Onus on DA to resolve whether chemist's early days were probed adequately.

Byline: Kris Olson

While not the final word on the matter, the decision of a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court will prompt an investigation that some defense attorneys believe will lead to an already "apparent" conclusion: that prosecutors have failed to meet their legal responsibility to investigate possible malfeasance by Sonja Farak in the first 18 months of her career as a state chemist, when she worked at the Hinton drug lab in Jamaica Plain.

Farak'smisdeeds once she moved on to the Amherst lab have been well-chronicled. Those began in late 2004, shortly after she arrived from Hinton, according to the "Caldwell Report," which culminated an investigation by the Attorney General's Office into Farak's conduct in Amherst.

According to the report, Farak initially stole methamphetamine standards but in early 2009 began to steal from police-submitted samples as well.

Testifying before a grand jury under the protection of an immunity order, Farak claimed that she had not taken standards or police-submitted samples for personal use during her short time at Hinton because she did not have access to them.

But one of the judges who has since reviewed matters related to her misconduct, Superior Court Judge Richard J. Carey, did not credit that testimony, citing Farak's history of having lied to her therapist in order to downplay her substance abuse.

In the present case, defendant Eugene Sutton, who had pleaded guilty to possession and conspiracy with intent to distribute heroin in March 2006, filed a motion in Superior Court in June 2018, seeking an order vacating his convictions and dismissing the underlying indictments with prejudice because Farak had been involved in testing the drugs in his case while she was at Hinton.

Sutton argued that the commonwealth had failed to investigate Farak's conduct while at Hinton. He would later expand a motion for post-conviction discovery to seek records directly from the Department of Health and the Office of the Inspector General, which had conducted what had been described as a "top-to-bottom review" of the Hinton lab after the misconduct of another chemist, Annie Dookhan, came to light.

Superior Court Judge Michael D. Ricciuti concluded that the OIG is a member of the "prosecution team" for purposes of a prosecutor's duty to disclose exculpatory evidence. He ordered the OIG to make its "full files" -- all 22.3 gigabytes of electronic data and 63 file boxes -- available to the district attorney...