How to Fix a Drug Scandal (2020) s01e04 Episode Script
Episode 4
1
[Luke Ryan] This is it right here.
Morrill Science Center.
[reversing system bleeping]
I've never been inside,
but we are fast approaching
what can fairly be described
as the scene of the crime.
Hi.
You would never know it was ever here
if you were just looking at this.
She left this building for the last time
on the morning of January 18th, 2013.
The state police showed up here,
um later that morning
and they shut the lab down.
I'm sure this is on many brochures
here at the the university.
It's really pretty.
I imagine, like, there was many times
where this was the scene that,
you know, Sonja Farak walked
out the door to uh
really fuckin' high.
[beeping]
[Linda Farak]
It's hard when you get out of jail.
She was demoralized.
You go to a job interview,
you're up-front, you're honest.
And not a problem, not a problem.
They offer the job. Day before you're
supposed to show up, they rescind it.
They did have a couple of people
knock on the door,
'cause it was in the news.
[sniffles]
Uh I just told them to go away.
Phone calls.
Just, "Nope. Not interested." Hang up.
[Amy Farak] You know,
it was difficult at first.
She didn't have a job.
She she couldn't drive.
So I'd spend a couple of weeks with her,
just to try to help her
with this, that, and the other thing.
There was a lot of difficulties
just trying to make sure she could get
to her probation officer.
Like, "Okay, I gotta catch
this bus at this time,"
and it gets cold and snowy in Northampton,
so in zero-degree temperatures,
she has to walk to the bus, which isn't
the worst in the world, I mean,
but it still was difficult for her to
to get basic necessities done.
It's trying to get back into society.
It seems like there's a gap.
It's like, "Okay, good luck.
You're out. Now, good luck."
It was difficult for her.
[Luke] So, Sonja Farak served
an 18-month sentence.
But ultimately, the government's
representations throughout
were an attempt to say,
"We caught this very quickly."
And my job was to not take that
at face value and to find the truth.
I wanted to figure out
when she really started using drugs
and tampering with evidence.
Because the longer
her misconduct was going,
the more people
whose rights were affected,
including my clients.
[Shawn Musgrave]
Luke had a few pieces of paper
showing that Sonja had gone
to substance abuse therapy.
But this isn't enough.
He knows that somebody else has records
and documentation of Sonja's timeline.
[Luke] I wanted to see
all of her therapist's records.
I wanted to see
what Sonja Farak told counselors
regarding her drug history.
[sighs]
And so I went before a judge
and got permission.
In March, they sent the records under seal
to the Hampden County Clerk's Office.
Because of the sensitive,
private nature of these records,
to view them,
I had to sign a protective order
and I couldn't get copies,
I couldn't, um
I couldn't tell anybody what I found.
I could just make some notes
at the clerk's office.
And as I open those up,
I immediately realize
that this was not something
that began in 2011.
[lawyer] You sought treatment
for your substance abuse.
So, the first therapist you saw,
you saw in 2009?
Yes.
[Luke] When she began treatment,
she spent about three months in therapy,
talking about stuff
that she was struggling with,
relationships, family background stuff.
[lawyer] And you had a good relationship
with that doctor?
I thought so.
And in addition to being really personal,
these records were sad.
It was her disclosing
the most deepest, darkest secrets
and the reasons why
she had come to this place in her life,
and how she excelled academically,
excelled athletically.
She was a groundbreaking member
of the boys' football team.
But she reported at a pretty early age
suffering from depression
and it continued
to really affect her life.
[lawyer] Were you being candid with her?
Yes.
[Luke]
I think it's very painful to be Sonja,
and I regret
having to advocate against her.
I mean, she could have been my client.
And her treatment
with a therapist continued.
[lawyer] And you told her
about your drug problem, right?
And then in April of 2009,
she went into a therapy session
and said, "You know what?
I'm a drug addict and I get all my drugs
from my place of employment.
And I've been doing this
since I started this job
back in 2004."
I told her about my drug problem
about three months after I started.
[Luke] And so we had gone from a situation
where the undisclosed evidence
affected hundreds of people,
to now we're talking thousands of people.
So, I knew about hundreds
of pages of records that show
Sonja Farak was using drugs at the lab
the entire time that she worked there.
And so I need to be able
to tell people what's there.
[Paul Solotaroff]
So, Luke is sitting on this evidence,
this crate of explosive
that will blow apart hundreds, if not
thousands, of cases that she had tested.
[Luke] And so I went in to the judge
and I essentially made the argument
that the liberty rights
of this large group of people
outweighed Sonja Farak's privacy rights
and maintaining the confidentiality
of the of the records.
And so the judge gave us permission
to give these records to the government.
Supposedly, those reports had been sealed.
I had no idea at the time
how long this had been going on.
Uh
I haven't read a lot of the reports
or anything like that.
But, uh, Sonja has admitted to me,
yeah, it was going on a little bit longer.
[Luke] Therapy is supposed to be
the place where you can close the door
and spill your guts.
So, I understood that I was
setting something in motion
that would likely lead to the disclosure
of very very personal stuff.
[Linda] It was devastating.
Everybody in the world could see
the whole thing.
I did not like the idea
of it being distributed to the masses,
but I had clients still in jail.
[squealing and laughter]
So, I had used the records actually
to advocate successfully
on Rafael Rodriguez's behalf
to get him out of prison on Easter 2015.
[child] Aaah!
Papi!
Hey, darling!
It it was it was, like,
a relief, just seeing my kids
It's like giving my kids what they wanted
and making them happy.
My husband was so happy.
[Rolando, in Spanish] I was incarcerated
in Cuba at a young age.
I was 12 years old when I was imprisoned.
I came to the United States in 1980.
I felt happy because at least
I was out of the prisons of Cuba,
out of the regime of Cuba.
Those years, I lost them.
Here, the only thing
they found me guilty of
is for a small bag of drugs
worth ten dollars.
Now I'm losing my life in prison,
here in Massachusetts.
[Luke] I don't approach
any client relationship
with the idea of "I know what
you're going through," because I don't.
I'm perpetually just confounded by
uh, the extreme social, political,
economic disadvantage that my clients
like Rolando Peñate
or Rafael Rodriguez have to endure.
[Madelyn] He tried looking for work.
And, uh once you're
you're convicted,
a convicted felon,
it's hard for you to get a job.
[Madelyn laughing]
They say that once you go bad,
there's no way back to good,
which is a lie because, you know,
I had a bad record and now I'm
I'm an account manager, you know.
God gave me a second chance
and I think that's the problem.
These people that are in jail,
they don't get a second chance.
Here you go. Hey.
Go get it! Go get it!
[Luke] When he got out of jail,
he didn't win the case on that day.
For the next year, he had to wonder,
"Am I gonna have to go back again?
Am I gonna end up serving
this four-to five-year prison sentence?"
And that whole period of time,
you know, we'd have all these court dates.
There were status conferences.
They were doing these investigations
about Farak's misconduct,
and he would, you know, be in touch,
mostly through Madelyn,
saying, "Hey, any news?
Are they gonna get rid of this case?"
And the message we got
time and time again was "No, they're"
You know, "They're committed
to continuing to prosecute this."
And so in the spring of 2016, he, um
[sighs]
Uh, he ended up, um
[Madelyn] I was at work
and my daughter calls and she goes,
"Mom, I'm calling Dad, you know,
I need him to come to school
and come and get me,
and he doesn't pick up the phone."
So, right there, I knew.
I'm like, "Something's up."
And I worked in Connecticut
and I told my, um, supervisor,
I'm like, "I gotta go.
Something's up with my husband."
This is where I found my husband.
Uh, right here, in this section.
So I called 911
and, um
when I called 911,
you know, I gave 'em my address.
I said what was going on,
that I was doing compressions already.
And, you know, the ambulance came in.
They took over.
And I just went to the porch
and I kneeled down
and I looked up into the sky
and I said, "Just give me strength.
That's it."
[sighs]
He he ended up, uh, overdosing.
[singing in Spanish]
It was just about a year and a couple
of weeks after, uh, I had gotten him out.
And uh
And maybe he would have been better off
if he'd just served the four to five.
Maybe he'd still be alive today
if he didn't have this
herky-jerk trip through
the Massachusetts criminal justice system.
[reporter] Today, justices consider
whether to dismiss
the thousands of cases
involving drug tests
done by former state chemist
Annie Dookhan.
WBUR's Deborah Becker reports.
[Deborah] Although Annie Dookhan
has already served her sentence
for falsifying drug tests,
the fight continues over what to do
about the criminal cases
where she tested the drug evidence.
- [Matt] Bye.
- [woman] Good luck.
[Deborah] Prosecutors put together
what's considered an official list
of cases affected by Dookhan's testing.
That list contains 24,000 cases.
The ACLU says most of those cases
are for low-level drug crimes.
[Matt Segal] Part of our analysis
of the cases that were provided to us
was that in 60 percent
of the Dookhan cases,
the only drug charges were for possession.
And in 90 percent of the cases,
the entire case
was brought in district court.
[bailiff] answer the charge
[Matt] And district court is
for less serious offenses.
condition is sufficient
So, in 90 percent of these cases,
someone had already decided
that these were not the most serious cases
in the Commonwealth,
and that someone was a prosecutor.
[Deborah] Matt Segal, Legal Director
of the ACLU of Massachusetts,
- will argue before
- [man] Today, the years-long legal battle
over a state drug lab scandal
goes before
the Massachusetts State Supreme Court.
[court official]
Hear ye. Hear ye. Hear ye.
[judge] SJC-12157.
Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice,
and may it please the Court.
This is another attempt
to toss out cases that were mishandled
by former state lab chemist Annie Dookhan.
Tens of thousands of convictions linked
to the Annie Dookhan drug lab scandal.
The district attorneys
who prosecuted those cases argue
they can all be retried one at a time.
Given that we have roughly 24,000 cases
that have gone unaddressed,
given that it has been over four years
since Annie Dookhan's misconduct
was disclosed,
my argument today will address why
a comprehensive remedy is needed
to resolve this crisis,
as well as the form
that a remedy should take.
- [judge] Okay, thank you.
- [bailiff] The Court will rise.
We were saying that the SJC
cannot do this on a case-by-case basis.
You need to step in in a bold way.
Keep in mind, all of those defendants
whose convictions were tied
to Annie Dookhan directly
have already served their time.
You need to acknowledge
we have a massive lab scandal.
They went to prison.
They served their sentence and are now
out, but they continue to suffer
[Marx] And you need to fix this
on a global basis.
[reporter] The Boston Herald is reporting
that Annie Dookhan is now out of prison.
And not just because of Annie Dookhan,
because you have another one coming.
The same thing is happening
in Western Massachusetts
with the Farak scandal.
[in Spanish] Ryan worked hard on the case.
All the motions we submitted,
they would deny.
He kept visiting me regularly.
He'd call me,
and we'd talk.
We became good friends.
He said, "Look, I'm going to
put in an appeal on your case."
[Luke] Eventually,
what I wrapped my mind around was the idea
that I wasn't just representing
people like Rolando Peñate
and Rafael Rodriguez,
I had an obligation to this whole class
of Farak defendants.
I mean, there were thousands
and thousands of criminal cases
whose convictions are likely invalid.
[judge] SJC-11761.
- All right. You may begin. Thank you.
- [lawyer] Good morning, Your Honors.
Today, uh, we are requesting
a conclusive presumption
of egregious misconduct
in, uh, this case and in every case
where Farak was the chemist
on the certificate of analysis.
The question is
what kind of an investigation do you say
the Commonwealth
should have done in this case?
An investigation into the timing
and the scope of her misconduct.
Evidence tampering,
and she was using drugs on the job.
And that undermines
the reliability of the testing.
[Shawn] The entire prosecution of Sonja
Farak by the Attorney General's Office
was predicated on this having been a
uh, just a few months when she was
tampering or stealing from samples.
And then the Supreme Judicial Court
issues their ruling
on the Farak defendants on appeal.
[bailiff] All rise.
Court is now in session.
You may be seated.
CPCS et al. versus the Office
of the Attorney General and the
[Shawn] And the Supreme Judicial Court
decided what the Attorney General's Office
had done was inadequate.
So, basically, this was
the state's highest court saying,
"We noticed that
you prosecuted Sonja Farak,
but no one actually investigated
what she did."
- That's what was going on.
- I would ask
that the parties discuss with me now
The court gave the Attorney General's
Office kind of an ultimatum.
"You're gonna do your own investigation,
or we're gonna look
to what our other options are."
The SJC said
to the Attorney General's Office,
"Your first investigation sucked.
Bad job."
[bailiff] Court will all rise.
"So, we want you to do
a new and improved investigation.
We can't make you do that
'cause we're the judicial branch
and you're the executive branch,
but, trust me, you really want
to take another shot at this."
[Maura Healey]
The high court called into question
just how long Sonja Farak
had engaged in this misconduct
and raised questions
about what the impact of that conduct
was going to be on these cases.
And so that's when we began in earnest
to go back and to look
at what happened here.
- [gavel bangs]
- [murmur of voices]
[lawyer] 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.
[lawyer] And you received a grand jury
subpoena to be here today, correct?
Correct.
I'm, uh
showing you Grand Jury Exhibit 1.
[Luke] If they didn't give her immunity,
she could assert
her Fifth Amendment right not to testify.
What is that that I placed before you?
What we wanted was the truth
and we thought the best way to get it
would be to put her in a position
where, um she was forced to tell it.
Uh, it's my grant of immunity.
So that is, for the record,
the immunity order that immunizes you
from any prosecution related to crimes
that you may talk about today
and on future dates.
Is that your understanding?
That is my understanding.
[David Sullivan] That's where
you really find the real story.
Because when you're given immunity,
you can be punished.
You can be, you know, charged with perjury
uh, for not telling the truth.
[lawyer] How long were you employed
as a chemist at Amherst?
Just under ten years.
[lawyer] How many samples
did you test in that ten years?
[Sonja] Uh, approximately 30,000
different pieces of evidence.
[Luke] A lot of her testimony
was not surprising,
because we had already gotten
her medical records.
But I think the thing
that stood out the most was just the
ways in which she described it
as such an easy thing to do.
Like, you knew she was doing it,
but when she talked about, just
"Yeah, I go over, I open up,
take out an eyedropper,
put it in my Diet Coke can."
Um, and nobody's the wiser
and every single day doing that.
And what it really laid bare was
the incredible free rein she had there
and the total absence
of any supervision and quality control
that existed at the lab.
My perception of her
in reading those minutes
was she was definitely a drug addict.
And and my natural tendency is
to really sympathize with drug addicts
and feel like they are suffering.
You said you attempted
periods of sobriety.
What would happen
when you stopped using methamphetamine?
[Sonja] I tried to have
periods of sobriety,
you know, a couple of weeks here
or whatnot,
but I was not super successful.
I would go through some withdrawals.
I think she said at one point,
like, she's using to prevent withdrawals.
[Sonja] Increasingly lethargic.
Tired beyond belief.
Having trouble focusing.
And even after those few days,
I would still have a lack of energy.
All the research I'd done about her,
and knowing
what a promising young person she was,
and how smart she was
[Sonja] I did try snorting phentermine,
but it clogged my nasal passages
so I ended up
just eating it.
[Luke] To realize, like
what she'd become
My habit increased a lot.
I I was going to smoke crack.
I I could sneak across the hallway
to the fume hood,
where I would smoke just because
I could get rid of the smell.
[Luke] I I felt really bad for her.
[Sonja] Multiple,
like, ten, 12 times a day.
[Luke] By the same token,
I think my anger was more
directed towards the people
who were in positions at that lab
who let that shit go down.
Like, there should have been
mechanisms in place
to prevent something like this.
[David] This whole thing
could have been avoided.
Hey, listen.
There was no drug test.
Drug tests for employees
have been around forever.
And doesn't it make logical sense
to have a pre-employment drug test
and then to randomly test people?
Especially in a drug lab?
They they need to have rules in place,
better rules than they had, in my opinion.
That's my opinion.
And they need to be drug tested.
We were drug tested. We were drug tested
every two years and then randomly.
I mean, why wouldn't you test someone
um, that's handling all the drugs?
When you look at society,
people have addictions.
And why is it surprising that Sonja Farak
or some other drug chemist that's testing
might have that addiction?
And she did. She had it from day one.
From day one,
the state could have avoided this.
But if she's high,
if she's on meth,
she's on crack,
that destroys
the reliability of that test.
It's it's not whether
she could do it or not do it.
It's the fact that when she's high
and doing tests,
you can't get in front
of a judge or a jury
and say, "This is reliable," anymore.
[Linda] All these lawyers
that want their clients off now
thinking that she may have
you know, tainted their evidence.
But she said to me, "They belong in jail."
You know, so she said,
"I know them people are guilty."
'Cause she says, "First of all,
if they didn't have real drugs,
I wouldn't have taken 'em."
Through all the years of taking drugs
and doing all these tests,
you didn't take any shortcuts
or make any mistakes?
I don't believe so at all.
It was a job that I loved from the get-go.
I do realize the responsibilities
and duties that were involved.
I know I crossed the line
you know, actually taking evidence.
I mean
I knew it was one of those things.
I know I'm going too far
when that happens.
I guess part of me knew
if I did the test accurately,
there wouldn't be any reason
for the test to be contested
and possibly re-analyzed.
If I did everything well,
there would be no reason
for anything to be questioned.
[reporter 1] Sonja Farak went to work high
for nearly eight years every day
to her job as a crime lab chemist
in Amherst.
[reporter 2] The full extent of former
state chemist Sonja Farak's behavior
[Shawn] So, after the retired judges
submit their report
and then the grand jury transcripts
were released
And now reporters like myself,
members of the public,
could see everything that Luke Ryan found
and that the Attorney General's Office
didn't reveal.
[reporter 3] After using
nearly all the lab's meth,
she moved on
to other drugs like LSD and
[Shawn] And there's still a question
of whether things were actively hidden
by the Attorney General's Office or not.
[Luke] Because the Attorney General's
Office was taking the position
that they didn't do anything wrong,
it became clear
that what I would need to do
was to select attorneys
from the AG's office,
the highest law enforcement in the state,
give them subpoenas,
bring them into court
and force them to testify.
We needed to hear from Anne Kaczmarek.
We needed to hear from Kris Foster.
We needed to hear from their supervisors
and from the state police.
The people who were involved
in all of this.
[court official] Court is now in session.
Please be seated.
- [Judge Carey] Morning, everybody.
- [people] Morning.
I'm not criticizing Judge Carey,
but he didn't have any sense
of what he was getting into.
But he quickly found out
what he was stuck with.
[Jared Olanoff]
Luke contacted me and said, "Jared,
I want you to come back in
and help fight this."
I said, "Luke, absolutely."
[Carey] Call your first witness.
[Jared] Can you please
state your full name?
- Randy L. Thomas.
- [Jared] How are you employed?
I'm a state trooper
in the Mass State Police,
assigned to the Attorney General's Office
in Springfield.
[Jared] Drawing your attention
back to January 18th, 2013
[Jared in interview] The purpose of
the Carey hearings were twofold.
One, the state's highest court said,
"Look, the first time around,
you guys didn't do
a thorough investigation.
You now need to do
a thorough investigation
into the timing and scope
of Farak's misconduct."
[Jared in court] You then applied
for a search warrant to search her car.
- Correct?
- [Randy] Yes.
And then part two.
How how are
these mental health worksheets
which prove
that Sonja Farak tampered for years,
how are they just coming out now,
years later?
And why are they just coming out?
[Luke] And so before doing that,
you didn't think it would be prudent
to go through, uh, these couple
of hundred pieces of paper
to see if what you were telling the court
that you seized was, in fact, accurate?
[Randy] The car was
full of paperwork.
[Luke] The stakes were incredibly high,
and they were not just high for my client,
they were high for a class
of 10,000 people,
uh or more.
Yeah, I felt this extraordinary pressure
of, if we were going to get to the bottom
of this, it was on us to to do it.
Like, this was gonna be it.
[Shawn] I attended those hearings.
They were pretty extraordinary,
because it's defense attorneys
getting to ask state troopers
how they did their jobs.
[Luke] Some of the paperwork
that you, uh, seized
Current and former prosecutors,
how they did their jobs.
[lawyer] In our criminal case, obviously,
striving to identify the scope
of misconduct by Miss Farak.
We were examining prosecutors
all the way up the chain.
[Luke] Were you employed
by the Massachusetts
- Attorney General's Office?
- [man] Yes.
They were being cross-examined
by the very person they were accused
of mistreating, Luke Ryan.
I I gotta say, I mean,
I've never seen anything like it.
[Luke] Now, uh, who did you assign
to respond to this motion?
[man] Uh, Kris Foster.
And it became very, very clear,
the best way to use that time
was to really focus on our allegations
of prosecutorial misconduct
by referencing all of these emails
that I now had.
[Luke] Showing an email
to Anne Kaczmarek.
Have you seen this email before?
That's where everything was,
it was right in the emails.
There was a document in the emails
called a prosecution memo
and in that prosecution memo
that was written by Anne Kaczmarek,
she talks about
those mental health worksheets.
And she never turned them over.
[Luke] Have you ever seen
this document before?
[man] You know, this looks like
it might have been one of those
uh, mental health worksheets,
does that answer your question?
Luke had his witnesses.
When Luke was done I'd say,
"Judge, may I just have two minutes?"
[Jared] Did Kris Foster ever,
uh, tell you where she got that line
that every document's been disclosed?
[man] Uh, I don't recall
her ever telling me that.
[laughs]
And I would have
two minutes' worth of questions.
Just boom, boom, boom.
"When did you know that these,
like, seven pieces of paper
uh, were in Farak's car
and put into this evidence box,
but not handed to defense attorneys?"
Like, that was really the issue.
And then the judge
would actually break in.
[Carey] I'm curious
to find out what happened.
Whether or not, um, this was
a very, very high-profile, busy case
where people did the best they could,
or whether somebody buried, intentionally
uh credible, important
exculpatory evidence.
Um, what I'm hearing a lot of
is second-hand and third-hand hearsay.
"Uh, did you get copied on this email?"
"Well, what did you think of that?"
Da, da, da, da, da.
I mean, where's the beef?
[Luke] Could you
state your name for the record?
- Yes. My name's Anne Kaczmarek.
- [Luke] Uh
Ms. Kaczmarek, my name's Luke Ryan.
I don't think we've met before.
[Buffy] That was when
it became kind of exciting.
Because I'd been
covering these for so long
and to actually see
um, Anne on the stand
Luke Ryan actually
started off his questioning
by handing Anne Kaczmarek an email
in which she had said
that she doesn't like Luke Ryan.
[Luke speaking]
[Anne speaking]
Finally it started to get into,
like, "Tell me about this day."
Like, "Here here is your email
where you got
these worksheets sent to you.
What did you do next?"
[Luke speaking]
[Anne speaking]
[Jared speaking]
[Anne] I
[Shawn] And you could just
feel people starting to tense up,
because this was what
Luke Ryan and the defense attorneys
had been working for
for all this time, was to get answers
to questions that weren't in the emails.
[Jared speaking]
[Anne speaking]
[Marx] I think the testimony
in front of Judge Carey
was a major revelation,
uh, in the sense that, um
you essentially had,
uh, prosecutors acknowledging
that they hadn't been
candid to the court.
That they hadn't turned over evidence
they should have.
[Jared speaking]
[Kris] Uh AAG Kaczmarek told me
that she that it those documents
she didn't want turned over
she didn't want produced.
They had already
everything had already been produced.
[Shawn] And then Luke asked Kris Foster
[Shawn] And that moment in particular
was just so tense.
He says, "Here's this letter
that you wrote to this judge.
Was this a lie?"
[Luke speaking]
[Shawn] And then you get her answer,
which was "No."
[Kris] No.
[Luke speaking]
[Matt] She hadn't reviewed
a single document. Not one.
And, therefore, she had no idea
whether anything had been turned over.
So, Foster may have thought
that she did a bang-up job
testifying in December 2016,
but what it really was
was the most
dramatic confession
to wrongdoing that I have ever seen.
[Luke speaking]
[Marx] Judge Carey's report was shocking.
Um it's
it's hard to overstate how unusual it is
for a judge, uh,
to say in such explicit terms,
uh, that prosecutors have engaged
in such serious misconduct.
Um
I mean, "fraud on the court"
sounds like a
sort of lawyerly phrase, um
but it has a certain resonance
in the legal world.
And the consequences it had
for people who were trying
to challenge their wrongful convictions,
uh, it was shocking.
You you don't see
many documents like that.
There should be a lot more of them,
but you don't see them often.
[train passing]
[sighs]
Come on, Lupe.
Lorenzo, Lupe
[woman] Aah!
[speaking Spanish]
[laughing]
[in English] My grandson, it's
Ah, it's my my family, you know.
[all speaking Spanish]
- [squawking]
- Ya, ya, ya, Lupe!
[Scott Allen] Once you carry
some sort of a criminal record, you know,
it gets harder and harder
to get any kind of a decent job.
And if you also have relatively few,
like, credentials or skills,
you're you're outside looking in,
no matter what.
It's like, a lot of these people
were extremely marginal.
Uh, and then some of 'em,
they, like, went to jail for years
based on the evidence from Annie Dookhan.
[Matt] There were thousands of defendants
who'd been wrongfully convicted,
who were continuously being punished.
People can be barred from public housing.
People can lose jobs.
People can lose professional licenses.
You know, their punishment wasn't over
when they got out of prison.
They were being punished every day.
[Shawn] In the Dookhan case,
all of the work by the ACLU
and the public defenders culminates
in this incredible ruling.
The SJC told prosecutors,
"You have a choice. You can either dismiss
Dookhan defendants,
just dismiss their cases outright,
or you can come back to us and say
that you could convict these people again
without Dookhan's analysis."
Today is deadline day
for district attorneys across the state
who continue to deal
with the damage done by Annie Dookhan.
[Daniel Conley]
Ultimately, the court said to us,
"Look, basically, you'd better
dump a bunch of these cases
or we're gonna have to do it for you."
So for the vast majority of cases,
we dismissed them.
The ACLU of Massachusetts
and Fick & Marx
secured a record-setting 21,839 dismissals
of drug convictions.
And it's more than 20,000 cases
get dismissed.
This is a huge win for the ACLU
and then they're
teeing up litigation over Farak.
We now expect
to secure the dismissal
of thousands of convictions
tainted by Sonja Farak
and by the misconduct
of the Massachusetts
Attorney General's Office.
[court official]
Hear ye. Hear ye. Hear ye.
All persons having anything to do
before the Honorable, the Justices
of the Supreme Judicial Court
now sitting in Boston
within and for the Commonwealth.
Draw near, give your attendance
and you shall be heard.
[judge] SJC-12471.
[Matt] Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice.
May it please the Court.
There are thousands
of wrongfully convicted people
yet again before the Court.
ACLU says, here we have another chemist
who, uh, committed fraud.
And then we've got these prosecutors
who also committed fraud
and did all these things to hide evidence.
This is the most significant
record of harm
as a consequence
of prosecutorial misconduct
that the Court has ever seen.
They were extending the suffering
of thousands of people.
[reporter] The largest mass dismissal
of criminal convictions in US history.
[Scott] Maybe it starts with these two
chemists and their psychological needs,
but it ends up being
one of the biggest miscarriages of justice
in American history.
So, that's a pretty profound thing
all by itself.
And it also showed us a lot of things
that people take for granted.
The machinery of justice.
The people who make it work,
they're not benign.
They're not neutral, necessarily.
If we don't insist on it, then they
won't be fair and and impartial.
Watching this unfold has taught me
a lot about the role of defense attorneys
in the legal system,
and how they keep prosecutors accountable.
Because what ultimately
brought this all to light
was a lot of very
pour a Scotch in there
- [Shawn] very
- Oh, was that on camera?
- [laughing]
- Sorry!
just
relentless attorneys
filing motion after motion,
getting denied over
and over and over again for years
seemingly knowing in their gut
that something had gone wrong.
I want to say hi to Luke.
- [applause]
- [woman] Yeah!
[Matt] And if you haven't heard,
Luke found some evidence
- that is relevant.
- [laughter]
Oh, I see that Dan Marx is here.
- Hey, Dan Marx.
- [applause]
We also have T-shirts available
for each of you.
[laughter]
- [woman] Thank you, Matt!
- [cheering]
- [crowd cheering]
- [commentator] And Brady throws.
And touchdown!
- [laughing]
- Nice to see you.
Oh, my God! You all right?
- You look great.
- Aah
- I don't like it.
- [laughs]
[Luke Ryan] This is it right here.
Morrill Science Center.
[reversing system bleeping]
I've never been inside,
but we are fast approaching
what can fairly be described
as the scene of the crime.
Hi.
You would never know it was ever here
if you were just looking at this.
She left this building for the last time
on the morning of January 18th, 2013.
The state police showed up here,
um later that morning
and they shut the lab down.
I'm sure this is on many brochures
here at the the university.
It's really pretty.
I imagine, like, there was many times
where this was the scene that,
you know, Sonja Farak walked
out the door to uh
really fuckin' high.
[beeping]
[Linda Farak]
It's hard when you get out of jail.
She was demoralized.
You go to a job interview,
you're up-front, you're honest.
And not a problem, not a problem.
They offer the job. Day before you're
supposed to show up, they rescind it.
They did have a couple of people
knock on the door,
'cause it was in the news.
[sniffles]
Uh I just told them to go away.
Phone calls.
Just, "Nope. Not interested." Hang up.
[Amy Farak] You know,
it was difficult at first.
She didn't have a job.
She she couldn't drive.
So I'd spend a couple of weeks with her,
just to try to help her
with this, that, and the other thing.
There was a lot of difficulties
just trying to make sure she could get
to her probation officer.
Like, "Okay, I gotta catch
this bus at this time,"
and it gets cold and snowy in Northampton,
so in zero-degree temperatures,
she has to walk to the bus, which isn't
the worst in the world, I mean,
but it still was difficult for her to
to get basic necessities done.
It's trying to get back into society.
It seems like there's a gap.
It's like, "Okay, good luck.
You're out. Now, good luck."
It was difficult for her.
[Luke] So, Sonja Farak served
an 18-month sentence.
But ultimately, the government's
representations throughout
were an attempt to say,
"We caught this very quickly."
And my job was to not take that
at face value and to find the truth.
I wanted to figure out
when she really started using drugs
and tampering with evidence.
Because the longer
her misconduct was going,
the more people
whose rights were affected,
including my clients.
[Shawn Musgrave]
Luke had a few pieces of paper
showing that Sonja had gone
to substance abuse therapy.
But this isn't enough.
He knows that somebody else has records
and documentation of Sonja's timeline.
[Luke] I wanted to see
all of her therapist's records.
I wanted to see
what Sonja Farak told counselors
regarding her drug history.
[sighs]
And so I went before a judge
and got permission.
In March, they sent the records under seal
to the Hampden County Clerk's Office.
Because of the sensitive,
private nature of these records,
to view them,
I had to sign a protective order
and I couldn't get copies,
I couldn't, um
I couldn't tell anybody what I found.
I could just make some notes
at the clerk's office.
And as I open those up,
I immediately realize
that this was not something
that began in 2011.
[lawyer] You sought treatment
for your substance abuse.
So, the first therapist you saw,
you saw in 2009?
Yes.
[Luke] When she began treatment,
she spent about three months in therapy,
talking about stuff
that she was struggling with,
relationships, family background stuff.
[lawyer] And you had a good relationship
with that doctor?
I thought so.
And in addition to being really personal,
these records were sad.
It was her disclosing
the most deepest, darkest secrets
and the reasons why
she had come to this place in her life,
and how she excelled academically,
excelled athletically.
She was a groundbreaking member
of the boys' football team.
But she reported at a pretty early age
suffering from depression
and it continued
to really affect her life.
[lawyer] Were you being candid with her?
Yes.
[Luke]
I think it's very painful to be Sonja,
and I regret
having to advocate against her.
I mean, she could have been my client.
And her treatment
with a therapist continued.
[lawyer] And you told her
about your drug problem, right?
And then in April of 2009,
she went into a therapy session
and said, "You know what?
I'm a drug addict and I get all my drugs
from my place of employment.
And I've been doing this
since I started this job
back in 2004."
I told her about my drug problem
about three months after I started.
[Luke] And so we had gone from a situation
where the undisclosed evidence
affected hundreds of people,
to now we're talking thousands of people.
So, I knew about hundreds
of pages of records that show
Sonja Farak was using drugs at the lab
the entire time that she worked there.
And so I need to be able
to tell people what's there.
[Paul Solotaroff]
So, Luke is sitting on this evidence,
this crate of explosive
that will blow apart hundreds, if not
thousands, of cases that she had tested.
[Luke] And so I went in to the judge
and I essentially made the argument
that the liberty rights
of this large group of people
outweighed Sonja Farak's privacy rights
and maintaining the confidentiality
of the of the records.
And so the judge gave us permission
to give these records to the government.
Supposedly, those reports had been sealed.
I had no idea at the time
how long this had been going on.
Uh
I haven't read a lot of the reports
or anything like that.
But, uh, Sonja has admitted to me,
yeah, it was going on a little bit longer.
[Luke] Therapy is supposed to be
the place where you can close the door
and spill your guts.
So, I understood that I was
setting something in motion
that would likely lead to the disclosure
of very very personal stuff.
[Linda] It was devastating.
Everybody in the world could see
the whole thing.
I did not like the idea
of it being distributed to the masses,
but I had clients still in jail.
[squealing and laughter]
So, I had used the records actually
to advocate successfully
on Rafael Rodriguez's behalf
to get him out of prison on Easter 2015.
[child] Aaah!
Papi!
Hey, darling!
It it was it was, like,
a relief, just seeing my kids
It's like giving my kids what they wanted
and making them happy.
My husband was so happy.
[Rolando, in Spanish] I was incarcerated
in Cuba at a young age.
I was 12 years old when I was imprisoned.
I came to the United States in 1980.
I felt happy because at least
I was out of the prisons of Cuba,
out of the regime of Cuba.
Those years, I lost them.
Here, the only thing
they found me guilty of
is for a small bag of drugs
worth ten dollars.
Now I'm losing my life in prison,
here in Massachusetts.
[Luke] I don't approach
any client relationship
with the idea of "I know what
you're going through," because I don't.
I'm perpetually just confounded by
uh, the extreme social, political,
economic disadvantage that my clients
like Rolando Peñate
or Rafael Rodriguez have to endure.
[Madelyn] He tried looking for work.
And, uh once you're
you're convicted,
a convicted felon,
it's hard for you to get a job.
[Madelyn laughing]
They say that once you go bad,
there's no way back to good,
which is a lie because, you know,
I had a bad record and now I'm
I'm an account manager, you know.
God gave me a second chance
and I think that's the problem.
These people that are in jail,
they don't get a second chance.
Here you go. Hey.
Go get it! Go get it!
[Luke] When he got out of jail,
he didn't win the case on that day.
For the next year, he had to wonder,
"Am I gonna have to go back again?
Am I gonna end up serving
this four-to five-year prison sentence?"
And that whole period of time,
you know, we'd have all these court dates.
There were status conferences.
They were doing these investigations
about Farak's misconduct,
and he would, you know, be in touch,
mostly through Madelyn,
saying, "Hey, any news?
Are they gonna get rid of this case?"
And the message we got
time and time again was "No, they're"
You know, "They're committed
to continuing to prosecute this."
And so in the spring of 2016, he, um
[sighs]
Uh, he ended up, um
[Madelyn] I was at work
and my daughter calls and she goes,
"Mom, I'm calling Dad, you know,
I need him to come to school
and come and get me,
and he doesn't pick up the phone."
So, right there, I knew.
I'm like, "Something's up."
And I worked in Connecticut
and I told my, um, supervisor,
I'm like, "I gotta go.
Something's up with my husband."
This is where I found my husband.
Uh, right here, in this section.
So I called 911
and, um
when I called 911,
you know, I gave 'em my address.
I said what was going on,
that I was doing compressions already.
And, you know, the ambulance came in.
They took over.
And I just went to the porch
and I kneeled down
and I looked up into the sky
and I said, "Just give me strength.
That's it."
[sighs]
He he ended up, uh, overdosing.
[singing in Spanish]
It was just about a year and a couple
of weeks after, uh, I had gotten him out.
And uh
And maybe he would have been better off
if he'd just served the four to five.
Maybe he'd still be alive today
if he didn't have this
herky-jerk trip through
the Massachusetts criminal justice system.
[reporter] Today, justices consider
whether to dismiss
the thousands of cases
involving drug tests
done by former state chemist
Annie Dookhan.
WBUR's Deborah Becker reports.
[Deborah] Although Annie Dookhan
has already served her sentence
for falsifying drug tests,
the fight continues over what to do
about the criminal cases
where she tested the drug evidence.
- [Matt] Bye.
- [woman] Good luck.
[Deborah] Prosecutors put together
what's considered an official list
of cases affected by Dookhan's testing.
That list contains 24,000 cases.
The ACLU says most of those cases
are for low-level drug crimes.
[Matt Segal] Part of our analysis
of the cases that were provided to us
was that in 60 percent
of the Dookhan cases,
the only drug charges were for possession.
And in 90 percent of the cases,
the entire case
was brought in district court.
[bailiff] answer the charge
[Matt] And district court is
for less serious offenses.
condition is sufficient
So, in 90 percent of these cases,
someone had already decided
that these were not the most serious cases
in the Commonwealth,
and that someone was a prosecutor.
[Deborah] Matt Segal, Legal Director
of the ACLU of Massachusetts,
- will argue before
- [man] Today, the years-long legal battle
over a state drug lab scandal
goes before
the Massachusetts State Supreme Court.
[court official]
Hear ye. Hear ye. Hear ye.
[judge] SJC-12157.
Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice,
and may it please the Court.
This is another attempt
to toss out cases that were mishandled
by former state lab chemist Annie Dookhan.
Tens of thousands of convictions linked
to the Annie Dookhan drug lab scandal.
The district attorneys
who prosecuted those cases argue
they can all be retried one at a time.
Given that we have roughly 24,000 cases
that have gone unaddressed,
given that it has been over four years
since Annie Dookhan's misconduct
was disclosed,
my argument today will address why
a comprehensive remedy is needed
to resolve this crisis,
as well as the form
that a remedy should take.
- [judge] Okay, thank you.
- [bailiff] The Court will rise.
We were saying that the SJC
cannot do this on a case-by-case basis.
You need to step in in a bold way.
Keep in mind, all of those defendants
whose convictions were tied
to Annie Dookhan directly
have already served their time.
You need to acknowledge
we have a massive lab scandal.
They went to prison.
They served their sentence and are now
out, but they continue to suffer
[Marx] And you need to fix this
on a global basis.
[reporter] The Boston Herald is reporting
that Annie Dookhan is now out of prison.
And not just because of Annie Dookhan,
because you have another one coming.
The same thing is happening
in Western Massachusetts
with the Farak scandal.
[in Spanish] Ryan worked hard on the case.
All the motions we submitted,
they would deny.
He kept visiting me regularly.
He'd call me,
and we'd talk.
We became good friends.
He said, "Look, I'm going to
put in an appeal on your case."
[Luke] Eventually,
what I wrapped my mind around was the idea
that I wasn't just representing
people like Rolando Peñate
and Rafael Rodriguez,
I had an obligation to this whole class
of Farak defendants.
I mean, there were thousands
and thousands of criminal cases
whose convictions are likely invalid.
[judge] SJC-11761.
- All right. You may begin. Thank you.
- [lawyer] Good morning, Your Honors.
Today, uh, we are requesting
a conclusive presumption
of egregious misconduct
in, uh, this case and in every case
where Farak was the chemist
on the certificate of analysis.
The question is
what kind of an investigation do you say
the Commonwealth
should have done in this case?
An investigation into the timing
and the scope of her misconduct.
Evidence tampering,
and she was using drugs on the job.
And that undermines
the reliability of the testing.
[Shawn] The entire prosecution of Sonja
Farak by the Attorney General's Office
was predicated on this having been a
uh, just a few months when she was
tampering or stealing from samples.
And then the Supreme Judicial Court
issues their ruling
on the Farak defendants on appeal.
[bailiff] All rise.
Court is now in session.
You may be seated.
CPCS et al. versus the Office
of the Attorney General and the
[Shawn] And the Supreme Judicial Court
decided what the Attorney General's Office
had done was inadequate.
So, basically, this was
the state's highest court saying,
"We noticed that
you prosecuted Sonja Farak,
but no one actually investigated
what she did."
- That's what was going on.
- I would ask
that the parties discuss with me now
The court gave the Attorney General's
Office kind of an ultimatum.
"You're gonna do your own investigation,
or we're gonna look
to what our other options are."
The SJC said
to the Attorney General's Office,
"Your first investigation sucked.
Bad job."
[bailiff] Court will all rise.
"So, we want you to do
a new and improved investigation.
We can't make you do that
'cause we're the judicial branch
and you're the executive branch,
but, trust me, you really want
to take another shot at this."
[Maura Healey]
The high court called into question
just how long Sonja Farak
had engaged in this misconduct
and raised questions
about what the impact of that conduct
was going to be on these cases.
And so that's when we began in earnest
to go back and to look
at what happened here.
- [gavel bangs]
- [murmur of voices]
[lawyer] 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.
[lawyer] And you received a grand jury
subpoena to be here today, correct?
Correct.
I'm, uh
showing you Grand Jury Exhibit 1.
[Luke] If they didn't give her immunity,
she could assert
her Fifth Amendment right not to testify.
What is that that I placed before you?
What we wanted was the truth
and we thought the best way to get it
would be to put her in a position
where, um she was forced to tell it.
Uh, it's my grant of immunity.
So that is, for the record,
the immunity order that immunizes you
from any prosecution related to crimes
that you may talk about today
and on future dates.
Is that your understanding?
That is my understanding.
[David Sullivan] That's where
you really find the real story.
Because when you're given immunity,
you can be punished.
You can be, you know, charged with perjury
uh, for not telling the truth.
[lawyer] How long were you employed
as a chemist at Amherst?
Just under ten years.
[lawyer] How many samples
did you test in that ten years?
[Sonja] Uh, approximately 30,000
different pieces of evidence.
[Luke] A lot of her testimony
was not surprising,
because we had already gotten
her medical records.
But I think the thing
that stood out the most was just the
ways in which she described it
as such an easy thing to do.
Like, you knew she was doing it,
but when she talked about, just
"Yeah, I go over, I open up,
take out an eyedropper,
put it in my Diet Coke can."
Um, and nobody's the wiser
and every single day doing that.
And what it really laid bare was
the incredible free rein she had there
and the total absence
of any supervision and quality control
that existed at the lab.
My perception of her
in reading those minutes
was she was definitely a drug addict.
And and my natural tendency is
to really sympathize with drug addicts
and feel like they are suffering.
You said you attempted
periods of sobriety.
What would happen
when you stopped using methamphetamine?
[Sonja] I tried to have
periods of sobriety,
you know, a couple of weeks here
or whatnot,
but I was not super successful.
I would go through some withdrawals.
I think she said at one point,
like, she's using to prevent withdrawals.
[Sonja] Increasingly lethargic.
Tired beyond belief.
Having trouble focusing.
And even after those few days,
I would still have a lack of energy.
All the research I'd done about her,
and knowing
what a promising young person she was,
and how smart she was
[Sonja] I did try snorting phentermine,
but it clogged my nasal passages
so I ended up
just eating it.
[Luke] To realize, like
what she'd become
My habit increased a lot.
I I was going to smoke crack.
I I could sneak across the hallway
to the fume hood,
where I would smoke just because
I could get rid of the smell.
[Luke] I I felt really bad for her.
[Sonja] Multiple,
like, ten, 12 times a day.
[Luke] By the same token,
I think my anger was more
directed towards the people
who were in positions at that lab
who let that shit go down.
Like, there should have been
mechanisms in place
to prevent something like this.
[David] This whole thing
could have been avoided.
Hey, listen.
There was no drug test.
Drug tests for employees
have been around forever.
And doesn't it make logical sense
to have a pre-employment drug test
and then to randomly test people?
Especially in a drug lab?
They they need to have rules in place,
better rules than they had, in my opinion.
That's my opinion.
And they need to be drug tested.
We were drug tested. We were drug tested
every two years and then randomly.
I mean, why wouldn't you test someone
um, that's handling all the drugs?
When you look at society,
people have addictions.
And why is it surprising that Sonja Farak
or some other drug chemist that's testing
might have that addiction?
And she did. She had it from day one.
From day one,
the state could have avoided this.
But if she's high,
if she's on meth,
she's on crack,
that destroys
the reliability of that test.
It's it's not whether
she could do it or not do it.
It's the fact that when she's high
and doing tests,
you can't get in front
of a judge or a jury
and say, "This is reliable," anymore.
[Linda] All these lawyers
that want their clients off now
thinking that she may have
you know, tainted their evidence.
But she said to me, "They belong in jail."
You know, so she said,
"I know them people are guilty."
'Cause she says, "First of all,
if they didn't have real drugs,
I wouldn't have taken 'em."
Through all the years of taking drugs
and doing all these tests,
you didn't take any shortcuts
or make any mistakes?
I don't believe so at all.
It was a job that I loved from the get-go.
I do realize the responsibilities
and duties that were involved.
I know I crossed the line
you know, actually taking evidence.
I mean
I knew it was one of those things.
I know I'm going too far
when that happens.
I guess part of me knew
if I did the test accurately,
there wouldn't be any reason
for the test to be contested
and possibly re-analyzed.
If I did everything well,
there would be no reason
for anything to be questioned.
[reporter 1] Sonja Farak went to work high
for nearly eight years every day
to her job as a crime lab chemist
in Amherst.
[reporter 2] The full extent of former
state chemist Sonja Farak's behavior
[Shawn] So, after the retired judges
submit their report
and then the grand jury transcripts
were released
And now reporters like myself,
members of the public,
could see everything that Luke Ryan found
and that the Attorney General's Office
didn't reveal.
[reporter 3] After using
nearly all the lab's meth,
she moved on
to other drugs like LSD and
[Shawn] And there's still a question
of whether things were actively hidden
by the Attorney General's Office or not.
[Luke] Because the Attorney General's
Office was taking the position
that they didn't do anything wrong,
it became clear
that what I would need to do
was to select attorneys
from the AG's office,
the highest law enforcement in the state,
give them subpoenas,
bring them into court
and force them to testify.
We needed to hear from Anne Kaczmarek.
We needed to hear from Kris Foster.
We needed to hear from their supervisors
and from the state police.
The people who were involved
in all of this.
[court official] Court is now in session.
Please be seated.
- [Judge Carey] Morning, everybody.
- [people] Morning.
I'm not criticizing Judge Carey,
but he didn't have any sense
of what he was getting into.
But he quickly found out
what he was stuck with.
[Jared Olanoff]
Luke contacted me and said, "Jared,
I want you to come back in
and help fight this."
I said, "Luke, absolutely."
[Carey] Call your first witness.
[Jared] Can you please
state your full name?
- Randy L. Thomas.
- [Jared] How are you employed?
I'm a state trooper
in the Mass State Police,
assigned to the Attorney General's Office
in Springfield.
[Jared] Drawing your attention
back to January 18th, 2013
[Jared in interview] The purpose of
the Carey hearings were twofold.
One, the state's highest court said,
"Look, the first time around,
you guys didn't do
a thorough investigation.
You now need to do
a thorough investigation
into the timing and scope
of Farak's misconduct."
[Jared in court] You then applied
for a search warrant to search her car.
- Correct?
- [Randy] Yes.
And then part two.
How how are
these mental health worksheets
which prove
that Sonja Farak tampered for years,
how are they just coming out now,
years later?
And why are they just coming out?
[Luke] And so before doing that,
you didn't think it would be prudent
to go through, uh, these couple
of hundred pieces of paper
to see if what you were telling the court
that you seized was, in fact, accurate?
[Randy] The car was
full of paperwork.
[Luke] The stakes were incredibly high,
and they were not just high for my client,
they were high for a class
of 10,000 people,
uh or more.
Yeah, I felt this extraordinary pressure
of, if we were going to get to the bottom
of this, it was on us to to do it.
Like, this was gonna be it.
[Shawn] I attended those hearings.
They were pretty extraordinary,
because it's defense attorneys
getting to ask state troopers
how they did their jobs.
[Luke] Some of the paperwork
that you, uh, seized
Current and former prosecutors,
how they did their jobs.
[lawyer] In our criminal case, obviously,
striving to identify the scope
of misconduct by Miss Farak.
We were examining prosecutors
all the way up the chain.
[Luke] Were you employed
by the Massachusetts
- Attorney General's Office?
- [man] Yes.
They were being cross-examined
by the very person they were accused
of mistreating, Luke Ryan.
I I gotta say, I mean,
I've never seen anything like it.
[Luke] Now, uh, who did you assign
to respond to this motion?
[man] Uh, Kris Foster.
And it became very, very clear,
the best way to use that time
was to really focus on our allegations
of prosecutorial misconduct
by referencing all of these emails
that I now had.
[Luke] Showing an email
to Anne Kaczmarek.
Have you seen this email before?
That's where everything was,
it was right in the emails.
There was a document in the emails
called a prosecution memo
and in that prosecution memo
that was written by Anne Kaczmarek,
she talks about
those mental health worksheets.
And she never turned them over.
[Luke] Have you ever seen
this document before?
[man] You know, this looks like
it might have been one of those
uh, mental health worksheets,
does that answer your question?
Luke had his witnesses.
When Luke was done I'd say,
"Judge, may I just have two minutes?"
[Jared] Did Kris Foster ever,
uh, tell you where she got that line
that every document's been disclosed?
[man] Uh, I don't recall
her ever telling me that.
[laughs]
And I would have
two minutes' worth of questions.
Just boom, boom, boom.
"When did you know that these,
like, seven pieces of paper
uh, were in Farak's car
and put into this evidence box,
but not handed to defense attorneys?"
Like, that was really the issue.
And then the judge
would actually break in.
[Carey] I'm curious
to find out what happened.
Whether or not, um, this was
a very, very high-profile, busy case
where people did the best they could,
or whether somebody buried, intentionally
uh credible, important
exculpatory evidence.
Um, what I'm hearing a lot of
is second-hand and third-hand hearsay.
"Uh, did you get copied on this email?"
"Well, what did you think of that?"
Da, da, da, da, da.
I mean, where's the beef?
[Luke] Could you
state your name for the record?
- Yes. My name's Anne Kaczmarek.
- [Luke] Uh
Ms. Kaczmarek, my name's Luke Ryan.
I don't think we've met before.
[Buffy] That was when
it became kind of exciting.
Because I'd been
covering these for so long
and to actually see
um, Anne on the stand
Luke Ryan actually
started off his questioning
by handing Anne Kaczmarek an email
in which she had said
that she doesn't like Luke Ryan.
[Luke speaking]
[Anne speaking]
Finally it started to get into,
like, "Tell me about this day."
Like, "Here here is your email
where you got
these worksheets sent to you.
What did you do next?"
[Luke speaking]
[Anne speaking]
[Jared speaking]
[Anne] I
[Shawn] And you could just
feel people starting to tense up,
because this was what
Luke Ryan and the defense attorneys
had been working for
for all this time, was to get answers
to questions that weren't in the emails.
[Jared speaking]
[Anne speaking]
[Marx] I think the testimony
in front of Judge Carey
was a major revelation,
uh, in the sense that, um
you essentially had,
uh, prosecutors acknowledging
that they hadn't been
candid to the court.
That they hadn't turned over evidence
they should have.
[Jared speaking]
[Kris] Uh AAG Kaczmarek told me
that she that it those documents
she didn't want turned over
she didn't want produced.
They had already
everything had already been produced.
[Shawn] And then Luke asked Kris Foster
[Shawn] And that moment in particular
was just so tense.
He says, "Here's this letter
that you wrote to this judge.
Was this a lie?"
[Luke speaking]
[Shawn] And then you get her answer,
which was "No."
[Kris] No.
[Luke speaking]
[Matt] She hadn't reviewed
a single document. Not one.
And, therefore, she had no idea
whether anything had been turned over.
So, Foster may have thought
that she did a bang-up job
testifying in December 2016,
but what it really was
was the most
dramatic confession
to wrongdoing that I have ever seen.
[Luke speaking]
[Marx] Judge Carey's report was shocking.
Um it's
it's hard to overstate how unusual it is
for a judge, uh,
to say in such explicit terms,
uh, that prosecutors have engaged
in such serious misconduct.
Um
I mean, "fraud on the court"
sounds like a
sort of lawyerly phrase, um
but it has a certain resonance
in the legal world.
And the consequences it had
for people who were trying
to challenge their wrongful convictions,
uh, it was shocking.
You you don't see
many documents like that.
There should be a lot more of them,
but you don't see them often.
[train passing]
[sighs]
Come on, Lupe.
Lorenzo, Lupe
[woman] Aah!
[speaking Spanish]
[laughing]
[in English] My grandson, it's
Ah, it's my my family, you know.
[all speaking Spanish]
- [squawking]
- Ya, ya, ya, Lupe!
[Scott Allen] Once you carry
some sort of a criminal record, you know,
it gets harder and harder
to get any kind of a decent job.
And if you also have relatively few,
like, credentials or skills,
you're you're outside looking in,
no matter what.
It's like, a lot of these people
were extremely marginal.
Uh, and then some of 'em,
they, like, went to jail for years
based on the evidence from Annie Dookhan.
[Matt] There were thousands of defendants
who'd been wrongfully convicted,
who were continuously being punished.
People can be barred from public housing.
People can lose jobs.
People can lose professional licenses.
You know, their punishment wasn't over
when they got out of prison.
They were being punished every day.
[Shawn] In the Dookhan case,
all of the work by the ACLU
and the public defenders culminates
in this incredible ruling.
The SJC told prosecutors,
"You have a choice. You can either dismiss
Dookhan defendants,
just dismiss their cases outright,
or you can come back to us and say
that you could convict these people again
without Dookhan's analysis."
Today is deadline day
for district attorneys across the state
who continue to deal
with the damage done by Annie Dookhan.
[Daniel Conley]
Ultimately, the court said to us,
"Look, basically, you'd better
dump a bunch of these cases
or we're gonna have to do it for you."
So for the vast majority of cases,
we dismissed them.
The ACLU of Massachusetts
and Fick & Marx
secured a record-setting 21,839 dismissals
of drug convictions.
And it's more than 20,000 cases
get dismissed.
This is a huge win for the ACLU
and then they're
teeing up litigation over Farak.
We now expect
to secure the dismissal
of thousands of convictions
tainted by Sonja Farak
and by the misconduct
of the Massachusetts
Attorney General's Office.
[court official]
Hear ye. Hear ye. Hear ye.
All persons having anything to do
before the Honorable, the Justices
of the Supreme Judicial Court
now sitting in Boston
within and for the Commonwealth.
Draw near, give your attendance
and you shall be heard.
[judge] SJC-12471.
[Matt] Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice.
May it please the Court.
There are thousands
of wrongfully convicted people
yet again before the Court.
ACLU says, here we have another chemist
who, uh, committed fraud.
And then we've got these prosecutors
who also committed fraud
and did all these things to hide evidence.
This is the most significant
record of harm
as a consequence
of prosecutorial misconduct
that the Court has ever seen.
They were extending the suffering
of thousands of people.
[reporter] The largest mass dismissal
of criminal convictions in US history.
[Scott] Maybe it starts with these two
chemists and their psychological needs,
but it ends up being
one of the biggest miscarriages of justice
in American history.
So, that's a pretty profound thing
all by itself.
And it also showed us a lot of things
that people take for granted.
The machinery of justice.
The people who make it work,
they're not benign.
They're not neutral, necessarily.
If we don't insist on it, then they
won't be fair and and impartial.
Watching this unfold has taught me
a lot about the role of defense attorneys
in the legal system,
and how they keep prosecutors accountable.
Because what ultimately
brought this all to light
was a lot of very
pour a Scotch in there
- [Shawn] very
- Oh, was that on camera?
- [laughing]
- Sorry!
just
relentless attorneys
filing motion after motion,
getting denied over
and over and over again for years
seemingly knowing in their gut
that something had gone wrong.
I want to say hi to Luke.
- [applause]
- [woman] Yeah!
[Matt] And if you haven't heard,
Luke found some evidence
- that is relevant.
- [laughter]
Oh, I see that Dan Marx is here.
- Hey, Dan Marx.
- [applause]
We also have T-shirts available
for each of you.
[laughter]
- [woman] Thank you, Matt!
- [cheering]
- [crowd cheering]
- [commentator] And Brady throws.
And touchdown!
- [laughing]
- Nice to see you.
Oh, my God! You all right?
- You look great.
- Aah
- I don't like it.
- [laughs]