01x01 - Episode 1

[bunniefuu]

[woman speaking]

[audio fades out]

[audio fades in]

[trooper] Okay.

[speaking hesitantly]

- [trooper] Mm-hm.

- [Farak] Um

- [trooper] Mm-hm.

- [Farak] Um

[trooper] Mm-hm.

[trooper] Um

[man] At these drug labs,

a single chemist can do

a few dozen cases every day.

Hundreds of cases in a month.

It depends on what types

of samples they're analyzing,

how productive they are,

how easy the tests are.

There are a lot of variables to determine

how many cases a given chemist

can go through,

but no matter what, it's a lot.

Thousands of cases a year.

[man 2] People don't think an awful lot

about the drug labs.

I mean, it's sort of one of those

machinery-of-government kind of places

that you just assume

they're doing their job

unless you're told otherwise.

[woman] Thirty-five-year-old Sonja Farak

worked here at the Massachusetts

State Crime Lab in Amherst.

It's amazing to think about the impact,

the ripple effect

of a single person's act.

[Shawn] And it turns out it's not just

one, but two chemists in Massachusetts.

[woman] Chemist Annie Dookhan

mishandling evidence

[man] Essentially, what has happened

is 25 to 30,000 cases

have been dumped into our laps.

[man 3] This isn't just a scandal

about bad science.

It is a scandal about bad law.

Do you have anything to say

[man 3] I mean, if Dookhan had been

a little bit less brazen,

and if Farak had been

a little more careful,

no one would've ever known.

[siren wailing]

[man 4]

Massachusetts is a challenging place

to do criminal defense

and civil rights work.

You know, I think nationally,

we're known as

sort of this liberal outpost.

We produce the Kennedys of the world,

and John Kerry, and Mike Dukakis,

and so people think of it as,

you know, the bluest of blue states.

But when it comes

to criminal justice issues

[exhales] this is not

a progressive place.

You know, I think the story

of the drug lab scandals

Look, it's complicated,

because Eastern Mass and Western Mass,

they're really kind of

two separate worlds.

Different newspapers,

different media cycles,

different legal communities.

And so it wasn't really clear,

the extent to which

things had gone wrong in the labs.

And it took years to figure out

what really had happened.

[gavel bangs]

[man] I would like

to begin an investigation

into the facts and circumstances

of criminal misconduct

at the drug testing laboratory

located in Amherst.

Ma'am, can you please state your name

and spell your last name for the record?

My name is Sonja Farak.

And Farak is spelled F-A-R-A-K.

[man] And how old are you now?

I'm 37.

How long were you employed as a chemist

for the Department of Public Health

and later the Mass State Police,

how many years?

Just under ten years.

How many samples

did you test in that ten years?

Uh Approximately

30,000 different pieces of evidence.

[birdsong]

My name's James Connolly.

I was a homicide investigator

for 20 years,

and after that I was promoted to Major

and I went to the State Police Crime Lab.

I got a call, I think it was January 18th,

from Jim Hanchett.

He was the Amherst lab supervisor.

He called me and said

that the night before,

Sharon Salem, one of the chemists

who'd handle the evidence,

couldn't find two samples.

So we went out to see for ourselves

what had been done.

[trooper] Okay, and so, um

[James] They looked in the evidence locker

and temporary locker and didn't find them.

They went to Sonja's desk.

We opened one of the drawers

and there was a tub

and a piece of manila paper on it.

[trooper] Okay.

[James]

He found the cases in her work area.

The cases were done.

They were completed, they were sealed,

but they were both sliced open.

She had done the work weeks before that.

And initially when she ran it

through the computer,

both of them tested positive for cocaine.

He couldn't understand

why it was still at her desk.

The analysis had been completed.

Why is it still at her desk?

So he tested both cases

and both cases came up negative,

which looked to him

like she took the drugs

and replaced them with, uh, fake drugs.

When Jim Hanchett showed me

the fake drugs,

I called my colonel,

and then I called

the Hampshire District Attorney's Office

and asked them

to help us investigate this.

I was in a training in Central Mass,

and I got a call in the late morning

from a Major Jim Connolly.

Major Connolly was in charge

of the drug labs in Massachusetts.

I remember vividly him saying,

"We have a problem."

Drugs were found

at the desk of Sonja Farak,

a chemist who worked

at the Department of Public Health Lab

located at University of Mass.

They were missing

they were looking around for a file,

and it appears that she's been

tampering with some drugs.

I asked, "How long

has Sonja been working there?"

He said, "2004."

So the State Police unit that's attached

to my District Attorney's Office

was notified.

At that point, they focused on,

"Where is Sonja Farak?"

[David] She was down in Hampden County.

She was going to be testifying

in a Hampden Superior Court case.

So we sent a couple troopers down there

and they followed her, um

while she was at the court.

[woman] I was in Framingham when a call

came in from the drug lab in Amherst.

They were missing some evidence.

And they believed

they knew who might've taken it.

My name is Robin Whitney.

I retired from the State Police

as a Detective Lieutenant

in charge of the District Attorney's

Office in the Northwestern District.

Our goal at that point was

to try and locate Sonja Farak.

Sonja was in the courthouse,

waiting to testify on a drug case.

She went on a lunch break,

went to her motor vehicle.

She sat in her car.

Um

Maybe had lunch, we're not quite sure.

There was a thought that, you know,

"How do we know

that she's not dipping her head

to have clam chowder or drugs?"

You know, you you didn't know.

You couldn't tell.

So I follow her back to the courtroom

and I just, you know, introduce myself.

Said, "We'd like to have a conversation

with you." She agrees to that.

We advised her of her rights

[Robin] Okay.

and sat down and had a conversation.

She almost immediately

decided not to talk,

so she invoked, uh, her Fifth Amendment,

but they did get a search warrant

for her motor vehicle.

[phone ringing]

[woman] I got the original phone call,

like-- What was it?

Midnight, one o'clock in the morning,

you know.

Anytime you get a phone call

at that time of night, something's wrong.

But I had-- I just couldn't understand it.

I couldn't believe it.

I figured there had to be a mistake.

There had to be, 'cause not Sonja.

She didn't say too much on the phone,

basically that, uh she was arrested,

and that there were some drugs in the car.

[David] So the investigation started

here at our office,

but we knew that the scope of this

could be very large.

That this is a case

that our office would not handle

because it would be a direct conflict.

I mean, when you're investigating somebody

who's tampered with evidence,

and we have thousands of cases

that we've prosecuted,

that's a direct conflict.

So we had to get

the Attorney General's Office involved.

That's usually the agency that handles

conflicts with District Attorneys.

[woman] Good afternoon, everybody.

Massachusetts Attorney General

Martha Coakley,

uh, and with me is Colonel

of the State Police Timothy Alben.

In my 25 years as a prosecutor,

both State and Federal,

I have seen prosecutors, police,

even defense lawyers,

who have, in some way,

because of the lure of cocaine,

heroin, the addiction, the money,

fail in a way that has really required us

to develop systems

so that we can identify it

as soon as possible.

As a result of quick action

by the State Police and by our office,

uh, we have been able to bring charges

against Sonja Farak,

age 35, of Northampton.

She was arrested last night

and we have charged her

with two counts of tampering with evidence

and one count of possession

of a Class B substance, cocaine.

She'll be arraigned Tuesday morning

in Eastern Hampshire District Court.â™

[man] Now, uh

can you describe for the grand jurors

your duties and responsibilities

as a chemist at the drug laboratory?

[Sonja speaking]

[lawyer] Can you describe

what are controlled substances?

[Sonja] The most common one is heroin.

Cocaine, marijuana

different pills.

[interviewer] Why does no one know

what a bench chemist is?

[chuckles] Um

Well, I would think any chemist

would know what a bench chemist is.

This is not a term that's specific

to forensic chemistry by any means.

There's bench chemists

in all fields of chemistry.

I think the general public

doesn't know about,

you know, drug chemistry in particular

because it's not on the TV shows.

You're not gonna find a Forensic Files

or a CSI: Miami or whatever

that covers a drug case.

It doesn't make for compelling,

interesting stories.

So I don't think it gets the exposure.

[interviewer] So why are we here?

Well, sometimes it does.

[woman] In Massachusetts tonight,

a drug lab scandal is sending shock waves

through the state's

criminal justice system.

A State Police chemist is suspected

of altering drug samples,

faking test results,

and listing some drug samples as positive

even though she allegedly

never tested them.

[man] So, just six months before

the revelations about Sonja Farak,

the Annie Dookhan scandal

implicated tens of thousands of cases,

created an enormous stir in the press

Do you have anything to say at all

about the allegations? Can you tell us

and an enormous run

on the District Courts.

I've been covering the w*r on Drugs

for almost exactly 30 years now.

First started in 1988 in the fall,

writing a story called "Dead Boys"

about ten- and 12-year-old kids

selling their bodies

on the West Side Docks

for five-dollar crack rocks.

And nothing has changed in those 30 years

except the size of the population.

Annie Dookhan's alleged actions

corrupted the integrity

of the entire criminal justice system,

and there are many victims

as a result of this.

First, of course, are the defendants who,

when charged in a criminal justice system,

have the right to expect

that they will be given due process

and that there will be fair

and accurate information used

in any prosecution against them.

[man] It was very clear from the beginning

of the Annie Dookhan situation

that you had someone

essentially faking lab results.

Faking it in a way that is resulting

in people being wrongfully convicted.

Annie Dookhan created havoc

for at least six counties.

She may have compromised

thousands of cases

and she cost the State

millions of dollars.

[Daniel] The Farak scandal was different.

I don't think anyone had a sense of the

potential scale when this first started.

The State Attorney General's Office says

that Amherst lab worker Sonja Farak

Are you embarrassed?

allegedly removed

a substance from a case file

that tested positive for cocaine,

and replaced it with one

that did not test positive.

This whole area is private property

run by homeowners.

- Please leave the premises.

- Will you say anything to co-workers--

Just for you guys to please leave now.

Thank you.

[Daniel] When the scandal breaks,

how do you make a statement

that no one's been wrongfully convicted?

How do you know?

We believe, on the face of it,

that these allegations do not implicate

any system-wide practices

that would implicate the reliability

of drug certificates

[Paul] So, it was very clear

in Coakley's remarks,

in the Farak press conference,

that she and her office,

the Attorney General's Office,

were gonna do everything

in their power to limit the damage,

to limit the footprint

of this new scandal,

and to limit the scope to just two cases.

the arrest was made

on those two cases at this time, uh

[David] When you give a press conference,

you talk about what you know

and what you don't know.

So, you really can't say at that point

anything more than, "She was arrested.

There was paraphernalia found,

there was a little bit of drugs in the car

and there was drugs missing from the lab."

But as far as going

out on a limb on day one

and saying, "Hey,

this is what we've concluded"

These drugs were tested,

they were tested fairly

It's just not the way that you do it.

She did not have all the facts.

Nobody had all the facts,

and as soon as this happened,

there was always going to be

a question as to what was reliable,

what was unreliable at that lab.

And I give a lot of credit to Luke Ryan.

He really dug deep,

and the more that he looked at it,

the more he uncovered.

My name is Luke Ryan.

I'm a defense attorney

in Western Massachusetts.

The importance of the chemistry part

of a drug prosecution

cannot be overstated,

but it's the part of the drug case

that is the least sexy.

There are no snitches involved.

There are no cops doing

you know, breakin' down doors.

This is people in lab coats

looking in their microscopes,

and I think the presumption

people have is that, you know,

everything that they take off the street

is what it appears to be.

And so they think that, you know,

most defendants are guilty.

But when you talk about people

who have track records

and who have criminal records,

they are easily, in my experience,

the most vulnerable

to being wrongfully convicted.

And so, when Sonja Farak got arrested,

I knew that I had clients

with drug offenses

where she had done the testing.

So it seemed to me immediately,

"This is gonna be a big deal

for some of the people I represent."

Like Rafael Rodriguez.

[woman] When I was with Rafael,

I felt protected.

I felt like he protected me and my kids.

I don't know, just the times we spent,

we were always together

and we made the best of it.

- Here, he was always making us laugh.

- [laughter on video]

- [giggling]

- [snoring]

Always play-fighting,

like, on my mom's bed.

- That was the fun part.

- [Madelyn] Making the sandwich.

Yeah, we would

all just jump on top of each other.

[mumbles]

[girl] He was kind of more like a friend.

He was kind of like

He was kind of more like

a best friend than a dad.

[Madelyn] I worked,

so he was always with the kids.

You know, like, they would go to the park,

to anywhere, they were always out.

In the summer, they would go to here,

to the the public pool,

and they would be there.

And, um that's where the guy showed up.

He was an informant, he had an open case,

so if he had information on somebody

that had a criminal record,

he would set them up.

He kept on calling my husband

and he set him up.

It was cocaine.

At first, I felt really hurt,

because it was like

I always told him from the beginning,

"When you feel like you're gonna relapse,

let me know so I can help you.

You know, we can get help."

When he went to prison,

I told my kids, you know,

"He did something bad

and he's doing time."

I've never been an addict.

I-- I don't understand

what they go through,

or or what sets them

to to want to use drugs.

We would go visit, we would play dominoes

and just spend time with him.

[interviewer] What was it like to talk to

your friends about that? Or did you not?

I really didn't talk about it that much.

I have my few select friends

that I talk to about my dad.

Every crime has a set of elements,

things the government has to prove

in order to establish

that you're guilty of the crime.

It can be something as simple

as you're charged with drunk driving.

They need to prove

that you were driving on a public street.

You know, a guy takes a golf cart

and drives around the golf course.

Is that a public street or not?

So things that seem

like silly details in a case

actually become important.

In a drug case,

if you are prosecuted

and charged with selling a joint,

the question is, is that really marijuana?

If it's not, you're not guilty.

The government has to prove,

and prove beyond a reasonable doubt,

that the thing

they're accusing you of doing,

which is against the law,

you've actually done.

[Richard Nixon]

This nation faces a major crisis

in terms of the increasing use of drugs.

We have the laws now.

We're going to go out

and enforce those laws.

[man] Officers now do not need

a search warrant

to enter a home suspected

of containing ill*gal drugs.

[George HW Bush] This

This is crack cocaine.

It's as innocent-looking as candy.

But it's turning our cities

into battle zones.

[Daniel] If you're gonna fight

a w*r on drugs,

you need to build an entire system

designed around finding those people

who manufacture, ship, sell and use

the drugs you decide are ill*gal,

and then a system

to prosecute them and imprison them.

There are huge agencies at the local

level, the state level, the federal level.

It's everything from the police officers

to the prosecutors to the court officials

to the prison guards to the administrators

to the lab scientists.

There are billions of dollars

that flood into this system

to perpetuate this w*r on drugs,

which we've now been fighting

since the 1970s.

In order to convict someone

because of some substances

that we've decided are ill*gal,

you need a scientist

to look at that substance

and say, "Yes, this is cocaine,"

or "This is heroin," or

"This is marijuana," or not.

[man] Certain substances form

a distinctive crystal.

This is the crystal for heroin.

Here's the crystal for cocaine.

And that's an essential part of the case,

because if the government can't prove

that, then they can't convict anyone.

So, when you get

the evidence to your bench,

you will do

a preliminary description of the evidence.

You want to verify chain of custody,

uh, just making sure

that all the dates and times

and signatures and numbers match up

as you, uh, look

at the various paperwork and items.

You move on to take a weight,

the net weight, which is the weight

of the drug material only.

And then we will go through

a series of tests.

At that point,

we would do a spot color test.

Basically, we put a very small amount

of different reagents in some wells

in a ceramic plate, a drop or two of each,

and certain substances cause

certain color changes with their agents.

With other substances,

we would add some of the sample to a vial

and seal it to be run

on the mass spectrometer.

The mass spectrometer blasts ions

at the chemical,

which breaks the chemical

into kind of like a chemical fingerprint.

And so we can compare that fingerprint

to the fingerprint

of standards or controls.

When we're done,

we put it into a brand-new evidence bag,

and we would initial

and heat-seal it closed.

At that point, we would verify

that the results on the certificate

matched our results in the notebook

and we would sign the certificates.

[Daniel] A drug certificate is

the scientific record

that some independent scientist

looked under a microscope

or in a spectrometer

or used some other technology

to determine,

yes, in fact, what you had,

what you bought or sold

or had in your pocket,

was ill*gal drugs

of such and such a purity,

of such and such a weight.

But that raises the huge question

of whether or not that's truly

just an objective scientific process.

And as a criminal defendant,

you have a right

to confront your accusers.

And so, if I'm being prosecuted

for a drug crime,

the people in the drug labs,

the chemists who are doing this work,

are effectively my accusers.

They're the ones who are saying

I have heroin,

or cocaine or marijuana or meth.

[Heather] If I'm the person

who did that testing,

I'm the person who signed that report,

the defendant really should be

checking into my credibility.

It doesn't necessarily have anything to do

with the science of what I'm doing,

it has to do with me as a person

and the credibility of me,

and the idea being, I think,

if I don't seem credible,

maybe you should dig a little deeper

and look at the testing I conducted

and and so forth.

When Sonja was arrested,

my initial reaction was, "Wow."

There were a lot of clients

where she had actually tested

the drugs in those cases.

And because the Amherst drug lab

tested all of our drug cases,

and those are the only kinds

of cases, basically,

that I was doing at that point,

um, I-- I said, "Wow, there's gonna be

some work to do here."

The government doesn't have

to prove very much

to find you guilty of a drug offense.

They just have to prove

that you gave drugs to someone,

that you had drugs

either in your house or on your person,

and that the substance is,

in fact, a drug.

And so, if they can't,

then you're entitled

to be found not guilty.

You're entitled to be acquitted

of the drug crime.

So, I went through all my cases

looking for drug certificates,

those pieces of paper

that she had signed and said,

"I tested the drugs and they're drugs."

And people were in prison

based on drug certificates

signed by Sonja Farak.

And people were in court

being charged at that moment.

Jorge Diaz was one of the original

Farak defendants, as they're called.

[Jorge] I was about to be sentenced

And I say, "What do you mean?"

He say, "You see this drug certificate?

See who signed it there?"

I said, "Yeah, well, who's that?"

That's when he say, "Yeah, sit there.

Relax and watch me in action."

[lawyer] Now if you could just please

give me a little background information?

Where were you born?

I was born in San Diego, California.

I lived in San Diego for about a year.

And then my dad got transferred

to Newport, Rhode Island.

He worked in the navy.

I came up with a normal childhood.

You know, it was a middle-class family.

I was provided for in every way.

I wasn't abused.

And yet

[man 1] All right, sound speed.

- [man 2] Speeding.

- [man 1] Okay.

[woman] We moved to Rhode Island in the--

I was one or two,

so it was, you know, 1982,

and then we grew up there.

We were a military family,

but my dad retired,

so we weren't moving around.

It was great having an older sister.

We were a lot alike growing up.

It was Farak and little Farak

[laughs] a lot of times.

Our parents They were relatively strict.

Growing up, it was, you you figure

it out and you tough through it.

I always thought Sonja was quiet.

We were both tomboys,

both really active in sports.

[Linda] Sonja was never the type

to just sit still.

As a child, she was involved

in a lot of different activities.

[Amy] We had a little bit

of sibling rivalry, but in a good way.

Sometimes it was tough

'cause I always felt

she was better at school,

better at softball,

she was better at basketball,

she played football.

[Linda] She was the first girl

in the state of Rhode Island

to play high school football

in a public school system.

She had a full-page layout

from the local paper about it.

[man] I wasn't quite sure

what to expect in Portsmouth today.

We went out to visit Sonja Farak.

She is the first girl

to play high school football

in Rhode Island.

[yelling and cheering]

[Amy] She played through

her freshman year of high school.

[man] She plays the line

on offense and defense.

I want to be accepted like one of them.

You know, no special treatment.

[Amy] She was good.

She would take down guys

twice her size in drills.

[laughs]

In one of the interviews that she had

[chuckles]

she's quoted saying,

"Hitting is the funnest part."

[Sonja] I just like to hit, you know?

[man] Mm-hm.

When you say you like to hit, um

how did you know you liked to hit

before you started playing football?

I don't know. I like beating up

on my sister a little bit.

I didn't give her black eyes, but,

you know, just have a little fun with her.

[Amy] It was amazing watching that.

Of course, you know,

when I was ten, I didn't understand.

Why is this a big deal?

But if she puts her mind to something,

she can do it.

[man] Sonja Farak doesn't like

being called a pioneer,

but she's well aware

of the trail she's blazing.

[whistle blows]

[Sonja] I graduated in 1996.

I received various

varsity letters in sports,

and was also co-class valedictorian.

[lawyer] You attended

a four-year college, correct?

[Sonja] That is correct. It was Worcester

Polytechnic Institute in Western Mass.

I graduated with high distinction

and had a couple

of Student Life Awards presented to me.

- And what was your major?

- Biochemistry.

I noticed there was a posting

for a chemist position

in the drug analysis laboratory,

and so I applied.

And I was accepted, so I took that job.

[lawyer] And that was located

at the Hinton laboratory?

[Sonja] That is correct.

[Amy] Back in Boston,

she was in the chem lab for the State.

It really fit in with kind of what

she went to school for.

There's a lot of detail

that is necessary to go into it.

Um, and I think that's what she enjoys

and that's what she's really good at.

Approximately how many chemists

worked with you at the Hinton laboratory?

There was probably

about 12 or 13 chemists.

[lawyer] And how long did you stay

at the Hinton laboratory?

[Sonja] I was at the lab for about a year,

and I realized I would never be able

to afford to buy a place

in the Boston area,

and I was intrigued with Western Mass,

so I talked to the head of the labs

and mentioned if a position

opened up in Amherst,

I could transfer out there.

Because I like fresh air,

I like, you know, being outside.

[birdsong]

[David] It's really a nice valley

that we live in.

It's the Connecticut Valley.

The Connecticut River goes through.

You know, I think that, uh

people sometimes kinda look, uh at us

as the country folks.

- [laughing]

- [woman] Very good!

- [cheering]

- [woman] All right!

[David] We're about a hundred miles

due west of Boston.

And I've been District Attorney

for almost eight years now.

It's a great place to raise a family.

It's a slower pace.

You know, I mean,

I have two lights on the way to work.

I I live the next town over, so

On a on a tough day,

some days I get both lights.

It's a real nice place to live.

[Sonja] I moved out to Western Mass,

and I thought there would be

a chance for me to buy a house.

[lawyer] Can you just tell us,

what was your partner's name at the time?

Nikki Lee.

[Amy] Sonja met Nikki in college.

Nikki was older.

Moving was beneficial

for both Sonja and Nikki.

Northampton is kind of artsy

and Nikki's very much, um more artsy.

It seemed like

a really close-knit community.

And the house was really cute

and the neighborhood was great.

And Sonja found a great job.

I thought they were happy.

[Sonja] I started at the Amherst lab

in 2004.

It was on the UMass campus.

Can you tell the grand jurors

what the general atmosphere

of the Amherst lab was,

compared to the Hinton laboratory?

[Sonja] There was a little less stress,

more laid back.

It was one of the atmospheres,

if you got your work done,

there wasn't a lot of people

stressing over you, looking over you.

It was friendly.

We all got along.

[Amy] There were only

a couple of people in the lab.

I think that suited Sonja.

I always thought she kept to herself.

So I think she was happy,

just kind of, "Let me do my work

and I'll I'll get my work done."

[lawyer] Can you please describe

what your duties and responsibilities

were at the Amherst laboratory?

[Sonja] At the Amherst lab,

I basically carried over my duties

from the Hinton lab.

So I would get basically

any drug that came in

you know, whatever's next sequentially,

you would pick up.

[lawyer speaking]

[Sonja speaking]

[Heather] The day-to-day, if you will,

of being a drug chemist

can be quite repetitious,

maybe Groundhog Day -ish, in a sense.

You know, once you've seen

400 different types of cocaine packaging,

you've you've really seen most

of what people can come up with.

The cases are coming at you quite quickly,

uh, and they seem to never stop coming.

As long as the cases keep coming

from law enforcement,

the chemists don't have

any reason to stop working.

[Amy] Her job was just testing materials

that came in to figure out what they were.

It seemed really cool.

And I know she went to some trainings

and, um she seemed to enjoy it.

It was, you know, a lot of running the

the lab equipment that she enjoyed.

Um So, yeah. She she liked the job.

[Heather] I've never

been there physically, um

but I've seen some photos and videos.

And honestly,

the Amherst lab, um

was a mess.

[Paul] It was a decrepit,

grotesquely underfunded facility.

There was one working fume hood

at the Amherst lab.

And they were subsisting

on an annual budget of $300,000, um

which was barely enough money

to pay the salaries of these folks

and to keep the lights on.

And yet this lab was put in charge

of drug seizures across

all of Western Massachusetts.

Not only were they out

in the western part of the state,

you know, geographically isolated,

I think they were even,

you know, maybe philosophically isolated.

They were using the right testing

and the right technology

to get to the right answers,

but they just did not have

any sort of good laboratory practices

that were in place.

For example, they did not keep track

of reference materials.

Now, uh

you had referenced earlier

in your testimony standards?

Or national standards?

Were these same standards

at the Amherst laboratory?

Yes. In the refrigerator,

there was probably 50 standards.

[lawyer] Was the refrigerator

in a secure location? Could it be locked?

[Sonja] The refrigerator was in the lab,

and the only way

to get into the lab was with a key.

[lawyer] So the refrigerator itself

was not locked?

Correct.

[Robin] Things went awry there,

and it seemed like maybe there

truly wasn't enough people working there.

There was four of them, I believe.

That's not a lot

for the amount of drugs

they were probably taking in.

One person doing the intake,

and then, what,

three people doing the testing?

I think there wasn't enough control

over what was going on.

[Robin] Two cases were found, um

in her area,

in her tub, as they called it,

um, that were missing drugs.

The weights weren't right

or there was no drugs at all.

[Robin on tape] Do you just work

on one particular town's evidence?

[Luke] Even before she got arrested,

I knew the Amherst lab was underfunded

and didn't have the sort of basics

that you would expect at a place

where science is purportedly taking place.

So the safeguards that existed

at the Amherst lab were minimal,

and they required the good faith

of individuals to abide by them.

For example, uh, chemists were not

supposed to assign samples to themselves.

But at Amherst, chemists routinely

assigned samples to themselves.

Chemists were not necessarily

supposed to be in the lab by themselves,

but they were in the lab

as a practical matter

by themselves routinely.

[Paul] So, at this lab, in this old

State building in Amherst, Mass,

these folks are working crazy hours

for sub-standard wages,

and have almost no contact during the day.

They're not co-workers,

they just inhabit the same space

and do the same thing.

[Heather] They're planets

who are orbiting around the sun together,

but really having no interaction

with each other.

And they didn't need to.

As long as someone's keeping up

their responsibilities

to the lab as a whole,

you don't have to consult with each other

on your casework

because ultimately, it's my case,

I'm the one

who has to go into court

and answer for what's on that report.

And so, I have the independence

and the autonomy to handle it my way.

[lawyer clears throat]

Now, these national standards,

I assume they're fairly pure.

Is that fair to say?

They're pure, period.

Now, have you ever tried methamphetamine?

Have I ever?

No, well, prior to working at the lab?

- Have you ever taken methamphetamine?

- No.

Did you ever take

any of that methamphetamine

from the laboratory standard?

I took part of it. Yes, I did.

[lawyer] And why, why did you do that?

[Sonja] I guess I was curious.

Even while I was in college,

as a freshman,

I was going through

a rough period in my life, like, mentally.

And for some reason,

I had looked up drugs online.

And when I read about it, I said, like,

"That's one I would try,

if I was going to try it."

It would give me energy.

One day I just decided

to try a little bit.

I was alone.

People had gone out to lunch.

It was in liquid form,

so I used a pipette.

It gave me the desired effects.

It gave me energy.

I felt amazing.

I didn't wish it,

but it gave me the pep I was looking for.

You know, I still did the work

that I was assigned to.

If anything, it made me feel more alert.

And did this become daily use,

or was it just this one time?

I might've waited a short period,

but it quickly became daily use.

I would use a small metal spatula,

dip it in,

and, uh I would lick it.

[Paul] Liquid meth,

like all delirium drugs,

makes you much more energized,

raises your mood, raises your energy,

raises your concentration,

raises the intensity

at which you feel alive.

For someone like Sonja,

the feeling of being elevated,

the feeling of being charged

by this substance

was, for her, medicinal.

It was a way of getting out

of the drudgery

of being Sonja Farak.

[Sonja] I started just keeping it at work

and doing it

when I got to work for energy.

It did get to the point

where I was bringing it home, though,

and doing it first thing in the morning.

It became multiple times a day.

I don't think that anyone had a clue.

We all got in at slightly different times.

People would go home,

someone would go out to lunch.

I don't feel that my productivity

worsened at all at that time.

[Jared] She was charged

with evidence tampering in two samples.

But at no time did she ever say

exactly what it is that she had done.

You know, you're talking

about thousands and thousands of cases

where Sonja Farak was the chemist.

Thousands of samples that she had tested.

But all we got were the two samples

that she had supposedly tampered with

right when they looked

at her lab workstation

on January 19th, 2013.

No one went back

and tried to test a sample

from a year ago,

maybe two years ago.

Maybe eight years ago.

Let's get a law enforcement agency

to go back and test drug samples

that Sonja Farak had tested in the past

to see how long she had been doing this.

We asked,

just go back and do some testing.

Nobody did it.

The Attorney General wasn't going

to re-test cases from the past,

the local District Attorney wasn't going

to re-test cases from the past,

because the whole idea was

to keep this as small as possible.

I think it was out here in Western Mass,

they were trying to minimize it.

They just figured, "Oh,

she took some drugs and that'll be it."

And really not looking, uh

beneath the surface.

Certainly, uh we intend to do

a very thorough investigation into

I just think that they didn't want

to pursue the truth.

And I think, when you

when you start a case by saying,

"Well, let's

let's try to contain it"

Your job isn't to contain it.

It's to figure out what's the truth

and how are we gonna do justice?