01x03 - Episode 3

[bunniefuu]

[Sonja] Every day,

you swear you're not going to.

[snorting]

And then, you know, you put it back,

return to the safe

But then a night would come

when I was the only one there.

Or it's the morning,

or whatever time of day it was.

And I would want more.

[Paul Solotaroff]

Sonja was really beginning to come apart.

There's no such thing as stable

in the career of a cokehead,

and she needed more and more and more.

At a certain point,

powder doesn't get it anymore.

At a certain point,

you're either gonna smoke it

or you're gonna sh**t it.

And so, Sonja really benefited from having

the keys to this Pandora's box.

So, uh you had left off with me

in approximately early 2011,

when you had started to frequently take

powder cocaine samples from the lab?

Mm-hm.

[lawyer] And you indicated

your drug use got heavier

- by the middle of 2011, correct?

- [Sonja] Correct.

[lawyer] And is it fair to say

that you were under the influence

almost every day at work?

It's fair to say. Yes.

[lawyer] And it's fair to say, Ms. Farak,

that the amount of powder cocaine samples

coming into the lab began to decrease?

That's correct.

In 2011,

we seemed to be getting

less and less cocaine,

both in number of pieces

and evidence, but also quantity.

I mean, at that point,

if we got a tenth of a gram bag,

I couldn't really take anything from it

because it'd be noticeable.

[lawyer] Now, because these powder

cocaine samples were decreasing,

was there any other drug

that you began to experiment with in 2011?

[Sonja] I had already exhausted

the methamphetamine,

amphetamine and ketamine standards.

And then I did start trying

to smoke crack cocaine.

We had a small amount of base cocaine,

which is the chemical name in the lab,

which I tried smoking.

There was not a lot of it,

but I did start trying

to smoke crack cocaine.

And I say "try" because

I wasn't really good at it at first.

[lawyer] Can you explain why?

[Sonja] I had never been

a smoker in general.

I also was not prepared.

I was using aluminum foil pipes.

I was probably more timid

about trying not to get caught

because of the odor and the smoke.

Especially if you're using foil.

But I eventually made a crack pipe

with pipettes in the lab.

I would break off the tips.

Eventually, I got some copper wire

to put in, and when I did that,

I started to get better hits

and quickly became very addicted.

I did it at my workstation.

I actually smoked

in the evidence room.

[lawyer] Was this affecting

your productivity,

as far as you know,

in terms of your testing?

I believe it probably did lower it.

I was very in tune to what pieces

of evidence were coming up,

to try to manipulate the system

so I could get pieces of evidence

I wanted to analyze.

[Paul] So, Sonja, by 2012,

was not only an accomplished drug thief,

she was someone who had figured out

how to game the system.

She had access to drop-off schedules.

And she could manipulate

the rotation of assignments

so that she was next up

when a particularly big seizure

came through.

And it was essential that she keep getting

these seizures

of 20, 50, 100 grams or more,

so that the five percent skim was enough

to get her through the week.

[Sonja] I was going to smoke crack

at work multiple

like, ten, 12 times a day,

and that became longer.

I could sneak across the hallway

to the fume hood,

where I would smoke

just because I could get rid of the smell.

And that wasn't

a quick minute bathroom break.

- It was like--

- So you were just gone

from your workstation?

- Correct.

- Did anybody question you

at this point about absence

from your workstation?

I don't remember anyone commenting on it.

She's so out of control.

She's so unselfconscious

about, uh, what she's doing

and how she's coming off

to her colleagues.

She was leaving work so frequently

to get to the bathroom downstairs,

to get out to her car to smoke,

that her colleagues had

no choice but to notice

that someone was going to hell

right in front of them.

[tape recording playing]

You know

[Robin Whitney] Okay

So, Hanchett pulls her aside

in late 2012

and says, "What's going on with you?"

And she makes excuses.

She says she's going through

all sorts of constant crisis at home,

isn't feeling well,

and that's enough

to get Hanchett off her back.

[Sonja] My habit got bad enough

in the mid and later stages of 2012

where I was taking cocaine

from cases that I'd analyzed

and instead of using it as cocaine,

I would use that cocaine

to make crack for myself.

[Paul] Ultimately,

there wasn't enough powder cocaine

in all of Western Massachusetts

to keep her going.

And she crossed yet another bright line

when she went into work one night

and began cooking powder coke

into crack at her workstation.

[Sonja] Basically, I would make crack

by dissolving the cocaine in water,

adding baking soda

Heat it up, let it precipitate out,

and then I would form the crack.

I do remember one year,

there was one case that was a kilo

of cocaine that we had received

and I took out a good 100 grams of it

to make crack.

So, I wasn't necessarily

making small batches,

if I got a big enough submission

where I could make

a quantity worth my time.

By that point,

I was smoking at the lab,

smoking at home,

I was smoking and driving.

I don't want to say there was

no stopping me where I smoked, but I--

[lawyer] And that was because

of your addiction at this point, correct?

I was totally controlled by my addiction.

[Deborah Becker] At first, it was rumors.

They said, "We think she had

a drug problem for a long time."

You know. "It couldn't have been

a handful of samples.

It had to have been more than that."

The arrest was made

on those two cases at this time

[Deborah] But, was Sonja saying that

to not get in trouble,

or was the state saying that

to hide another drug lab crisis?

It was unclear.

I mean, at the time,

what I understood about Sonja Farak

was that she had been a good student.

She won chemistry awards,

she was her high school valedictorian.

She was described as someone

who was curious, sort of quiet,

athletic, hard-working.

She didn't seem

to stand out as someone

who would've had a drug problem

and would've been

misusing drug samples at all.

You know, it's easier to believe

that maybe Sonja Farak

only tampered with just a few cases.

And the public at the time

still didn't really know

any of these things about Sonja Farak.

I mean, we were still dealing

with Annie Dookhan

[bailiff] Court, all rise.

[Deborah] and in the public's eye,

Annie Dookhan was this rogue chemist.

[bailiff] The Honorable Court is open.

Please be seated.

The bad apple in the lab

lying about her academic credentials

and falsifying thousands of drug tests.

But, even at the sentencing,

it was sort of her problem.

[bailiff] solemnly swear

to make true answers

to such questions put to you by the court

now in hearing, so help you God?

- I do.

- [bailiff] Please step forward.

But there was a system here,

and she was rewarded for nine years

for testing thousands and thousands

of drug samples

when she couldn't possibly

have properly tested them all.

And you're pleading guilty here

because you are guilty?

[Annie] Yes, Your Honor.

Let me go through

your rights that you're giving up

by pleading guilty here today.

The first of those rights

is the right to remain silent

[Scott Allen] You know, Annie became

like this person who bore the burdens

for everybody, in a funny way.

She's the one who goes on trial, the one

that confessed, so she's the bad actor.

And she takes all the blame,

when really, she's just

a cog in a larger system.

[reporter] Why did Annie Dookhan do it?

She declined our request to explain,

but her lawyer says

the mother of a disabled young son

only wanted to help her career.

[lawyer] The furthest thing from her mind

is that this is gonna

ultimately cost millions of dollars,

it's gonna throw the entire

Massachusetts criminal justice system

into a tailspin

[Deborah] Her lawyer actually

argued for less time,

and said that she had not meant

to hurt anyone,

that she was just trying to do her job,

that she was rewarded

for being productive.

And she was very productive.

But she didn't realize the extent of

what she was doing

and how many people it would harm.

[bailiff] Annie Dookhan, the court,

having accepted your plea of guilty,

will now sentence you to be imprisoned

at the Massachusetts

Correctional Institution

[Deborah] So she was convicted

and sentenced to jail.

[bailiff] to a term of not more

than five years nor less than three years.

It was hard to watch.

Her father was very upset.

I can't imagine what that felt like,

to be there in court.

He had likely had

so many dreams for his daughter,

and, um, she obviously

felt pressure to do well and, uh

to watch it end like that,

I can't imagine what that felt like.

[reporter 1] As Dookhan was led away

to begin serving

a minimum three-year sentence,

authorities expect

it could take at least that long

to reconcile thousands of Dookhan cases

and restore faith

in the state's criminal justice system.

[car horn beeping]

[reporter 2] Former Massachusetts chemist

Annie Dookhan

was sentenced to

a three-to five-year prison term

for falsifying drug tests

affecting tens of thousands

of criminal cases,

but there's been little movement

to deal with all of the convictions

based on the lab's testing.

Matt Segal, with the Massachusetts

American Civil Liberties Union,

says his organization

is looking at legal ways

to try to get the state

to deal with the affected cases.

[Matt Segal on radio] The state has spent

hundreds of millions of dollars

on this scandal, and what have we gotten?

It certainly hasn't been justice.

[Matt Segal in interview] I was really

just a few months into the job

when the news hit

that a chemist had been arrested

for inventing the test results

that had put people in prison.

And so that's really when it started

and when we, at the ACLU of Massachusetts,

started to think about

the injustices that had happened

and what we could do to help.

And what we were thinking was

that the justice that needed to be done

was for all these convictions

to be wiped away,

and for the state to bear

the burden of doing that.

It was the right thing to do.

It was the way to do justice.

So the very first thing we did,

we sent a letter to Martha Coakley,

who was then the Attorney General.

We copied all

of the district attorneys and said,

more or less,

"Get rid of all these cases.

And if you don't

there's gonna be a lot of litigation.

There's gonna be a fight."

So we were dismissing cases.

You know, lower level cases,

left and right.

But at some point, the ACLU is saying,

"Treat this like a civil class action suit

and just get rid

of every single case that you have."

But even judges

were not prepared to do that,

because they'd never done that before.

You don't just dismiss cases

and a wave of defendants.

This is an emergency situation,

which is treated that way.

[Conley] Oh, we had defendants who had

been accused of serious trafficking.

Defendants who had been

parts of international gangs.

- [knocking]

- Police!

People who were wreaking havoc

in communities across Massachusetts,

- arrested with g*ns.

- [siren wailing]

The public reaction

to the Dookhan news was,

from my perspective as a defense lawyer

who cared about the wrongful convictions,

not very good.

There was a lot of misunderstanding

about, "Oh, my gosh,

someone did something wrong in the lab

and now all these crazy defense lawyers

want to let all these dangerous

drug dealers back out onto the street."

[reporter] Look at all these faces.

A fraction of the tens of thousands

of people Dookhan'd -

street slang for anyone

whose evidence she handled.

[Marx] There was very little

public awareness

that the vast majority

of the Dookhan defendants

were people who'd

already served their sentences,

who were non-violent drug offenders,

people who were already back at home

living with their families,

back at work in the community.

And really what we were

fighting about was whether or not

they should have an opportunity

to clear from their criminal record

a tainted drug conviction.

A tainted drug conviction which has

extraordinary collateral consequences

for someone's life.

[reporter] Hundreds of inmates

were serving time in cases

where she tested drug samples.

Officials say most

have violent criminal pasts.

We're not talking about

low-level drug addicts here.

We're talking about

high-level drug traffickers.

This should cause all of us concern.

I don't think

the district attorneys did anything

to kind of disabuse the public

of the misimpression that this was about

whether we were gonna let

a whole bunch of violent drug traffickers

out of prison and back onto the street.

It was never about that.

We weren't prepared to just say,

"We're gonna just wipe all of these out."

We did what we've been trained to do,

and that is resolve criminal cases

one case at a time.

Well, we knew exactly what that meant.

It meant that they were gonna fight

to keep the wrongful convictions.

So I called my friend Dan Marx.

He and I had gone to law school together

and I remembered him as being

one of the smartest people I'd ever met.

I'm in my office and Matt calls.

We had reconnected

after having gone to law school together.

[Matt] He said, "Look, we should

get all these convictions overturned.

We have to sue somebody,

but I'm not sure how we do it

or who we sue."

[Marx] "Would you be interested in trying

to develop a legal strategy

to deal with the lab scandal?"

It was something that, um

no reasonable lawyer

should have said yes to.

Um, well, it took, like, about two seconds

to think about.

Of course I was on board for that.

And so we sort of

immediately started working on it

because there's no blueprint for this.

Uh, you know, we knew a lot of things

that we needed to accomplish.

You know, we needed something

like a class action,

but this wasn't a class action.

We needed something

where we could demand

the court take

some kind of affirmative action

to rectify the situation,

as opposed to just try

to compensate individual people.

It was complicated. There's no precedent.

We'd never dealt with this before.

It's not like you just go into your online

legal research and type in "drug scandal"

and there are a whole bunch of cases

that tell you how to bring these lawsuits.

But, out in Western Massachusetts,

the Farak scandal was different

and potentially more troubling

because the scope

of what Sonja Farak did was not known.

And Luke Ryan was saying,

"There are some people literally locked up

as a result of the failure

of prosecutors to turn over evidence."

[door opens]

[Luke Ryan] Often I have the feeling

that I'm like a b*ttlefield medic.

It's like you fight like hell

to try to save somebody

and, you know, you lose a patient

and you don't have time to grieve.

You just gotta run to the next one

and try to throw a bandage on

or do whatever you can.

And my client Rafael Rodriguez

was back in jail

because we lost at the Kinder hearing.

But I represent people

who have different rights

because they're

at different stages in the process.

So I had another client,

Rolando Peñate,

and he had been arrested

but was not convicted.

He hadn't been to trial

and he was being held in Ludlow

at the Hampden County House of Correction.

[speaking Spanish]

I was in prison in Ludlow,

watching the news,

and that's when her photo comes up.

Hampshire County chemist

says that average lab

I checked my papers,

and I knew that was the woman

who checked my drugs.

I thought they would let me go.

That's what I thought.

[Luke] So Rolando had been arrested

in Springfield.

He's alleged to have sold

to an undercover officer.

Alleged narcotics were

discovered in the house,

but I'd been led to believe

the case against him

was going to be dismissed

because Sonja Farak was

the chemist in his case.

So I proceeded to reach out

to the prosecutor and say,

"Hey, your chemist has been arrested

and she certainly wasn't going to testify,

so I assume

that the charges against Mr. Peñate

are gonna be dismissed."

But the prosecutor announced

that it was gonna be his intention

to have an expert police officer

testify that it sure looked like

heroin and cocaine to him.

So my client's liberty is being deprived

and now I'm being told

that we're gonna go to trial

with some cop

who's gonna get on the stand

and give this testimony

that no judge should allow.

[gavel banging]

And I was just so deflated and frustrated.

There's really nothing worse

in my profession

than giving a client reason to believe

something good is gonna happen,

then at your next visit say,

"Remember what I told you

about you getting out next week?

Well, that's not gonna happen."

[Rolando, in Spanish] So they made me

an offer. Three years in prison.

They were offering me a sentence,

but I didn't want to be found guilty.

And because of that, I went to court.

I told Ryan,

"Let's fight this, let's do this."

[Luke] So Rolando had been arrested

in 2011,

but Judge Kinder had ruled that,

based on all the available evidence,

Sonja Farak's misdeeds

had only occurred since July 2012.

So, because of this Kinder paradigm,

when Rolando went to trial,

I wasn't allowed to raise

Sonja Farak's tampering at all,

or her suspected drug addiction.

And I remember saying to the judge,

"I just want to get this straight.

The chemist in Mr. Peñate's case

is under indictment for evidence tampering

and a jury of his peers

isn't gonna hear about that?"

I felt like I was being forced

to participate in a process

that isn't fair,

and that was so frustrating,

it's difficult to put into words.

The jury found him guilty

of the sale that he allegedly made.

It was a punch in the gut.

I mean, back in March, I'd gone to court

expecting the case against Rolando Peñate

was gonna be dismissed.

And then, nine months later,

I'm sitting there and I'm watching him

get a seven-year prison sentence

for a $20 bag of of heroin,

and it just seemed incredibly excessive.

[Rolando, in Spanish] After I was

found guilty, they sent me to Walpole.

It's another world.

You look at a guard

and they're yelling at you,

"Why you look at me like that?"

And it wasn't easy for me at that time.

I would find myself so angry

about the sentence - seven years.

[bailiff] Sonja Farak, how do you

now plead to those two indictments,

each of which charge you

with tampering with evidence

and possession of

a Class B controlled substance,

that being cocaine?

[Sonja] Guilty.

[judge] Your conduct has,

whether you recognized it

at the time or not,

come at a great cost to the state.

[Amy Farak]

Sonja didn't want to go to jail.

Um nobody does.

But I think she knew it was

it was a real possibility.

[judge] I'm going to impose a sentence

of 18 months at the House of Correction.

[women talking and shouting]

[Amy] I feel like she needed help.

Um I felt that she could get

better help outside of jail.

I wanted her to get

whatever she needed to get better.

I was a little concerned knowing

that she'd worked for the State Police,

how that could be looked at,

um in jail.

Um

So it was it was a little scary,

I guess, for me, thinking about it.

She was really going to jail.

[buzz of conversation]

The first time I went to visit Sonja,

she was behind glass

and you had to talk over the phone.

And that was the communication,

and it was just surreal.

[laughing] I was, like, "This is how

I have to talk to my sister,

is through glass over a telephone."

[David Sullivan]

When I heard that she had pled guilty

and that she got a sentence of 18 months,

I thought that was a major blunder.

Once that plea got done,

I looked at it as a sweetheart deal.

She gets a sentence, but they didn't

get any information from her.

Where's the deal?

You know, I mean,

it's kind of a one-sided deal

that, "Okay, I do my time,

but I don't have to talk to you"?

"I don't have to tell you

exactly what happened"?

[woman 1] A plastic bag of crack cocaine,

copper mesh and a bag

of burnt copper mesh.

These are all items that are used

by someone who is smoking crack.

[woman 2] There were four separate,

distinct samples?

[woman 1] Correct.

[David] To me, that seemed intentional.

It was like they were saying,

"We don't wanna really hear from her.

We wanna make assumptions

that are good for us,

that contains this thing,

and says, 'Hey, we only have to deal

with six months of tampering.'"

And it was really that plea

that got me worried.

Worried that there was

there's somethin' more to this story.

[Jared Olanoff] So, after we lost

to the Attorney General

at the Kinder hearing, I moved on.

Um Luke didn't.

Luke kept fighting.

He kept trying to see the evidence.

The "assorted lab paperwork"

from Sonja Farak's car.

The Attorney General had said that

all the evidence had been emailed to us.

But Luke wanted to go

actually look at it in Boston,

and he spent months, after I was all done,

fighting for his clients

to just go look at it.

[Luke] Kris Foster at

the Attorney General's Office said,

"I cannot let Attorney Ryan

look at this evidence

while we have a pending prosecution

against Sonja Farak."

[Jared] Uh, Sonja Farak

had been sentenced.

Her case was no longer an "open case."

It wasn't an open investigation.

So the Attorney General's Office

had no reason to prevent Luke

from going to look at the evidence.

[Luke] So, I've been looking for this

for a very long time,

but by this point, I thought, "Well,

there's probably nothing for me to see.

Like, it really is inconsequential."

But I felt I had an obligation to do it

just by way of due diligence.

So I made arrangements to go

to the Attorney General's Office.

To the 19th floor,

where these three banker's boxes were

just sitting in a file waiting for me.

And there was a state trooper in the room

who was gonna be there

and watch me go through the boxes.

So I had spent a lot of time

trying to see this stuff,

to see what was in her car

when she got arrested.

It was about 21 months

after Sonja Farak's arrest.

Rafael Rodriguez is in prison,

Rolando Peñate is in prison.

And as I went through these papers,

I started to see things

that immediately were clear

had nothing to do with lab work.

Things that had headings

like "Emotion Regulation Worksheet,"

talking about the internal feelings

that Ms. Farak was experiencing

when getting, quote-unquote,

"a good sample."

This meant that Sonja Farak

was engaged in drug treatment,

and she was telling clinicians

about her drug use.

And I just kind of

went through, page by page,

with my cell phone,

taking a picture of this one

and that one over there

And I have a terrible poker face,

but I was trying

to just keep everything light,

and I was kind of scared

that the state trooper at the end

of the conference room table

was gonna figure out

some reason why this needed to stop.

And then I finally came across something

called the ServiceNet Diary Card.

At the top, it had days of the week

and dates in December, no year,

but on December 22nd,

a Thursday, if you looked down you saw

Sonja Farak checked the box

that made it clear

that she had used drugs on that day.

And then there was a narrative part

at the bottom of the document

where she wrote the words

"Tried to resist using at work,

but ended up failing."

And my heart started racing,

because I was thinking,

"Well, December 2011 is when

she was signing certificates

in Rolando Peñate's case.

I wonder could it possibly,

you know, line up?"

So, I got back to my office.

I need to see

Rolando Peñate's drug certificates

to see when in December she signed it.

And she signed

the first certificate in his case

on December 22nd, 2011.

So the big question in that moment was

what December 22nd

are we talking about here?

Is it December 22nd, 2011,

or some other year?

And as I scrutinized it, I looked

at the bottom, and it said on Saturday,

"Mad about missing part of Pats game."

You know, I'd looked

at the pictures of Sonja Farak's car

dozens and dozens of times.

She had "New England Patriots"

on the steering wheel of her car,

and the game would have been

Saturday, December 24th.

So when was the last time

that the Patriots played

a Christmas Eve game on a Saturday?

And the Internet is great

for warehousing information like that.

And I saw that they played

the Miami Dolphins in 2011.

So that meant that Sonja Farak had

performed the analysis in Rolando's case

on the same day that she tried to resist

using at work but ended up failing.

[lawyer]

Do you recall that day, Ms. Farak?

Yes, I do.

[lawyer] And how do you recall that day?

It was one day if you asked

if I was impaired at work,

I would have to say yes.

[Paul] It began like any other day.

[Sonja] I was using crack.

I remember

the submissions were small bags.

[Paul] She beams up

repeatedly that morning.

And then, sometime late morning,

she takes delivery of a sample of LSD.

[Sonja] Liquid LSD.

I took some and I remember

not being able to function too well.

[psychedelic rock music playing]

[lawyer] Did you take a substantial amount

of this liquid LSD?

I didn't measure the amount,

but I was very impaired.

[lawyer] And when you say "impaired,"

can you describe

I knew I couldn't drive.

There were some hallucinations,

not little green men, you know,

but colors swaying in the wind.

I remember going

to the bathroom to smoke crack.

After taking it and dropping some of it,

totally freaking out,

crawling on the floor trying to find crack

which I thought was there.

[lawyer] Did you do any tests that day?

[Sonja] That morning I analyzed

some tests on cocaine,

just to make sure I knew what it was.

That afternoon, I did not.

[Paul] Sonja Farak declares

in grand jury testimony

that she has no recollection

of doing drug analysis tests

at her workstation

that afternoon,

when in fact her notebook reveals

that she did multiple tests

on several different samples

and that she certified them

as positive for heroin.

And this included a drug certificate

for a Cuban refugee

named Rolando Peñate.

So this is evidence

that I was not given access to

that would have convinced

any juror to acquit Rolando Peñate.

And it meant that Sonja Farak had been

doing this for at least over a year

before she got arrested.

So it basically blew up

the Kinder paradigm.

And it seemed like this could be evidence

of a massive cover-up

by the Attorney General's Office.

The arrest was made on those two cases.

brought this

to our attention immediately.

These allegations do not implicate

the reliability of drug certificates

or fairness of trials against defendants.

[Luke] And maybe I found the smoking g*n

in this whole sordid tale.

[reporter]

Today's the final day on the job

for longtime State Attorney General,

Martha Coakley.

After eight years as AG,

she's exiting elected office

after losing

[buzz of conversation]

[bagpipes playing]

[cheering]

[Shawn Musgrave] In 2015, in comes

a new Attorney General, Maura Healey.

Raise your right hand.

So, the Farak case was

under this big giant question mark

- I, Maura Healey

- Do solemnly swear.

and the ACLU was involved

in the Dookhan cases.

- I will bear true faith and allegiance

- To the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

To the Commonwealth

[Shawn] So the question was,

how is Maura Healey,

who's now in the driver's seat,

going to handle things that she inherited?

[Maura Healey]

And when I started in January of 2015,

our office under the prior administration

had prosecuted Dookhan and Farak.

They had been sentenced to jail

and we were in the midst

of learning more information

about just how significant the scope,

the ramifications of that conduct was

on individual cases.

[Marx] During that kind of transition,

there's a sense that it's an opportunity.

So yeah, I mean, I think we were

cautiously optimistic at the time,

but that's Again, that's also part

of being a defense lawyer.

[laughs] You you wouldn't do this

unless you can find a way

to be hopeful all the time.

[jazz band playing]

But I think we weren't kidding ourselves

about, you know,

this was going to be a long slog

and a tough fight.

And so we don't know

the exact number of those convictions.

In fact, we generally haven't been able

to find out these numbers

until the prosecutors give us

lists of cases.

[Matt] Our justice system is set up

to convict people of crimes.

And what we were seeing

with the Dookhan scandal

was that the structure,

the entire system exists

to make it so easy

to hold onto a wrongful conviction

and so hard to overcome it.

So the system is designed

to make it almost impossible

for a mass injustice

to lead to a mass exoneration.

[siren whoops]

[Deborah] So then

the American Civil Liberties Union

is trying to come up with a solution

to deal with all the affected cases.

What do we do with all these people

who are charged with drug crimes

now that Annie Dookhan

has been found guilty

and we know

that drug evidence was mishandled

and we know

that the lab wasn't properly run?

So they bring a lawsuit to

the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

[court official]

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.

All persons having anything to do

before the Honorables, the Justices

of the Supreme Judicial Court,

give your attendance

and you shall be heard.

[judge] SJC-11764.

[Matt] Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice.

May it please the Court,

Matthew Segal for the petitioners.

Thousands of people

whose rights were violated

by misconduct at the Hinton lab

will have no meaningful opportunity

to challenge their convictions.

[Deborah] But the District Attorneys

of Massachusetts do not think

that the cases should be dismissed.

The defendants' due process rights

vis-à-vis that have been addressed

[Matt] There wasn't even

a process in place

to identify the cases.

defendants overwhelmingly

convicted when they've gone to trial

using that defense

And to me, one of the most remarkable

signs of the injustices

that happened over the years

is that it took this lawsuit

and years of time

before we ever actually

got a list together.

[Marx] The fact that it was so hard

just to figure out the list of people

whose cases were processed

by Annie Dookhan

gives you a sense of this chaos.

What was going on there?

It should have been possible

to walk into that lab

and press a button on a computer

and generate a spreadsheet

of all her cases

with all the information

you need to correct those on day one.

It took years even to figure out

what cases she had worked on.

How's that possible?

[Deborah] And then there were rumblings

about the Farak case.

People were concerned that

uh, there may have been

more going on there

and it was actually a bigger story

than the state was letting on.

We hear about Attorney Luke Ryan,

and Ryan is alleging

that the Farak case was

particularly problematic.

[Shawn] So Luke has been one

of the main drivers of an investigation

into what happened

during the Farak prosecution.

He wanted to know

how could these worksheets

have been at the Attorney General's Office

and he was never told about them?

So Luke's really gunning

for an investigation,

specifically on the question

of whether the Attorney General's Office

and the Mass State Police

covered up the evidence.

[Luke] It didn't feel like an accident.

This was not something

that was just plain old human error.

Choices were made.

Somebody decided that this evidence

was not going to see the light of day,

and there needs to be accountability.

So I sent a letter to

the newly-elected Attorney General,

Maura Healey, and I said,

"Somebody needs to look into

the reasons why, uh, this happened."

So to her credit,

Maura Healey read our letter and decided,

"I need to appoint somebody

to look into this."

From the beginning,

we were trying to get this right

and that started with trying to figure out

what is it that actually happened here.

[Shawn] And so to investigate

Luke's claim of misconduct,

the Attorney General

appoints two retired judges.

Two judges,

and then they work with two troopers

from the Massachusetts State Police.

[Luke] They went and got captains

in the state police

and outsourced the investigation to them.

[Matt] Now, this is a bizarre way

to investigate prosecutorial misconduct,

because state troopers don't investigate

prosecutorial misconduct.

- [siren wailing]

- They investigate crimes.

And so they spent many, many months and

interview, uh, some witnesses,

including Kris Foster.

The troopers reviewed

more than 800 emails,

and assembled a bunch of exhibits.

And then the retired judges

submit their report.

And I didn't have to do that.

I didn't

I didn't need to do that report.

I just thought it made sense, as a matter

of having somebody do a look at

what had happened here within the office.

It wasn't the kind of work product

that we were expecting,

um, and it wasn't high quality.

[Matt] People call it a report,

but it's really just a letter,

which says there's nothing to see here.

No prosecutorial misconduct.

Everything's fine.

Essentially what the report amounted to

"Luke Ryan is unprofessional."

They found the only person

who did anything wrong was me.

[sighs]

And it tore into me,

called me unprofessional,

said I made baseless

and negligent allegations

and really just made a mockery

of what I'd been doing

for the last few years.

But their key finding was

this was not a cover-up

because here you can look

from these emails

that people in the Attorney General's

Office and the Mass State Police

knew about these documents,

they talked about these documents,

and said, "See attached disk

with all these emails."

We had to figure out,

how can we get this disk?

And it turns out the only copy

was in Judge Velis' possession.

So I had to call Judge Velis up,

somebody who's just endorsed

a report that said I behaved

in an unprofessional way,

and say, "Hey,

can I have a copy of the disk?"

And he said, "Sure."

And so I was, like, trembling mad at him

but I made arrangements to meet

at a Barnes & Noble at a mall

and took my mother with me

so that there would be a witness

in case we had words about his report.

So, it was a very pleasant conversation.

He gave me the disk.

I took the disk.

I went home. I put it in my computer.

And I remember when the thing popped up

and I suddenly had these threads.

They were in chronological order.

So I began and I clicked on

I think my first email

was a January 23rd one

where they were referring to personal

papers that were found in the car.

And I said, "Uh-oh.

Like, that's not assorted lab paperwork."

Anne Kaczmarek's told,

"Hey, we've got this other case

where it looks like she may have stolen

some oxycodones.

What do you want to do?"

And her response was,

"Please don't let this get

more complicated than we thought.

Maybe if she had a bad back,

that's the reason

she was taking the oxys?"

And then the critical email

from the state trooper.

After Farak was arrested,

the lead investigator

from Mass State Police

emails Anne Kaczmarek.

Subject line, "Farak admissions."

And then he had attached

a copy of the document,

uh, the ServiceNet Diary Card

where Farak disclosed

using drugs at the lab.

Like, the investigators

and the Attorney General's Office,

they were talking

about exactly these worksheets.

And it became clear, like,

they knew about this.

There's a bunch of people

who are talking about this

and they knew

about Sonja Farak's drug addiction.

It was also bizarre,

because I suddenly had

all of this new information

about how I was regarded,

how my work was regarded,

and they did not like me at all.

Anne Kaczmarek said I was rude.

She said I was aggressive.

She said I was untrustworthy.

She told Kris Foster

she really didn't like me.

So I had these mixed emotions

of, like, "Oh my God,

they're calling me an as*h*le"

and "Thank you so much

for giving me these things

that shows that exculpatory evidence

was not just overlooked,

but that they knew about it

and that they actively took steps

to, uh, keep this investigation

very, very small."

[Marx] Those emails, I think,

are one of the most powerful examples

of the inability of the system

to really ensure

that evidence that needs

to get turned over to defendants

does get turned over.

Um this case really captures that,

because you have the prosecutors

and the cops holding a piece of paper

that says, "On the day

that Sonja Farak tested the drugs

used to prosecute

and convict Luke Ryan's client,

she was high."

They're holding that piece of paper.

But their first instinct is

not to call Luke and say,

"Luke, I got something

really important that you need to see.

I'll send it over to you now."

It's to bury it.

I'm not trying to demonize anyone.

I don't know what was in their mind.

Um, as a defense lawyer,

I don't like to demonize people.

I think good people

give in to bad impulses.

Uh I think people wanna avoid work.

They wanna avoid embarrassment.

They wanna avoid losing cases.

Whatever the rationale was,

they were holding in their hand

damning evidence

about the state chemist in that case

and they didn't give it

to their defense lawyer.

[Maura] You know, um

ultimately, they're the prosecutors

who are in charge of of their cases.

I mean, I wasn't here under

I wasn't involved

with the Criminal Bureau work.

That was the prior administration.

I wasn't part of that, so I don't

I don't know the scope of it.

But, um, I certainly know that

you know, prosecutors

You know, you need to There are ethical

rules that you've gotta follow.

[Matt] It seemed like not only

did Kris Foster and Anne Kaczmarek

at the Attorney General's Office

fail to turn over evidence,

they also may have misled a judge,

Judge Kinder.

And in the spectrum

of prosecutorial misconduct,

that's about as bad as it gets.

I I was getting pretty angry

and pretty agitated.

I felt like this had been, uh

just a huge con job.

[David] So when I heard about the emails

and the scope of it

because Luke Ryan was

good enough to let me know

And that was the real revelation,

that this is this is big.

That really opened up the Pandora's box

for, uh, the Attorney General's Office

that this now was bigger than just,

uh, what they had been, uh, projecting.

Because they wanted to contain it.

They didn't want to pursue the truth.

They didn't want to know the full scheme.

They didn't want to know the truth.

And the truth was

that she'd been using drugs since 2004.