sonja farak therapy notes
Patrick appointed the state inspector general to look into it. It was an astoundingly light touch for the second state chemist arrested in six months. After high school, Sonja went on to major in biochemistry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in western Massachusetts. Subscribe to Reason Roundup, a wrap up of the last 24 hours of news, delivered fresh each morning. This might not have mattered as much if the investigators had followed the evidence that Farak had been using drugs for at least a year and almost certainly longer. A federal judge has rejected claims from an embattled former state prosecutor that she is protected from liability in the fallout over a Massachusetts drug lab scandal. As he leafed through three boxes of evidence, he found the substance abuse worksheets and diaries. She was ar-rested for tampering with evidence while abusing narcotics at work. It declined Farak's offer of a detailed confession in exchange for leniency, nixing the offer without even negotiating terms. Sonja Farak, a chemist with a longterm mental health struggle, is the catalyst of the story, but it doesn't end with her. She had never quashed a subpoena before, but supervisors told her to fend off motions about Farak. Shown results suggesting otherwise, she copped to contaminating samples "a few times" during the previous "two to three years.". Her role was to test for the presence of illegal substances, which could be instrumental in thousands of . Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters, Sonja Farak is the subject of Netflix's "How To Fix a Drug Scandal. This article originally appeared in print under the headline "The Chemists and the Cover-Up". Hearings could help decide how many of thousands of convictions tainted by Farak's testing may be overturned. They were found with their packaging sliced open and their contents apparently altered. Sonja Farak pleaded guilty to stealing samples of drugs from an Amherst drug lab. a certification of drug samples in Penates case on Dec. 22, 2011. Even the master's degree on her rsum was fabricated. Coakley assigned the case against Dookhan to Assistant Attorney General Anne Kaczmarek and her supervisor, John Verner. From the March 2019 issue, "Tried to resist using @ work, but ended up failing," the forensic chemist scribbled on a diary worksheet she kept as part of her substance abuse therapy. Initially, she had represented herself in answer to the complaints lodged against her, but later, she turned to Susan Sachs, who represented her since, not just on the Penate lawsuit, but also on any other case that emerged as the result of her actions in Amherst. Verner's "marching orders," he later testified, were to prosecute Farak with "what was in front of us, the car, things that were readily apparent. Netflixs How to Fix a Drug Scandal tells the story of two women whose actions brought to light the negligence of the system that is supposed to deliver justice to everyone. Before her sentencing, Farak failed a drug test while out on bail, according to Mass Live. And then the bigger investigation was going to be someone else.". And so, when she pleaded guilty in January 2014, Farak got what one attorney called "de facto immunity." The disgraced chemist was sentenced to less than two years behind bars in 2014, following her guilty pleas for stealing cocaine from the lab. "First, of course, are the defendants, who when charged in the criminal justice system have the right to expect that they will be given due process and there will be fair and accurate information used in any prosecution against them." Joseph . Farak was a former lab chemist at a lab in Amherst, Massachusetts and was convicted of stealing and using drugs from the lab where she worked. (Belchertown, MA, 01/22/13) Sonja Farak, 35, of Northampton, is arraigned in Eastern Hampshire District Court in Belchertown on charges that she stole cocaine and heroin while working as a. The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the Amherst crime . Thanks to Farak's testimony and those diary worksheets, we now know that, soon after joining the Amherst lab in 2004, Farak started skimming from the methamphetamine "standard," an undiluted oil used as a reference against which suspected meth samples are compared. Shawn Musgrave is a reporter who was until recently based in Boston. B. ut when Penates lawyer tried to obtain the documents not certain what was in them before his clients 2013 trial, he was rebuffed by state prosecutors who said the papers were irrelevant according to emails included in investigative reports unsealed earlier this month. Investigators either missed or declined opportunities to dig very deep. "Whether law enforcement officials overlooked these papers or intentionally suppressed them is a question for another day.". Farak. Instead, Kaczmarek provided copies to Farak's own attorney and asked that all evidence from Farak's car, including the worksheets, be kept away from prying defense attorneys representing the thousands of people convicted of drug crimes based on Farak's work. Even before her arrest, the Department of Public Health had launched an internal inquiry into how such misconduct had gone undetected for such a long time. Please note that if your case has been identified for dismissal, it could take approximately 2-3 months for the relevant court records to be updated. Even when she failed a post-arrest drug testprompting the lead investigator to quip to Kaczmarek, "I hope she doesn't have a stash in her house! Sonja Farak. From the April 2023 issue, Billy Binion Meanwhile, other top prosecutors, including Coakley, largely escaped criticism for their collective failure to hand over evidence that they were bound by constitutional mandate to share with defendants. A status hearing on Penate's suit, which was filed in 2017, is scheduled for July. As a teenager, she had attempted suicide. She had unrestricted access to the evidence room. A scandal erupts, raising questions for the thousands of defendants in her cases. Sgt. It features the true story of Sonja Farak, a former state drug lab chemist in Massachusetts who was arrested in 2013 for consuming the drugs she was supposed to test and tampering with the evidence to cover up her tracks. She started working shortly after for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health in July 2003 until July 2012, and from July 2012 until January 2013 for the Massachusetts State Police when the lab fell under their jurisdiction. Her notes record on-the-job drug use ranging from small nips of the lab's baseline standard stock of the stimulant phentermine to stealing crack not only from her own samples but from colleagues' as well. Episode 1. Between Farak and Dookhanwho's also featured in How to Fix a Drug Scandal38,000 wrongfully convicted cases have been dismissed, according to the Washington Post. ", Prosecutors maintained that Faraks rogue behavior spanned just a few months. It contained substances often used to make counterfeit cocaine, including soap, baking soda, candle wax, and modeling clay, plus lab dishes, wax paper, and fragments of a crack pipe. Farak as a young. Farak received a sentence of 18 months in jail and 5 years of probation. A Powerful EHR to Manage a Thriving Practice. Scalia may as well have been describing Dookhan. He recommended she lose her law license for two years; the Office of Bar Counsel later argued Kaczmarek should be disbarred. The show also delves into the issues of the state in discovering and reporting on the extent of the cases that were affected by Faraks actions. And both pose the obvious question about how chemists could behave so badly for years without detection. That motion was denied, and the notice letters will explain Farak's tampering without any mention of prosecutorial misconduct. Nassif considered it a lapse in judgment, but not a disqualifying one; Nassif's boss didn't think it necessary to alert the prosecutors whose cases relied on the samples, much less the defendants. Although the year she wrote the notes wasnt listed on the worksheet, in the six years prior to her arrest, 2011 is the only year in which Dec. 22 fell on a Thursday. That settlement awaits approval by a judge. "The gravity of the present case cannot be overstated," Kaczmarek wrote in her memo recommending a prison sentence of five to seven years. El 6 de enero de 2014, Farak se declar culpable de los cargos en su contra. Sonja Farak is at the center of Netflix's new true crime docuseries, How To Fix a Drug Scandal. In December 2011, after police in Springfield, Mass., had arrested Renaldo Penate for allegedly selling heroin, the drugs from that case were tested at a state drug lab by technician Sonja Farak. Looking back, it seems that Massachusetts law enforcement officials, reeling from the Dookhan case, simply felt they couldn't weather another full-fledged forensics scandal. memo to Judge Kinder the next week, Foster said she reviewed the file, and said every document in it had already been disclosed. The report But unlike with Dookhan, no one launched a bigger investigation of Farak. There were also newspaper articles about other officials caught stealing drugs, including one with a scribbled note, "Thank god I'm not a law enforcement officer." She is not active on any social media platform and has kept her distance from the press. Join us. wrote she "tried to resist using @ work, but ended up failing." Because the attorney general had "portrayed Farak as a dedicated public servant who was apprehended immediately after crossing the line, there was also no reasonto waste resources engaging in any additional introspection.". And when the tests she did run came back negative, Dookhan added controlled substances to the vials. Damning evidence reveals drug lab chemist Sonja Farak's addictions. Having barely investigated her, prosecutors indicted Farak only for the samples in her possession the day she was caught. She received the American Institute of Chemists Award in her final year as well as a Crimson and Gray Award from the school a year before, which recognized her dedication, commitment and unselfishness in the enrichment of student life at WPI. A Rolling Stone piece on Farak also indicated that she graduated with high distinction from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After contemplating another suicide, she settled on drugs, and the fact that she had such easy access to it at her workplace made it easier for her to get lost in that world. Our posture is to not delve into the twists and turns of the investigation or the report and to let it stand on its own, Merrigan said. How to Fix a Drug Scandal: With Shannon O'Neill, Karl Kenzler, Paul Solotaroff, Scott Allen. She received an email from a detective weeks after Farak's arrest containing detailed notes Farak made in conjunction with her own drug treatment, pointedly identified as "FARAK Admissions" but failed to disclose them for years. In "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," a new four-part Netflix docuseries, documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr presents the stories of Massachusetts drug lab chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, and . She stopped the interview when asked about crack pipes found at her bench, and state police towed her car back to barracks while they waited on a warrant. Regarding the cases that she had handled, the Massachusetts courts threw out every case in the Amherst lab during her tenure. This threw every sample she had ever tested into question. The court also dismissed all meth cases processed at the lab since Farak started in 2004. Farak wasn't the first Massachusetts chemist to tamper with drug evidence. Dookhan's output remained implausibly high even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (2009) that defendants were entitled to cross-examine forensic chemists about their analysis. She was also under the influence when she took the stand during her trial. According to the notes, Farak thought it gave her energy, helped her to get things done and not procrastinate, feel more positive., Her partner Nikki Lee testified before a grand jury that she herself had tried cocaine, that she had observed Farak using cocaine in 2000, and that she had marijuana in her house when police officers arrived to search the premises as part of their investigation of Farak., In Faraks testimony during a grand jury investigation, she said that she became a recreational drug user during graduate school and used cocaine, marihuana, and ecstasy. She also said she used heroin one time and was nervous and sick and hated every minute of it [and had] no desire to use [it] again., Farak met and settled down with Nikki Lee in her 20s. Patrick said "the most important take-home" was that "no individual's due process rights were compromised.". In a March 2013 Given the account that Farak was a law-abiding citizen, it is questioned as to how an According to the documents released Tuesday, investigators found that Sonja Farak tested drug samples and testified in court while under the influence of methamphetamines, ketamine, cocaine, LSD . They tend to be more freeform notes about the session and your impressions of the client's statements and demeanour. "Thousands of defendants were kept in the dark for far too long about the government misconduct in their cases," the ACLU and the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state's public defense agency, wrote in a motion. Penate argued the court should follow those findings. Both scandals undercut confidence in the criminal justice system and the validity of forensic analysis. 3.3.2023 4:50 PM, 2022 Reason Foundation | Her answer: more than eight years before her arrest. Farak apparently still tested each caseunlike Annie Dookhan, another Massachusetts chemist who was arrested five months prior to Farak for fabricating test results. She later called this dismissive exchange a "plea to God.". This not only led to people getting a reprieve from prison but also filing their own lawsuits against the injustice they had to suffer. Kaczmarek, along with former assistant attorneys general Kris Foster and John Verner, all face possible sanctions. In June 2011, Dookhan secretly took 90 samples out of an evidence locker and then forged a co-worker's initials to check them back in, a clear chain-of-custody breach. The former judges and the state police officers who helped them conducted a thorough review, said Emalie Gainey, spokeswoman for Attorney General Maura Healey. Kaczmarek is one of three former prosecutors whose role in the prosecution of Farak later became the focus of several lawsuits and disciplinary hearings. The cocaine, found in an unsealed, completed drug-testing kit, tested negativemeaning Farak had seemingly replaced the formerly "positive" drugs with falsified substances. Farak signed a certification of drug samples in Penate's case on Dec. 22, 2011. She started seeing a substance abuse therapist around this time. Inwardly though, Sonja was struggling. The number is 888-999-2881. She tried to kill herself in high school, according to Rolling Stone. Carr weaves Farak's story into that of another Massachusetts chemist, Annie Dookhan, who worked across the state at the Hinton drug lab in Boston. 1. The Farak scandal came as the state grappled with another drug lab crisis. Many more are likely to follow, with the total expected to exceed 50,000. "That was one of the lines I had thought I would never cross: I wouldn't tamper with evidence, I wouldn't smoke crack, and then I wouldn't touch other people's work," Farak said. . "As the gatekeeper to this evidence, she failed to turn over documents, and she adamantly opposed the requests for access. When defense lawyers asked to see evidence for themselves, state prosecutors smeared them as pursuing a "fishing expedition.". Kaczmarek argued before the BBO, and in response to Penate's lawsuit, that she was focused on prosecuting Farak and not defendants, like Penate, whose criminal cases were affected by Farak's misconduct. "We shouldn't be in the position of having to be saying, 'Don't close your eyes to the duration and scope of misconduct that may affect a whole lot of cases,'" the exasperated Massachusetts chief justice told prosecutors during oral arguments. ", In 2004, her first full year at the lab, Dookhan reported analyzing approximately 700 samples per month. This immediately provoked questions about the thousands of cases in which her findings had contributed to the imprisonment of an individual. Faraks wife had her own mental health problems, and according to Rolling Stone, Farak would have conflict with her wife every night at home. But the Farak scandal is in many ways worse, since the chemist's crimes were compounded by drug abuse on the job and prosecutorial misconduct that the state's top court called "the deceptive withholding of exculpatory evidence by members of the Attorney General's office.". It features the true story of Sonja Farak, a former state drug lab chemist in Massachusetts who was arrested in 2013 for consuming the drugs she was supposed to test and tampering with the. On paper, these numbers made Dookhan the most productive chemist at Hinton; the next most productive averaged around 300 samples per month. Poetically, that landmark case originated from the Hinton lab, although Dookhan didn't conduct the analysis in question. The governor didn't appoint the inspector general or anyone else to determine how long Farak was altering samples or running analyses while high. | With the Dookhan case so fresh, reporters immediately labeled Farak "the second chemist. Thanks largely to the prosecutors' deception, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in October 2018 was forced to dismiss thousands of cases Farak may never have even touched, including every single conviction based on evidence processed at the Amherst lab from 2009 to the day of Farak's arrest in 2013. Soon after Dookhan's arrest, Coakley's office asked the governor to order a broader independent probe of the Hinton lab. ", The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the state drug lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, for more than eight years. Among the papers they seized were handwritten worksheets Farak completed for drug-abuse therapy. Fortunately, the courts largely ignored this shallow investigation. But a crucial issue was not before the court. There is no allegation of misconduct against the local prosecutors who presented the case against Penate in Hampden County Superior Court. Inwardly though, Sonja Farak was striving. Foster, now general counsel at the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission, and Kaczmarek, now a clerk magistrate in Suffolk Superior Court, declined to comment for this story. ", Prosecutors nationwide pretty uniformly backed this argument, which the Supreme Court rejected in a 54 opinion. Penate alleged Kaczmarek's actions violated his "Brady rights," which require prosecutors to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel. In the aftermath, the court felt it necessary to make clear that "no prosecutorhas the authority to decline to disclose exculpatory information.". Follow us so you don't miss a thing! To multiple courts' amazement, her incessant drug use never caught the attention of her co-workers. Name. In a 61 ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court in 2017, the defense bar, led by public defenders and the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), won the dismissal of almost every conviction based on Dookhan's analysismore than 36,000 cases in all. ", Officials rushed to downplay the situation in Amherst. The Hinton drug lab, operated by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, appears to have been run largely on the honor system. There is nothing to indicate that the allegations against Farak date back to the time she tested the drugs in Penates case. They were all rendered unacceptable. Maybe it's not a matter of checklists or reminders that prosecutors have to keep their eyes open for improprieties. State prosecutors hadnt provided this evidence to other district attorneys offices contending with the Farak fallout, either.
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