How Can America Fix Its Crime Labs?
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Scandals have plagued crime labs across the country. What can be done to prevent the next one?
In 2013, Sonja Farak, a chemist at an Amherst state lab in Massachusetts, was arrested for tampering with evidence. Farak’s case made headlines in part for its salaciousness: She was using lab samples to fuel her own drug habit for at least eight years. At its worst, her addiction impelled the chemist to cook crack inside the state-run lab, and smoke up to a dozen times a day on the job, the Boston Herald reports.
Convicted in 2014, she has already served her 18-month sentence. But, according to the Herald, a newly released state investigation has found that Farak’s misconduct may have affected thousands more cases than anyone realized.
How does a drug addict steal from a state-run lab for nearly a decade without anyone noticing? The Farak scandal is unusual, but it is not unique. The Massachusetts District Attorney’s office is still recovering from the case of Annie Dookhan — a chemist currently in jail for tampering with evidence in drug cases. Dookhan handled samples for more than 40,000 cases, and as many as 20,000 convictions may have resulted from her work, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
And it’s not just Massachusetts. Crime lab technicians in Montana andCalifornia have been accused of stealing pills and cocaine from evidence. And in Houston, Jonathan Salvador, a Department of Public Safety crime lab employee, was let go for fabricating drug tests, and a slew of guilty verdicts were overturned as district attorneys across 30 counties began re-evaluating the evidence in the nearly 5,000 cases Salvador had worked on.
The lack of oversight in crime labs, and the pressure to do more with less creates an environment that allows misconduct like Farak’s to go unnoticed.
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