01.31.2023/Special Edition
State Inspector General’s Office Denied Other Workers Besides Annie Dookhan Engaged in Drug Lab Misconduct, Despite Secret Criminal Referrals
By Maggie Mulvihill
In multiple court filings and a statement to a judge, top lawyers for the state Inspector General’s office either denied they had referred for criminal prosecution other employees at a beleaguered state drug lab or indicated no other workers engaged in misconduct. The only employee ever prosecuted for misconduct at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute in Jamaica Plain was disgraced chemist Annie Dookhan.
The statements were made even though the IG’s office had referred other workers to the Attorney General for possible criminal prosecution, one as far back as 2015, stemming from their work at the Hinton drug lab, court records show.
A Middlesex County Superior Court judge last September sealed those referrals for nearly 50 years – until September 2072. The records are among well over a dozen that have been sealed in a set of Middlesex County Superior Court drug cases in which defendants are contesting their convictions because their evidence was tested at Hinton. Defense lawyers are pushing for the referrals to be made public, claiming the IG’s long-touted claim that Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at Hinton is false.
The lab was closed in 2012 following the revelation that Dookhan had been for years falsifying drug sample results.
A now-sealed Sept. 16, 2022 order from Middlesex Superior Court Judge John T. Lu underscores the concerns raised by the defense lawyers.
“For example, in June 2015 the OIG (Office of Inspector General) made a referral based on test results from an independent out-of-state laboratory, which were inconsistent with the Hinton Drug Lab results, suggesting that criminal acts may have been committed by another person at the Hinton Lab,” Lu wrote.
Dookhan pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with drug evidence at Hinton, where her rampant misconduct led to tens of thousands of wrongful drug convictions.
Coupled with the widespread drug theft at the state lab in Amherst, by former chemist Sonja Farak, the scandal has become the biggest crime lab crisis in U.S. history, costing taxpayers at least $30 million to date.
A hearing on the Middlesex cases is set for later this month.
“Truth was not a priority for the Inspector General’s office,” said attorney James P. McKenna, who represents two of the Middlesex defendants convicted with evidence tested by chemists other than Dookhan.
Dookhan and Farak were collectively sentenced to less than five years behind bars after pleading guilty to either tampering with evidence or stealing drugs in two separate prosecutions. No other Hinton employee has ever been prosecuted since the IG’s office issued a 2014 report stating Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at Hinton. The agency spent $6.2 million in public funds to come to its conclusion following a “top-to-bottom review” of Hinton and its operations.
Among the statements the IG’s office made about other potential misconduct at Hinton:
On July 11, 2018, the Inspector General’s then-General Counsel, Julia Bell Andrus told a Suffolk Superior Court judge she was not aware of any criminal referrals made by her office relative to Hinton. Her comment came in a hearing on the Escobar case before Judge Christine M. Roach.
Roach asked Andrus: . . . “there were no referrals, criminal referrals?
“There are none mentioned in the (Hinton) report, Your Honor, and there are none that I am aware of,” Andrus responded, according to a transcript of the hearing. The following day, Andrus wrote to apologize to the judge, stating she was prohibited by law from discussing any referrals.
“I misspoke during the hearing, and I am writing to correct the record,” Andrus wrote. State law bars the disclosure of any criminal referrals made by the IG’s office. Defense lawyers are arguing that in the interests of justice and a full accounting of what occurred at Hinton, the information must be released.
In a July 10, 2018 filing in a Suffolk County drug case in which the defendant, Justino Escobar, was challenging his conviction for cocaine trafficking, Andrus, the IG’s general counsel, stated: “Because the OIG neither "participated in the investigation or evaluation of individual defendants' cases" nor reported to the prosecutor's office" regarding those cases, it was not an agent of the prosecution team in the defendant’s case (or in the case of any other defendant in the Hinton-related cases.”
- That statement was repeated by First Assistant Inspector General Natalie S. Monroe in a July 18, 2018, filing in the Escobar case.
On Sept. 5, 2019, Andrus stated in a filing to the state Supreme Judicial Court that Dookhan was the only chemist to “act with deliberate malfeasance.”
The statement came in a case in which the Middlesex County District Attorney was appealing a lower court order it review the IG’s mammoth Hinton case file to see if the agency ever investigated Farak. The IG’s office “did not find evidence that any other chemist at the Drug Lab committed malfeasance with respect to evidence testing or knowingly aided Dookhan in her malfeasance,” Andrus stated.
In a statement, the Inspector General’s office said: “By statute, the Office of the Inspector General must refer matters to prosecutors when we find reasonable grounds to believe a criminal statute has been violated. The statutory threshold for a referral is very low. When we make a referral, we do so with the understanding that the prosecutorial agency will make their own independent determination that may or may not result in a prosecution. Under our statute, we cannot publicly disclose referrals that have not resulted in a prosecution. Because of our statute, the Office’s policy is to neither confirm nor deny the existence of a referral. Consistent with that policy, that is what our former general counsel informed the Court in her letter following the hearing.”
A spokeswoman for newly-elected Attorney General Andrea Campbell declined comment.
Maggie Mulvihill is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Computational Journalism at Boston University. She can be reached at mmulvih@bu.edu
What is Contrarian Boston?
I have fielded emails over the past several months asking what Contrarian Boston is about.
Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.
For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.
An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.
Our focus is:
· Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;
· Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;
· The media and why it does what it does;
· Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;
· And whatever else catches our fancy.
The OIG took 6.2 million dollars to lie to the public. The people who lied should be prosecuted and our money should be refunded. An actual independent agency should be hired to find out what actually happened at these labs and money should be paid to the defendants whose fourth amendment rights were violated. This is a disgrace and the OIG should be gutted.