Prosecutors slammed for ‘lack of moral compass,’ withholding evidence in widening Mass. drug lab scandal

By Tom Jackman October 4 at 5:00 AM

Twice in recent years, chemists used by the state of Massachusetts to test drugs in criminal cases committed massive misconduct in their testing, affecting tens of thousands of cases. And twice, prosecutors in Massachusetts failed to act promptly to notify most defendants of the problem. ... Instead, the prosecutors have taken years to seek justice for the defendants affected by the bad drug testing in both episodes, causing some people to wrongly spend years in prison.

In the first case, after five years, the Massachusetts supreme court eventually forced state prosecutors to compile a list of affected defendants and ultimately dismiss 98.5 percent of the cases involved, with more than 21,000 drug convictions erased. In the second case, discovered in 2013 but still unfolding, a judge concluded recently that two prosecutors committed “intentional, repeated, prolonged and deceptive withholding of evidence from the defendants” and that “their misconduct evinces a depth of deceptiveness that constitutes a fraud upon the court.”

The two prosecutors, former assistant attorneys general Anne Kaczmarek and Kris Foster, have since moved on to higher-paying jobs elsewhere in the state government. But still no steps have been taken to fully identify the thousands of cases handled by Sonja Farak, a chemist who admitted that she was high nearly every day while analyzing drug samples submitted by police from 2005 to 2013, and who has already been convicted and served her time. In many cases, authorities can’t retest the drugs that Farak originally certified because, well, Farak used them.

So last month, the state public defender agency and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Massachusetts attorney general and all 11 district attorneys, seeking a list — and dismissal — of all Farak-related cases, based not only on her misadventures but also the “egregious prosecutorial misconduct” by the state attorney general’s office. It has now been 4½ years since Farak’s arrest in January 2013.
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Tom Jackman has been covering criminal justice for The Post since 1998, and now anchors the new "True Crime" blog. Follow @TomJackmanWP