Rollins vows to toss drug lab cases
Wants to dismiss convictions linked to Hinton Lab
‘The time has come to fully address the impact of systemic misconduct in the Hinton Lab. … It is never too late to rectify the injustice suffered by so many individuals.’
SUFFOLK DA RACHAEL ROLLINS
The Suffolk DA is pledging to toss 74,800 criminal cases as the Hinton Lab fiasco continues to lay waste to drug prosecutions — and cost the state $30 million to date.
Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins announced Monday she is launching the “Hinton Lab Initiative” to vacate cases linked to the “catastrophic failure of management” at the now-shuttered Jamaica Plain lab.
Rollins pledged to dismiss Suffolk County drug convictions for any individual whose drug certification was done at the Hinton Lab between May 2003 and August 2012.
That’s when chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak were convicted of botching samples in what has become the worst case of its kind in the nation’s history.
Dookhan raced through tests falsifying evidence, prosecutors said. Farak was addicted to the drugs she was testing and was accused of smoking crack “10 to 12 times a day, including during work” at a lab in Amherst, according to a state probe.
“The time has come to fully address the impact of systemic misconduct in the Hinton Lab. … It is never too late to rectify the injustice suffered by so many individuals,’’ Rollins said.
Rollins is out to come to a “global resolution” for drug cases “from any analysis conducted at the Hinton Lab between May 1, 2003, and August 30, 2012.” That’s about
82,800 samples.
More than 7,800 of those cases were already reviewed and thrown out with prejudice as part of a 2017 Supreme Judicial Court ruling.
Rollins said she is targeting some 74,800 Suffolk County lab certifications that were not reviewed and they will be the subject of the proposed global resolution.
“Since one certification can be used for multiple defendants or one defendant can have multiple certifications, the precise number of defendants is still to be determined,” the DA added.
To date, 35,000 drug convictions have been dismissed due to the drug lab scandals — that included the drug lab in Amherst — with the fallout spreading to other counties in the Bay State.
Both Dookhan and Farak served time and are now free. Dookhan spent three years in jail and was released in 2016; Farak was sentenced to 18 months and walked free in 2015. Both were part of a Netflix series that looked at the lab scandal.
Rollins said 190,000 cases were handled at the Hinton Lab during the time in question.
“We will convene a summit next month to begin identifying individual defendants, reviewing the cases and determining next steps,” Rollins said.
A similar clean sweep of drug convictions was implemented at the Amherst lab where Farak worked starting in 2004.
“The combined scandals of Dookhan and Farak have resulted in tens of thousands of overturned convictions, and have cost the Commonwealth approximately $30 million to date,” Rollins said, adding the time could have been better spent on “unsolved homicides, interacting positively with youth in our communities, or proactively trying to disrupt violence.”