and back onto the street.
It was never about that.
We weren't prepared to just say,
"We're gonna just wipe all of these out."
We did what we've been trained to do,
and that is resolve criminal cases
one case at a time.
Well, we knew exactly what that meant.
It meant that they were gonna fight
to keep the wrongful convictions.
So I called my friend Dan Marx.
He and I had gone to law school together
and I remembered him as being
one of the smartest people I'd ever met.
I'm in my office and Matt calls.
We had reconnected
after having gone to law school together.
[Matt] He said, "Look, we should
get all these convictions overturned.
We have to sue somebody,
but I'm not sure how we do it
or who we sue."
[Marx] "Would you be interested in trying
to develop a legal strategy
to deal with the lab scandal?"
It was something that, um
no reasonable lawyer
should have said yes to.
Um, well, it took, like, about two seconds
to think about.
Of course I was on board for that.
And so we sort of
immediately started working on it
because there's no blueprint for this.
Uh, you know, we knew a lot of things
that we needed to accomplish.
You know, we needed something
like a class action,
but this wasn't a class action.
We needed something
where we could demand
the court take
some kind of affirmative action
to rectify the situation,
as opposed to just try
to compensate individual people.
It was complicated. There's no precedent.
We'd never dealt with this before.
It's not like you just go into your online
legal research and type in "drug scandal"
and there are a whole bunch of cases
that tell you how to bring these lawsuits.
But, out in Western Massachusetts,
the Farak scandal was different
and potentially more troubling
because the scope
of what Sonja Farak did was not known.
And Luke Ryan was saying,
"There are some people literally locked up
as a result of the failure
of prosecutors to turn over evidence."
[door opens]
[Luke Ryan] Often I have the feeling
that I'm like a battlefield medic.
It's like you fight like hell
to try to save somebody
and, you know, you lose a patient
and you don't have time to grieve.
You just gotta run to the next one
and try to throw a bandage on
or do whatever you can.
And my client Rafael Rodriguez
was back in jail
because we lost at the Kinder hearing.
But I represent people
who have different rights
because they're
at different stages in the process.
So I had another client,
Rolando Peñate,
and he had been arrested
but was not convicted.
He hadn't been to trial
and he was being held in Ludlow
at the Hampden County House of Correction.
[speaking Spanish]
I was in prison in Ludlow,
watching the news,
and that's when her photo comes up.
Hampshire County chemist
says that average lab
I checked my papers,
and I knew that was the woman
who checked my drugs.
I thought they would let me go.
That's what I thought.
[Luke] So Rolando had been arrested
in Springfield.
He's alleged to have sold
to an undercover officer.
Alleged narcotics were
discovered in the house,
but I'd been led to believe
the case against him
was going to be dismissed
because Sonja Farak was
the chemist in his case.
So I proceeded to reach out
to the prosecutor and say,
"Hey, your chemist has been arrested
and she certainly wasn't going to testify,
so I assume
that the charges against Mr. Peñate
are gonna be dismissed."
But the prosecutor announced
that it was gonna be his intention
to have an expert police officer
testify that it sure looked like
heroin and cocaine to him.
So my client's liberty is being deprived
and now I'm being told
that we're gonna go to trial
with some cop
who's gonna get on the stand
and give this testimony
that no judge should allow.
[gavel banging]
And I was just so deflated and frustrated.
There's really nothing worse
in my profession
than giving a client reason to believe
something good is gonna happen,
then at your next visit say,
"Remember what I told you
about you getting out next week?
Well, that's not gonna happen."
[Rolando, in Spanish] So they made me
an offer. Three years in prison.
They were offering me a sentence,
but I didn't want to be found guilty.
And because of that, I went to court.
I told Ryan,
"Let's fight this, let's do this."
[Luke] So Rolando had been arrested
in 2011,
but Judge Kinder had ruled that,
based on all the available evidence,
Sonja Farak's misdeeds
had only occurred since July 2012.
So, because of this Kinder paradigm,
when Rolando went to trial,
I wasn't allowed to raise
Sonja Farak's tampering at all,
or her suspected drug addiction.
And I remember saying to the judge,
"I just want to get this straight.
The chemist in Mr. Peñate's case
is under indictment for evidence tampering
and a jury of his peers
isn't gonna hear about that?"
I felt like I was being forced
to participate in a process
that isn't fair,
and that was so frustrating,
it's difficult to put into words.
The jury found him guilty
of the sale that he allegedly made.
It was a punch in the gut.
I mean, back in March, I'd gone to court
expecting the case against Rolando Peñate
was gonna be dismissed.
And then, nine months later,
I'm sitting there and I'm watching him
get a seven-year prison sentence
for a $20 bag of of heroin,
and it just seemed incredibly excessive.
[Rolando, in Spanish] After I was
found guilty, they sent me to Walpole.
It's another world.
You look at a guard
and they're yelling at you,
"Why you look at me like that?"
And it wasn't easy for me at that time.
I would find myself so angry
about the sentence - seven years.
[bailiff] Sonja Farak, how do you
now plead to those two indictments,
each of which charge you
with tampering with evidence
and possession of
a Class B controlled substance,
that being cocaine?
[Sonja] Guilty.
[judge] Your conduct has,
whether you recognized it
at the time or not,
come at a great cost to the state.
[Amy Farak]
Sonja didn't want to go to jail.
Um nobody does.
But I think she knew it was
it was a real possibility.
[judge] I'm going to impose a sentence
of 18 months at the House of Correction.
[women talking and shouting]
[Amy] I feel like she needed help.
Um I felt that she could get
better help outside of jail.
I wanted her to get
whatever she needed to get better.
I was a little concerned knowing
that she'd worked for the State Police,
how that could be looked at,
um in jail.
Um
So it was it was a little scary,
I guess, for me, thinking about it.
She was really going to jail.
[buzz of conversation]
The first time I went to visit Sonja,
she was behind glass
and you had to talk over the phone.
And that was the communication,
and it was just surreal.
[laughing] I was, like, "This is how
I have to talk to my sister,
is through glass over a telephone."
[David Sullivan]
When I heard that she had pled guilty
and that she got a sentence of 18 months,
I thought that was a major blunder.
Once that plea got done,
I looked at it as a sweetheart deal.
She gets a sentence, but they didn't
get any information from her.
Where's the deal?
You know, I mean,
it's kind of a one-sided deal
that, "Okay, I do my time,
but I don't have to talk to you"?
"I don't have to tell you
exactly what happened"?
[woman 1] A plastic bag of crack cocaine,
copper mesh and a bag
of burnt copper mesh.
These are all items that are used
by someone who is smoking crack.
[woman 2] There were four separate,
distinct samples?
[woman 1] Correct.
[David] To me, that seemed intentional.
It was like they were saying,
"We don't wanna really hear from her.
We wanna make assumptions
that are good for us,
that contains this thing,
and says, 'Hey, we only have to deal
with six months of tampering.'"
And it was really that plea
that got me worried.
Worried that there was
there's somethin' more to this story.
[Jared Olanoff] So, after we lost
to the Attorney General
at the Kinder hearing, I moved on.
Um Luke didn't.
Luke kept fighting.
He kept trying to see the evidence.
The "assorted lab paperwork"
from Sonja Farak's car.
The Attorney General had said that
all the evidence had been emailed to us.
But Luke wanted to go
actually look at it in Boston,
and he spent months, after I was all done,
fighting for his clients
to just go look at it.
[Luke] Kris Foster at
the Attorney General's Office said,
"I cannot let Attorney Ryan
look at this evidence
while we have a pending prosecution
against Sonja Farak."
[Jared] Uh, Sonja Farak
had been sentenced.
Her case was no longer an "open case."
It wasn't an open investigation.
So the Attorney General's Office
had no reason to prevent Luke
from going to look at the evidence.
[Luke] So, I've been looking for this
for a very long time,
but by this point, I thought, "Well,
there's probably nothing for me to see.
Like, it really is inconsequential."
But I felt I had an obligation to do it
just by way of due diligence.
So I made arrangements to go
to the Attorney General's Office.
To the 19th floor,
where these three banker's boxes were
just sitting in a file waiting for me.
And there was a state trooper in the room
who was gonna be there
and watch me go through the boxes.
So I had spent a lot of time
trying to see this stuff,
to see what was in her car
when she got arrested.
It was about 21 months
after Sonja Farak's arrest.
Rafael Rodriguez is in prison,
Rolando Peñate is in prison.
And as I went through these papers,
I started to see things
that immediately were clear
had nothing to do with lab work.
Things that had headings
like "Emotion Regulation Worksheet,"
talking about the internal feelings
that Ms. Farak was experiencing
when getting, quote-unquote,
"a good sample."
This meant that Sonja Farak
was engaged in drug treatment,
and she was telling clinicians
about her drug use.
And I just kind of
went through, page by page,
with my cell phone,
taking a picture of this one
and that one over there
And I have a terrible poker face,
but I was trying
to just keep everything light,
and I was kind of scared
that the state trooper at the end
of the conference room table
was gonna figure out
some reason why this needed to stop.
And then I finally came across something
called the ServiceNet Diary Card.
At the top, it had days of the week
and dates in December, no year,
but on December 22nd,
a Thursday, if you looked down you saw
Sonja Farak checked the box
that made it clear
that she had used drugs on that day.
And then there was a narrative part
at the bottom of the document
where she wrote the words
"Tried to resist using at work,
but ended up failing."
And my heart started racing,
because I was thinking,
"Well, December 2011 is when
she was signing certificates
in Rolando Peñate's case.
I wonder could it possibly,
you know, line up?"
So, I got back to my office.
I need to see
Rolando Peñate's drug certificates
to see when in December she signed it.
And she signed
the first certificate in his case
on December 22nd, 2011.
So the big question in that moment was
what December 22nd
are we talking about here?
Is it December 22nd, 2011,
or some other year?
And as I scrutinized it, I looked
at the bottom, and it said on Saturday,
"Mad about missing part of Pats game."
You know, I'd looked
at the pictures of Sonja Farak's car
dozens and dozens of times.
She had "New England Patriots"
on the steering wheel of her car,
and the game would have been
Saturday, December 24th.
So when was the last time
that the Patriots played
a Christmas Eve game on a Saturday?
And the Internet is great
for warehousing information like that.
And I saw that they played
the Miami Dolphins in 2011.
So that meant that Sonja Farak had
performed the analysis in Rolando's case
on the same day that she tried to resist
using at work but ended up failing.
[lawyer]
Do you recall that day, Ms. Farak?
Yes, I do.
[lawyer] And how do you recall that day?
It was one day if you asked
if I was impaired at work,
I would have to say yes.
[Paul] It began like any other day.
[Sonja] I was using crack.
I remember
the submissions were small bags.
[Paul] She beams up
repeatedly that morning.
And then, sometime late morning,
she takes delivery of a sample of LSD.
[Sonja] Liquid LSD.
I took some and I remember
not being able to function too well.
[psychedelic rock music playing]
[lawyer] Did you take a substantial amount
of this liquid LSD?
I didn't measure the amount,
but I was very impaired.
[lawyer] And when you say "impaired,"
can you describe
I knew I couldn't drive.
There were some hallucinations,
not little green men, you know,
but colors swaying in the wind.
I remember going
to the bathroom to smoke crack.
After taking it and dropping some of it,
totally freaking out,
crawling on the floor trying to find crack
which I thought was there.
[lawyer] Did you do any tests that day?
[Sonja] That morning I analyzed
some tests on cocaine,
just to make sure I knew what it was.
That afternoon, I did not.
[Paul] Sonja Farak declares
in grand jury testimony
that she has no recollection
of doing drug analysis tests
at her workstation
that afternoon,
when in fact her notebook reveals
that she did multiple tests
on several different samples
and that she certified them
as positive for heroin.
And this included a drug certificate
for a Cuban refugee
named Rolando Peñate.
So this is evidence
that I was not given access to
that would have convinced
any juror to acquit Rolando Peñate.
And it meant that Sonja Farak had been
doing this for at least over a year
before she got arrested.
So it basically blew up
the Kinder paradigm.
And it seemed like this could be evidence
of a massive cover-up
by the Attorney General's Office.
The arrest was made on those two cases.
brought this
to our attention immediately.
These allegations do not implicate
the reliability of drug certificates
or fairness of trials against defendants.
[Luke] And maybe I found the smoking gun
in this whole sordid tale.
[reporter]
Today's the final day on the job
for longtime State Attorney General,
Martha Coakley.
After eight years as AG,
she's exiting elected office
after losing
[buzz of conversation]
[bagpipes playing]
[cheering]
[Shawn Musgrave] In 2015, in comes
a new Attorney General, Maura Healey.
Raise your right hand.
So, the Farak case was
under this big giant question mark
- I, Maura Healey
- Do solemnly swear.
and the ACLU was involved
in the Dookhan cases.
- I will bear true faith and allegiance
- To the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
To the Commonwealth
[Shawn] So the question was,
how is Maura Healey,
who's now in the driver's seat,
going to handle things that she inherited?
[Maura Healey]
And when I started in January of 2015,
our office under the prior administration
had prosecuted Dookhan and Farak.
They had been sentenced to jail
and we were in the midst
of learning more information
about just how significant the scope,
the ramifications of that conduct was
on individual cases.
[Marx] During that kind of transition,
there's a sense that it's an opportunity.
So yeah, I mean, I think we were
cautiously optimistic at the time,
but that's Again, that's also part
of being a defense lawyer.
[laughs] You you wouldn't do this
unless you can find a way
to be hopeful all the time.
[jazz band playing]
But I think we weren't kidding ourselves
about, you know,
this was going to be a long slog
and a tough fight.
And so we don't know
the exact number of those convictions.
In fact, we generally haven't been able
to find out these numbers
until the prosecutors give us
lists of cases.
[Matt] Our justice system is set up
to convict people of crimes.
And what we were seeing
with the Dookhan scandal
was that the structure,
the entire system exists
to make it so easy
to hold onto a wrongful conviction
and so hard to overcome it.
So the system is designed
to make it almost impossible
for a mass injustice
to lead to a mass exoneration.
[siren whoops]
[Deborah] So then
the American Civil Liberties Union
is trying to come up with a solution
to deal with all the affected cases.
What do we do with all these people
who are charged with drug crimes
now that Annie Dookhan
has been found guilty
and we know
that drug evidence was mishandled
and we know
that the lab wasn't properly run?
So they bring a lawsuit to
the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
[court official]
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.
All persons having anything to do
before the Honorables, the Justices
of the Supreme Judicial Court,
give your attendance
and you shall be heard.
[judge] SJC-11764.
[Matt] Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice.
May it please the Court,
Matthew Segal for the petitioners.
Thousands of people
whose rights were violated
by misconduct at the Hinton lab
will have no meaningful opportunity
to challenge their convictions.
[Deborah] But the District Attorneys
of Massachusetts do not think
that the cases should be dismissed.
The defendants' due process rights
vis-à-vis that have been addressed
[Matt] There wasn't even
a process in place
to identify the cases.
defendants overwhelmingly
convicted when they've gone to trial
using that defense
And to me, one of the most remarkable
signs of the injustices
that happened over the years
is that it took this lawsuit
and years of time
before we ever actually
got a list together.
[Marx] The fact that it was so hard
just to figure out the list of people
whose cases were processed
by Annie Dookhan
gives you a sense of this chaos.
What was going on there?
It should have been possible
to walk into that lab
and press a button on a computer
and generate a spreadsheet
of all her cases
with all the information
you need to correct those on day one.
It took years even to figure out
what cases she had worked on.
How's that possible?
[Deborah] And then there were rumblings
about the Farak case.
People were concerned that
uh, there may have been
more going on there
and it was actually a bigger story
than the state was letting on.
We hear about Attorney Luke Ryan,
and Ryan is alleging
that the Farak case was
particularly problematic.
[Shawn] So Luke has been one
of the main drivers of an investigation
into what happened
during the Farak prosecution.
He wanted to know
how could these worksheets
have been at the Attorney General's Office
and he was never told about them?
So Luke's really gunning
for an investigation,
specifically on the question
of whether the Attorney General's Office
and the Mass State Police
covered up the evidence.
[Luke] It didn't feel like an accident.
This was not something
that was just plain old human error.
Choices were made.
Somebody decided that this evidence
was not going to see the light of day,
and there needs to be accountability.
So I sent a letter to
the newly-elected Attorney General,
Maura Healey, and I said,
"Somebody needs to look into
the reasons why, uh, this happened."
So to her credit,
Maura Healey read our letter and decided,
"I need to appoint somebody
to look into this."
From the beginning,
we were trying to get this right
and that started with trying to figure out
what is it that actually happened here.
[Shawn] And so to investigate
Luke's claim of misconduct,
the Attorney General
appoints two retired judges.
Two judges,
and then they work with two troopers
from the Massachusetts State Police.
[Luke] They went and got captains
in the state police
and outsourced the investigation to them.
[Matt] Now, this is a bizarre way
to investigate prosecutorial misconduct,
because state troopers don't investigate
prosecutorial misconduct.
- [siren wailing]
- They investigate crimes.
And so they spent many, many months and
interview, uh, some witnesses,
including Kris Foster.
The troopers reviewed
more than 800 emails,
and assembled a bunch of exhibits.
And then the retired judges
submit their report.
And I didn't have to do that.
I didn't
I didn't need to do that report.
I just thought it made sense, as a matter
of having somebody do a look at
what had happened here within the office.
It wasn't the kind of work product
that we were expecting,
um, and it wasn't high quality.
[Matt] People call it a report,
but it's really just a letter,
which says there's nothing to see here.
No prosecutorial misconduct.
Everything's fine.
Essentially what the report amounted to
"Luke Ryan is unprofessional."
They found the only person
who did anything wrong was me.
[sighs]
And it tore into me,
called me unprofessional,
said I made baseless
and negligent allegations
and really just made a mockery
of what I'd been doing
for the last few years.
But their key finding was
this was not a cover-up
because here you can look
from these emails
that people in the Attorney General's
Office and the Mass State Police
knew about these documents,
they talked about these documents,
and said, "See attached disk
with all these emails."
We had to figure out,
how can we get this disk?
And it turns out the only copy
was in Judge Velis' possession.
So I had to call Judge Velis up,
somebody who's just endorsed
a report that said I behaved
in an unprofessional way,
and say, "Hey,
can I have a copy of the disk?"
And he said, "Sure."
And so I was, like, trembling mad at him
but I made arrangements to meet
at a Barnes & Noble at a mall
and took my mother with me
so that there would be a witness
in case we had words about his report.
So, it was a very pleasant conversation.
He gave me the disk.
I took the disk.
I went home. I put it in my computer.
And I remember when the thing popped up
and I suddenly had these threads.
They were in chronological order.
So I began and I clicked on
I think my first email
was a January 23rd one
where they were referring to personal
papers that were found in the car.
And I said, "Uh-oh.
Like, that's not assorted lab paperwork."
Anne Kaczmarek's told,
"Hey, we've got this other case
where it looks like she may have stolen
some oxycodones.
What do you want to do?"
And her response was,
"Please don't let this get
more complicated than we thought.
Maybe if she had a bad back,
that's the reason
she was taking the oxys?"
And then the critical email
from the state trooper.
After Farak was arrested,
the lead investigator
from Mass State Police
emails Anne Kaczmarek.
Subject line, "Farak admissions."
And then he had attached
a copy of the document,
uh, the ServiceNet Diary Card
where Farak disclosed
using drugs at the lab.
Like, the investigators
and the Attorney General's Office,
they were talking
about exactly these worksheets.
And it became clear, like,
they knew about this.
There's a bunch of people
who are talking about this
and they knew
about Sonja Farak's drug addiction.
It was also bizarre,
because I suddenly had
all of this new information
about how I was regarded,
how my work was regarded,
and they did not like me at all.
Anne Kaczmarek said I was rude.
She said I was aggressive.
She said I was untrustworthy.
She told Kris Foster
she really didn't like me.
So I had these mixed emotions
of, like, "Oh my God,
they're calling me an asshole"
and "Thank you so much
for giving me these things
that shows that exculpatory evidence
was not just overlooked,
but that they knew about it
and that they actively took steps
to, uh, keep this investigation
very, very small."
[Marx] Those emails, I think,
are one of the most powerful examples
of the inability of the system
to really ensure
that evidence that needs
to get turned over to defendants
does get turned over.
Um this case really captures that,
because you have the prosecutors
and the cops holding a piece of paper
that says, "On the day
that Sonja Farak tested the drugs
used to prosecute
and convict Luke Ryan's client,
she was high."
They're holding that piece of paper.
But their first instinct is
not to call Luke and say,
"Luke, I got something
really important that you need to see.
I'll send it over to you now."
It's to bury it.
I'm not trying to demonize anyone.
I don't know what was in their mind.
Um, as a defense lawyer,
I don't like to demonize people.
I think good people
give in to bad impulses.
Uh I think people wanna avoid work.
They wanna avoid embarrassment.
They wanna avoid losing cases.
Whatever the rationale was,
they were holding in their hand
damning evidence
about the state chemist in that case
and they didn't give it
to their defense lawyer.
[Maura] You know, um
ultimately, they're the prosecutors
who are in charge of of their cases.
I mean, I wasn't here under
I wasn't involved
with the Criminal Bureau work.
That was the prior administration.
I wasn't part of that, so I don't
I don't know the scope of it.
But, um, I certainly know that
you know, prosecutors
You know, you need to There are ethical
rules that you've gotta follow.
[Matt] It seemed like not only
did Kris Foster and Anne Kaczmarek
at the Attorney General's Office
fail to turn over evidence,
they also may have misled a judge,
Judge Kinder.
And in the spectrum
of prosecutorial misconduct,
that's about as bad as it gets.
I I was getting pretty angry
and pretty agitated.
I felt like this had been, uh
just a huge con job.
[David] So when I heard about the emails
and the scope of it
because Luke Ryan was
good enough to let me know
And that was the real revelation,
that this is this is big.
That really opened up the Pandora's box
for, uh, the Attorney General's Office
that this now was bigger than just,
uh, what they had been, uh, projecting.
Because they wanted to contain it.
They didn't want to pursue the truth.
They didn't want to know the full scheme.
They didn't want to know the truth.
And the truth was
that she'd been using drugs since 2004.