Posted on 04/04/2013 4:42:15 PM PDT by neverdem
More than 300 convicted inmates have been released from Massachusetts state prisons in the US as a result of the September 2012 arrest and subsequent indictment of Annie Dookhan, who worked in a Department of Public Health state laboratory and allegedly falsified evidence used in criminal cases. Now the scandal has grown with the prosecution of another Massachusetts state lab chemist for tampering with evidence and stealing drugs seized as evidence.
Sonja Farak, who worked at the Massachusetts State Crime Laboratory in Amherst, was charged with tampering with four drug samples stored at the lab on 1 April. In two of the cases, authorities allege that Farak mixed drug evidence samples with counterfeit drugs to hide her theft, and in the two other cases the samples could not be found. She was also charged with cocaine possession.
Attorney general Martha Coakley said that Farak – who was originally arrested in January, just months after the Dookhan scandal broke – ‘violated the trust placed in her’.
Question marks ‘Every case she handled now has a huge question mark around it,’ says Josh Lee, a criminal defense attorney and founding partner of law firm Ward, Lee and Coats. ‘Such an individual is not going to be concerned with good laboratory practices or proper evidence handling and testing,’ he adds.
If Farak was adulterating drug samples to cover up her theft, as she is accused of doing, then that could have influenced the weight of these samples and changed the crime that suspects were charged with. ‘Changing weights changes crimes and can, for example, elevate something from drug possession to drug trafficking,’ Lee notes.
Farak once worked at the same lab as Dookhan – the William Hinton State Lab in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. That lab has been closed since August, while the Amherst...
(Excerpt) Read more at rsc.org ...
Affirmative Action has its limits.
Could it be Jamaica?
A similar case.
Ex-lab tech pleads guilty on cocaine charge
{Snip}
Madden told police she had taken home small amounts of cocaine that had fallen out of about five evidence samples and said she used the drug to combat the effects of a longtime drinking problem.
Damned drunks!
More like the Dominican Republic’s neighbor to the south...
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