The state’s highest court seemed equal parts willing to concede mistakes may have occurred and ready to lay blame at the feet of state prosecutors when they met this week to hear arguments arising from a decade old drug lab scandal.
“You have before you today three consolidated bar discipline cases of monumental importance, and I do not say that lightly,” Joseph Makalusky, an associate counsel for the Bar Counsel told the court. “Without the public’s trust that lawyers and judges will act in good faith and strictly within the bounds of our laws and professional norms, the rule of law has little practical force.”
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, on Monday, heard from attorneys representing prosecutors from the attorney general’s office over their handling of the 2013 prosecution and arrest of drug lab chemist Sonja Farak, who was sentenced to 18 months of incarceration after it was revealed she was using some of the drugs she was meant to be testing.
As a result of Farak’s misconduct, the state has had to dismiss thousands of criminal convictions which flowed through her lab.
Three prosecutors connected with the Amherst drug lab scandal failed to disclose evidence and engaged in misconduct, including one prosecutor who “actively misled others,” a scathing report on the matter said in 2021.
A Board of Bar Overseers special hearing issued those findings in a 98-page decision about former assistant attorneys general Anne Kaczmarek, John Verner and Kris Foster, saying the three were at some point responsible for disclosing evidence that may have led to more convictions being overturned.
Kaczmarek was the lead prosecutor in the Farak case, during which Verner was a supervisor and Foster a junior attorney in the office of former Attorney General Martha Coakley.
“The disclosure of potentially exculpatory evidence was particularly important,” the report reads. “My findings, conclusions and credibility determinations above and below reflect that Kaczmarek not only failed to do this; she actively misled others in the AGO as to what had been produced to the DAOs.”
Kaczmarek failed to disclose information and “intentionally misrepresented the evidence she had, and worked to actively shut down inquiry and deflect zealous work by Farak defendants’ counsel who were doing their jobs by requesting evidence of Farak’s misconduct,” according to the report.
The judges on the state’s high court, while hearing “SJC-13360 Matter of Foster Bar Discipline,” seemed inclined to grant both the ideas that a simple clerical mistake may have occurred and that it was nevertheless the responsibility of prosecutors to avoid such a costly error.
The root of the problem, it seems, comes down to who is to blame: the lawyer in the court, her boss, or her assistant.
“(Kaczmarek) is a prosecutor with 15 years of experience, (Verner) is the head of the criminal bureau, right?” Associate Justice Scott Kafker asked the lawyer for the bar.
“It’s pretty clear (the judge) is being completely misled on this, isn’t he? I mean, he may be able to blame it on Kaczmarek, but she is telling him there is no smoking gun and everything has been turned over, so what’s he to do?” he asked counsel for one of the accused prosecutors.
The Bar Counsel was seeking disbarment for Kaczmarek and short term suspensions for both Verner and Foster. The SJC did not issue a decision on the case Monday but is expected to sometime this summer.