Welcome

Welcome to the Mass. drug lab scandals archive.

The twin scandals at Massachusetts drug labs have posed a fundamental challenge to the state’s criminal justice system and reshaped judicial precedents regarding government misconduct. The timeline surrounding them — from the arrests of the two chemists to the subsequent investigations to the eventual dismissal of more than 30,000 cases — is convoluted but relatively well-documented due to extensive litigation. These court battles unearthed some of the most crucial findings, particularly just how far back both Annie Dookhan’s and Sonja Farak’s misdeeds went, and the structural breakdowns that allowed them to go undetected for so long.

In my reporting on the Hinton and Amherst labs, I have obtained so many thousands of pages about the scandals from court exhibits, public records requests, and other sources. Here I will compile these materials in one place, and will continue to build out the trove as I find gaps.

This archive arose both to preserve my own santity and from the need for policymakers, reporters, and the public to access the primary documents and other materials regarding these scandals. As with my reporting, I aim here to look beyond the salacious details and to document the galling institutional failures that ultimately required unprecedented remedies.

I hope this archive will clarify and contextualize these breakdowns, and also provoke further questions.

-Shawn