PodCasts
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.
Ilyas and Jamie take a break from the drug lab to do a deep dive into what drives the state to fight their war on drug addicted people. Civil Assist Forfeiture is just a new rendition of the ancient practice of state run overlords using force backed by unfair laws to harass and steal from poor people.
Ilyas traces the practice back to the Magna Carta but it certainly predates that. Today police use the principal to take money from the people who the arrest for drug use and distribution to take all of their cash, cars and property. This cash is then used to buy things that don’t need to be approved by legislative bodies or reported at all. Boston was caught using this money to buy face recognition technology and placing cameras around the city to spy on its citizens.
