Annie Dookhan Case Again Under Scrutiny

When Franklin resident Annie Dookhan was arrested a decade ago it was big news locally and, in fact, nationally. Employed as a chemist at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute, which housed the Massachusetts state drug lab in Boston.

Although her supervisors seemed to have been oblivious to the problems, it seems that Dookhan had been routinely falsifying her results and, tellingly, racing through tests far faster than others.

And, it also turned out that she had exaggerated her credentials significantly.

The upshot was that Dookhan was convicted and served time in prison for obstruction of justice.

Tragically, large numbers of convictions that had been based in whole or in part on Dookhan’s lab work were thrown out. A total of 61,000 cases were dropped.

Now, though, according to an NBC report, the plot is thickening. Judge John T. Lu released a trove of documents relating to the lab that appear to show evidence of broader misconduct.

They were requested by a group of Middlesex County defendants are challenging their convictions due to the failure of the state to look into whether other actors specifically, saying the state failed to specifically investigate Sonja Farak and other chemists while they worked at Hinton.

Farak was at Hinton and then moved to a similar position in Amherst where she also got in trouble for mishandling and, indeed, stealing drug samples under her control – though there was never a conviction in that case.

According to the NBC reporting the defendants and the ACLU want to look further into the matter and suspect the original scandal may now grow.

(NBC News Image)