{"id":6978,"date":"2023-11-16T20:37:24","date_gmt":"2023-11-17T01:37:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/?p=6978"},"modified":"2023-11-16T20:37:24","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T01:37:24","slug":"faked-evidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/2023\/11\/16\/faked-evidence\/","title":{"rendered":"Faked Evidence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sonja Farak was a biochemist at the Massachusetts State Crime Laboratory who tested drugs that were used in criminal trials for convictions. This crime lab was a very underfunded and understaffed facility. According to the Netflix documentary How to Fix a Drug Scandal,<\/em> the lab received an annual budget of 300,000 dollars which was barely enough to pay the 4 scientists working there and \u201c to keep the lights on.\u201d In crime labs scientists are usually assigned evidence to be tested but in the Massachusetts crime lab the three testing scientists would assign themselves their evidence to be tested. Everything in the lab was available to the chemists including the standard samples for many drugs including meth.Due to these terrible working conditions, some scientists had to be in the lab alone, which is not allowed. In one of these many instances when Soja Farak was alone in the lab, she decided to try some liquid meth. Sonja, while in college, had done some research on the effect of drugs on the body and had determined that if she ever were to try a drug it would be meth. The reason being that liquid meth gives you energy and \u201cmakes you happier.\u201d So when Sonja took a drop of this liquid meth she immediately felt more energized and continued working on cases. Eventually Sonja became an addict, doing meth daily. Sonja was caught after she used some cocaine from the testing batch and replaced it with another substance that looked like cocaine. Eventually someone in the crime lab noticed that two batches that needed testing were gone and when they were found in Sonja\u2019s desk. After this evidence tested negative for cocaine, the police found the real cocaine in Sonja\u2019s car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am surprised by this information because I think that if it\u2019s this easy to tamper with evidence then it\u2019s even easier to convict someone of a crime. As a result people realized that the criminal justice system needed to be changed, and the state told the press that they would do a thorough investigation but they had no intent of doing so. I think the state is to blame, even though Sonja took the conscious decision to do meth, the crime lab should have better policies in place to make sure that this couldn’t even happen in the first place.(392)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sonja Farak was a biochemist at the Massachusetts State Crime Laboratory who tested drugs that were used in criminal trials for convictions. This crime lab was a very underfunded and understaffed facility. According to the Netflix documentary How to Fix … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18345,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155089],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6978"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18345"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6979,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6978\/revisions\/6979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ch115\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}