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Massachusetts crime lab scandal may involve even more wrongdoing

Annie Dookhan

A decade-old scandal at a Massachusetts crime lab — which led authorities to dismiss tens of thousands of drug convictions — may involve wrongdoing by more people than was previously known, according to a recent court order. 

A state Superior Court judge said in a ruling related to the release of a trove of state investigative materials that there is evidence that other employees at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute — beyond disgraced former chemist Annie Dookhan — may have engaged in misconduct. At least one person was referred to the state attorney general’s office in 2015 for potential prosecution, Judge John T. Lu wrote last week. 

The ruling stokes lingering doubts about statements by the state inspector general’s office over the past eight years that Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at the Hinton lab. And it means the vast scandal could grow. 

“This is a significant development. It justifiably raises questions about the criminal convictions that the lab helped to produce with or without Annie Dookhan’s involvement,” said Matthew Segal, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who has led the fight by defense lawyers to unearth the massive misconduct at a pair of government-run Massachusetts labs that prompted the state’s highest court to dismiss 61,000 drug charges. 

Annie Dookhan, center, is escorted out of her home by authorities in Franklin, Mass., on Sept. 28, 2012.Bizuayehu Tesfaye / AP

Dookhan’s misconduct at the Hinton lab was exposed in 2012, after she had worked there for nearly a decade. She admitted to tampering with evidence, forging test results and lying about it, according to court records. She served three years in prison and was released in 2016. Most of the people she helped convict of low-level drug offenses pleaded guilty and finished their sentences long before she was prosecuted, according to defense lawyers. More than 21,000 cases she worked on have been dismissed.

Lu’s ruling Sept. 16 is connected to cases in Middlesex County in which defendants are challenging drug convictions based on evidence that defense attorneys say was processed at the Hinton lab — not by Dookhan, but by other chemists, including Sonja Farak. 

Farak worked at the Hinton lab from 2002 to August 2004 before she moved to a state lab in Amherst, where she fed a drug addiction by using samples she was supposed to be analyzing in criminal cases, according to court records. She…

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