Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal how to fix a drug scandal netflix war on drugs william h hinton drug lab annie dookhan sonja farak - Rigged: The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal Podcast

Episode 1

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Published on:

17th Jul 2021

The OIG's Supplemental Report Part 1

Jamie, Ilyas and Chris begin season 2 of Rigged by covering the latest news on the former Attorney General employees who hid the extent of Sonja Farak's drug use from defense attorneys. They then discuss the 2016 Inspector General supplemental report which got little to no media attention.

This report documented the OIG's retesting of samples that the lab ran multiple times while only reporting the final results to the courts. This was clearly the lab doing everything it could to make sure that results came back positive and repeatedly testing evidence until they got their desired results.

These shocking realities are directly opposed to all the assertions that have been made by the state about the Hinton Lab. Namely that Annie Dookhan was the lone bad actor at the Hinton Lab and no one else was found to tamper with evidence.

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About the Podcast

Rigged: The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal Podcast

Hosts Jamie Folk and Ilyas Rona take a deep dive into the case responsible for the greatest violation of constitutional rights in Massachusetts history

On September 28, 2012, Massachusetts state chemist Annie Dookhan was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice and falsification of academic records. Approximately four months later another chemist, Sonja Farak, was arrested for using the drugs she was supposed to be testing and the Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal was born.

Hosts Jamie Folk and Ilyas Rona will be exploring the William H Hinton, UMass Amherst and State Police crime labs associated with this scandal and speak with the lawyers whose clients rights were violated as a result of the fraud committed by the chemists in these labs. Through their investigation of this case, Folk and Rona have found that the crimes of Dookhan and Farak were just the tip of the iceberg and that multiple chemists from three state labs lied on the stand, knowingly sent people to jail for possessing drugs that were not illegal and wanted to help law enforcement send as many people to jail as possible.

Jamie Folk is an independent journal who has been investigating this case since Dookhan's arrest was first reported. He has obtained over 70k documents from the state and has interviewed several lawyers, journalists, politicians, law enforcement officials and others connected with the case over the past 7 years.

Ilyas Rona is a lawyer who represented a man sent to prison by Dookhan and another Hinton lab chemist for possessing what turned out to be a cashew for two years. He has been investigating the Hinton, Amherst and State Police labs ever since.

About your host

James Folk

Jamie Folk has been researching and reporting on the Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal since 2013. He has worked in the biotech industry around Boston for the past 17 years in the Quality Assurance space. He was a volunteer with the Massachusetts Department of Corrections from 2010 to 2015 running the Alternatives to Violence (AVP) workshops for inmates and met many victims of these labs in prison.