Justice Faraktured

Briefly summarize the case. Are you surprised by this information? What is the fallout from
this type of behavior? Who is to blame?

The case of former bench chemist and drug analyst Sonja Farak for the crime lab at UMass in Amherst Massachusetts demonstrates the harms of unethical forensics. The chemist herself was taking the drugs. She could have been doing this for years. Additionally, whenever she took the real drugs in a sample she replaced them with fakes to make herself seem less suspicious. However, in January of 2013 almost 10 years into her career of analyzing drugs, Farak was arrested after two bags of fake meth after her desk was searched in response to a report of some missing drug samples. In her testimony she invoked her 5th amendment rights and was quickly found guilty for two charges of tampering and one count for possession of cocaine.

This result is both predictable and surprising. Sifting through drug samples for 10 years — more than 30,000 samples — must slowly develop her purported curiosity for the high of an illegal drug. At the same time, something like this should never happen unless authorities and systems were ill-prepared to monitor the chemists. The UMass Amherst lab was certainly not. Stemming from underfunding, chemists in the lab often practiced by themselves with no supervision, assigned themselves samples and were never questioned on the efficacy of their analysis.

As unsettling as the malpractice in the lab was, the response by the authorities was equally disturbing. Possibly from a “sweeping under the rug” combined with the irrelevance of Western Mass to the state police and attorney general in Boston made the investigation utterly lackluster. Drugs were never retested. Thus, many convictions reviewed by Farak could’ve imprisoned innocent people. Broadly from this case, one should question the legitimacy of both the forensic side and prosecutorial side of the justice system in America. (316)