This week, the Boston Globe reported on a series of cases that Wood & Nathanson attorney Christopher Post has been working on for the past several years, along with parallel litigation by Attorney James McKenna. New information proves that misconduct at the Hinton Drug Lab was wider than previously known. This information came to light because of Attorney Post’s relentless push both to obtain the internal emails of the Office of the Inspector General (‘OIG’) and then his fight to make them public. Read the emails here.
Much is known about Farak’s misconduct at the Amherst Public Health laboratory. The new Globe article addresses several concerning issues about the integrity of the work that she performed at the Hinton Drug Lab between 2003 and 2012, but it also raises serious questions about whether the OIG was itself engaged in fraud by intentionally misrepresenting that Annie Dookhan was the sole bad actor at Hinton.
The OIG began its investigation into the Hinton Drug Lab in 2012, following Dookhan’s infamous admission that she had been committing fraud for years and that she had purposefully converted negative drug test results into positives in order to cover her tracks. After a yearlong investigation costing the taxpayers an estimated $6.2 million, the OIG issued a March 14, 2014 “comprehensive” report concluding that Annie Dookhan was the sole bad actor at the lab.
However, the recently released e-mails show that the OIG was warned multiple times – by its own expert – that Sonja Farak’s testing volume at the Hinton Lab was on par with or exceeded Dookhan’s and was likely indicative of fraud. Indeed, the expert followed up with OIG a month before it issued its report, warning that the issue was not limited to Dookhan.
Equally concerning, however, is the fact that the OIG’s expert reached these conclusions within approximately two weeks of Farak’s indictment for distinct misconduct at the Amherst lab, but his opinion was never shared with defense counsel, even though it was clearly exculpatory.
“They had to have known, almost immediately, the implications of their own expert’s findings,” said Atty. Post. “But they still did not release his conclusions or the underlying data to the public. If this information had been released when it should have been, thousands of defendants would not have had to live with the collateral consequences of wrongfully obtained drug convictions.”
This is hardly the end of the concerns regarding the Hinton laboratory. Attorney Post and others litigating these cases remain concerned about the unrealistic productivity of other chemists at the lab and their dishonesty both about following protocols and in their statements to law enforcement. We expect significant additional developments in the coming weeks.