BOSTON — A chemist from Northampton whose misconduct at the state drug lab in Amherst led to the dismissal of thousands of drug convictions should have had her work at a second state drug lab more thoroughly scrutinized by the Office of Inspector General, according to a single justice ruling by the state’s highest court Thursday.
Associate Justice Scott L. Kafker, in the case of Commonwealth vs. Eugene Sutton, ruled that Sonja Farak’s work while employed at William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Jamaica Plain from 2002 to 2004 should have been better investigated, as it immediately preceded her tenure as state chemist at the since-closed lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus where drugs seized by local and state police from central and western Massachusetts were stored and analyzed.
Kafker’s ruling upholds a previous court decision by Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Michael D. Ricciuti finding that the state, once it became aware of the extent of Farak’s misconduct in Amherst, had a legal duty to look into her conduct in Jamaica Plain to determine how it might have affected cases there.
“The motion judge neither abused his discretion nor otherwise erred in ordering the Middlesex district attorney’s office to review the OIG’s file concerning its review of the Hinton lab,” Kafker wrote.
In March 2006, Sutton pleaded guilty to possession of heroin and possession with intent to distribute heroin, based on results from the Hinton lab, on June 17, 2004, following his arrest.
Sutton’s case is not among the thousands already thrown out based on misconduct by Farak and her colleague, Annie Dookhan, at the Jamaica Plain lab.
A year ago, a sweeping decision by the Supreme Judicial Court dismissed with prejudice every methamphetamine-related conviction from the nine years that Farak worked at the Amherst lab, as well as all cases involving drug tests from that lab from Jan. 1, 2009 through Jan. 18, 2013.
A total of 10,912 charges in 7,554 cases have been dismissed as a result of Farak’s misconduct. Along with Dookhan, 61,000 drug charges in Massachusetts have been dismissed.
Farak was arrested in 2013 and convicted the following year for stealing drug evidence at the state lab in Amherst. Authorities have said she was high almost every day she worked for eight years at the Amherst state drug lab.
But the so-called Caldwell report, named after Assistant Attorney General Thomas Caldwell who led an investigation into the drug labs, focused largely on investigating Farak’s conduct in Amherst, and concluded that she didn’t steal methamphetamine standards for personal use until late in 2004 or early 2005, and didn’t steal police-submitted samples until early 2009.
In addition, the report states that Dookhan’s misconduct of “dry-labbing,” which means identifying a drug sample as a narcotic by looking at it rather than testing, was something she did alone and that she had never discussed “dry-labbing” with Farak during their time together at the lab.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
