01x04 - Episode 4

[bunniefuu]

[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 f*ck' 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 expl*sive

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 sh*t 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]