The second chemist at the drug lab was never part of the original probe

This story never seems to end. The Inspector General didn't look at the other bad actor at the lab Sonja Farak who did much of the same thing lab chemist Annie Dookan did. The new revaluation could (which costs 6.2 million) negate another 11,000 drug cases. That doesn't include the 47,000 cases already dismissed.


From the Globe:
 by Maggie Mulvihill and Beverly Ford

In a revelation raising new questions about the scope and thoroughness of the state’s response to the Hinton drug lab scandal, the inspector general’s office has acknowledged it never investigated the work of a drug-abusing chemist who processed even more lab tests than her prolific disgraced co-worker, Annie Dookhan.

Inspector General Glenn A. Cunha’s office didn’t probe the conduct of chemist Sonja Farak at the William A. Hinton state laboratory in Jamaica Plain even though — amid its sweeping, $6.2 million probe into lab wrongdoing — Farak was arrested in 2013 and convicted the following year for stealing drug evidence at the state lab in Amherst, where she went to work after leaving Hinton in 2004.

The new revelation was included in a Sept. 5 filing with the Supreme Judicial Court in a pending heroin possession case when Special Assistant Attorney General Julia Bell Andrus, who is representing Cunha’s office in the case, said the agency “did not conduct an in-depth investigation specifically into the actions of Farak or any other individual” at Hinton.

State records from 2003 and 2004, when Dookhan and Farak both worked at the Hinton lab, indicate Farak’s testing regularly outpaced that of Dookhan, whose drug tampering resulted in her conviction in 2013 and approximately 20,000 criminal cases being dismissed.

The Middlesex district attorney’s office and the inspector general’s office are fighting a lower court order mandating that the DA scrutinize the IG’s massive investigative file to determine if it contains exculpatory evidence for the defendant in the heroin case, Eugene Sutton.

The inspector general’s office said in March 2014 that it had done an “exhaustive” review of work at the Hinton lab that included examining all management and operations to determine if any “chemists, supervisors or managers . . . committed any” misconduct that impacted the reliability of drug testing at the lab. The probe, spanning from 2002 to 2012, resulted in a 121-page report finding that Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at the lab.