02.13.2023/Breaking News
State Hid for Years Criminal Referrals of Other Chemists, Supervisors at Hinton Drug Lab
By Maggie Mulvihill
In a stunning development today, a Middlesex County Superior Court judge unsealed records revealing the state concealed information for years that showed other chemists and supervisors may have engaged in wrongdoing at a beleaguered crime lab where rampant misconduct led to tens of thousands of wrongful drug convictions.
An investigative report issued in March 2014 by the state Inspector General’s office concluded disgraced chemist Annie Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute.
But nine sets of records unsealed today by Judge Patrick M. Haggan show the agency referred to the state Attorney General for potential criminal prosecution other Hinton chemists and supervisors. The reported conduct includes lying to police, misidentifying drug samples or certifying substances as illegal under state law – including a piece of a nut - when they were not drugs.
Those actions, in a number of cases, led to wrongful convictions for defendants who had drug evidence tested at Hinton, the records show.
In his ruling, Haggan rejected arguments from the inspector general that the documents should remain sealed, stating the drug defendants’ constitutional rights trumped the state law that mandates the agency’s investigative materials are confidential.
“The OIG's statutory privileges, however, do not override defendants' constitutional rights, and full transparency and disclosure of any criminal misconduct at the Hinton Lab is in furtherance of the OIG's statutory responsibilities,” Haggan wrote. “As a result, the OIG's policy of maintaining confidentiality must yield to defendants' right to a fair trial.”
“Moreover, the public has a considerable interest in obtaining information pertaining to allegations of government misconduct or ineptitude,” Haggan wrote.
A spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s office did not immediately respond to two requests for comment.
Haggan’s ruling came in a set of consolidated Middlesex County cases in which drug defendants are seeking to overturn their convictions because the evidence was tested at Hinton.
“Judge Haggan’s order has let the truth out. Now there can be justice for thousands,” said James P. McKenna, who represents two of those defendants.
One referral was made in December 2013 – months before the former inspector general Glenn A. Cunha released the findings from his $6 million probe of the Hinton lab. That 121-page report, the result of a 14-month “top-to-bottom” probe of Hinton - stated Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at the lab.
Cunha, who now teaches at Boston College, declined to comment, stating in an email: “I cannot comment on pending litigation as the rules of professional responsibility prohibit me from doing so.”
A spokeswoman for the Inspector General’s office also declined comment.
With 61,000 drug convictions already dismissed by the state’s highest court because of the pervasive misconduct at Hinton and the state laboratory in Amherst, the crisis has become the largest crime lab scandal in U.S. history.
Dookhan and former Amherst chemist Sonja 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 even though the referrals indicate the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe” other workers and supervisors “violated state criminal law” while working at the lab between 2002 and 2012.
Last September, now-retired Superior Court Judge John T. Lu sealed for 50 years – without explanation – the referrals released today. The referrals were made to officials in the offices of former Attorney Generals Martha Coakley and Maura T. Healey. Coakley is now a private attorney and Healey is the governor. They were discovered last year among the inspector general’s Hinton investigative files by a prosecutor as he looked for exculpatory evidence in several Middlesex County cases in which defendants were challenging their convictions due to the misconduct at Hinton.
The referrals were made between December 2013 and June 2015 and indicate the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe” numerous other employees at the lab – beyond Dookhan – were “in violation of state criminal law.”
The referrals include:
- A Dec. 11, 2013 referral of former Hinton lab supervisor Julianne Nassif for misleading state police in its probe of the drug lab. The referral was sent to the first Assistant Attorney General under Coakley, Edward R. Bedrosian Jr. The two-page letter, signed by former inspector general counsel Audrey Mark, states Nassif told investigators for the state police that Dookhan had improperly written another chemist’s initials on a document, among other things. Nassif also told investigators she provided that information to a Department of Public Health investigator, who denied under oath Nassif ever provided the information to him.
The investigator testified that Ms. Nassif had not relayed that information to him and if she had, he would have noted that in his interview notes, the letter states.
Mark wrote the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe, based on these facts, . . . there has been a violation of state criminal law by Ms. Julianne Nassif, specifically that she willfully misled a police officer in violation of M.G.L. Ch. 268, 13B,” the letter states. That citation refers to the state’s obstruction of justice law.
- An August 18, 2014 referral of a former Hinton supervisor Charles Salemi and other employees sent to former Assistant Attorney General Sheila Calkins. The two-page referral signed by Mark states “pursuant to M.G.L. 12A section 10, I am writing to you to report that I have reasonable grounds to believe that there has been a violation of state criminal law by former Hinton drug lab employees related to their reporting of the drug BZP as a controlled substance.” The letter also states “there is evidence to suggest that chemists including Hinton drug lab supervisor Charles Salemi knew that BZP was not a controlled substance under Massachusetts general laws but caused certificates of analysis to be issued stating that BZP was an illegal class E substance.”
Mark also wrote that “certain criminal defendants were convicted “related to Hinton’s false reporting of BZP as a Class E substance.” She stated in the letter that her office was in the process of identifying and notifying state prosecutors “which defendants had been wrongfully convicted.”
- A June 10, 2015 referral letter sent by Mark to former Deputy Attorney General Colin Owyang stating the inspector general had “reasonable grounds to believe” there was a violation of criminal law by Dookhan and former chemists Kate Corbett and Sosha Hayes regarding the misidentification of nine Hinton drug samples. Additional testing of the samples showed either there were no drugs, even though the chemists certified there were, or they were different substances, the letter states. The chemists’ actions led to wrongful convictions, including one involving a Dorchester man who was arrested with a small piece of a nut, which police claimed was drugs and Dookhan later certified was cocaine.
The inspector general’s office has long maintained its office did not find evidence of criminal conduct by anyone at Hinton. Dookhan pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence at Hinton and was sentenced to three years in prison.
In July 2018, the agency’s 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 Suffolk County drug case in which the defendant, Justino Escobar, was challenging his conviction.
Judge Christine 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.
In September, 2019, in a filing in another Middlesex County case in which drug defendant Eugene Sutton was challenging his conviction based on evidence tested at Hinton, Andrus stated: The OIG “did not find evidence that any other chemist at the Drug Lab committed any malfeasance with respect to evidence testing or knowingly aided Dookhan in her malfeasance.”
Maggie Mulvihill is an Associate Professor of the Practice in Computational Journalism at Boston University. She can be reached at mmulvih@bu.edu.
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