The main premise of the Sonja Farak case was that she had been stealing and using drugs that were meant to be analyzed in the crime lab. Sonja had been tampering with the evidence, and when questioned about whether there should be any substances near her desk at the crime lab, she immediately used her 5th Amendment right. This came one year after Annie Dookan, another person working in a crime lab, admitted that when “testing” the different substances, she never actually tested them to be drugs but rather marked them as positive for the different illicit substances. Both Sonja’s and Annie’s behaviors raised many questions about the integrity of the crime lab and criminal justice as a whole. Their behaviors likely led to the arrests of many innocent people, and that is simply unacceptable. There is a lot of trust put into the crime labs, and having people jeopardize the system is just awful. People will spend time in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, and many lives have been ruined. The Sonja Farak situation is a little surprising to me because I expect someone who works in a crime lab to have better morals than to be so unethical. It is upsetting to see how drug addiction can lead to the downfall of someone who was well-respected by the people around her. In my opinion, the aftermath of Sonja’s situation was much less than the damage that she caused to many people’s lives. Sonja was only sentenced to 18 months in prison, which doesn’t seem fit. The many people she sent to prison were eventually dismissed after it was impossible to know if the substances in each of the cases were drugs or not. The aftermath wasted so many resources and questioned the fairness of many of these labs. People could see a lack of trust in these crime labs. In my opinion, this further perpetuates how the war on drugs can be seen as flawed. Sonja is most definitely to blame in this situation as she caused a lot of problems, but I will say she should not be totally to blame. There was no supervision over the pure substances, leaving them very accessible to everyone working in the lab. The lab had many flaws and this could have been easily prevented if these oversights were in place.
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I like how you talked about the ethics involved in forensic science. As a whole, our society puts a lot of trust in forensic science. This trust is broken when there are cases of illegitimate science, such as the ones involving Annie Dookan and Sonja Farak. As you mentioned, there are many underlying parts working in conjunction to cause some of the problems in America, such as the War on Drugs. Simply speaking, it all seems to boil down to selfishness, and self-preservation.