RIGGED: PODCAST

Season two of Rigged is kicked off with Ilyas, Jamie and Chris giving a preview of what is in store for the new season. We will touch on the new developments with the Drug Lab cases and also explore some other law enforcement driven scandals that have been making headlines in MA. These other scandals will include the multiple arrests of evidence room officers in MA as well as the State Police Over...

As it turns out, Annie Dookhan wasn't the only chemist who was friendly with the DAs. In the season 1 finale of Rigged, the boys explore Sonja Farak's emails with the DAs for Western Massachusetts. While listening to this episode, please keep in mind that Farak admitted to being high on cocaine, crack, meth, pot and LSD while testifying to lock people in prison for doing the exact same things. Pro...

In the penultimate episode of season 1 of Rigged, Luke Ryan returns to discuss the Amherst Lab Operations. Chris, Jamie, Ilyas and Luke look at the media bias that led to keeping the Amherst Lab open and misinforming the public on just how bad the Amherst Lab was. Truly scary considering the implications keeping these labs open had on many people's lives.

After reviewing thousands of documents regarding the investigations Massachusetts did into the state drug labs, perhaps the most disturbing finding is that exactly one person expressed regret that hundreds of thousands of people were denied their right to a fair trial. That one person was Annie Dookhan, the one most responsible for sending innocent people to jail but hardly the only one that could...

We call this part 3 of the Hinton Lab operations review but it is really part 4. We review Betsy O'Brien's interview with the State Police as well as other chemists. We also dive into an investigation done by the lab after the June Breach that has never been mentioned anywhere. There are many laughs to be had in this episode as the incompetence of the Hinton Drug Testing Lab is on full display. Tr...

Every show we like to introduce something new about this case and this show is no exception. Jim McKenna joins Ilyas, Jamie and Chris to review the interviews the Hinton Lab chemists gave to the state police and OIG. We discover that the Hinton Lab actually investigated how certain chemists method of testing samples actually contaminated within an 18 inch radius. While 18 inches doesn't sound like...

The Hinton Lab Operations and The June Breach that exposed Dookhan's maleficence are explored in this episode. The June Breach was when Annie took samples out of the evidence offices without getting them assigned to her by the evidence officer. She had asked the evidence office for the samples to be assigned to her but they refused so she just took them. This event led to her being fired and event...

As anyone who has made it this far into our podcast knows, Annie Dookhan was not the lone bad actor at the Hinton Lab. Many chemists at this lab gave false testimony on the stand, used bogus testing methods, lied to investigators and all of them hated the criminal defendants whose evidence they were charged with testing. In part one of our look at the lab, we look at the never before seen document...

In 2014, the Massachusetts Inspector General released its report on the William H Hinton Drug Lab from 2002 - 2012. The OIG famously concluded that "Annie Dookhan was the lone bad actor at the Hinton Lab." While this conclusion has been completely debunked by the documentation that has been release in the years since, what has been overlooked is what the OIG said about Dookhan's motive. They said...

Duane Cook spent six years of his life behind bars while the state knew his evidence was tampered with by Farak and refused to give him his freedom. This powerful episode clearly demonstrates the lengths the state of Massachusetts went to keep people locked up regardless of their actual guilt or innocence.

The second part of the March 2016 interview the Massachusetts Attorney General's office conducted with freshly released rigged chemist, Annie Dookhan. Attorneys at Law Ilyas and Chris, and investigative journalist Jamie speculate that Dookhan agreed to the interview as part of her plea agreement which saw her serve under two and a half years on a three-to-five-year sentence. Dookhan makes a false...

About a month after Annie Dookhan was released from jail, the Massachusetts Attorney General's office brought her in to interview her about lab operations. During the course of the interview, Dookhan falsely represented that she did not manufacture drug standards. Chris, Jamie and Ilyas found clearly evidence of the contrary. If Dookhan was poor and not part of a massive government cover-up, she w...

Jim Hanchett is asked why the chemists who worked in his lab misclassified drugs on the stand. When confronted with evidence that Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan conspired to do just that, Hanchett blurts out "We don't just make stuff up!". Unfortunately for many in Massachusetts, his lab was doing just that.

Continuation of the Hanchett Interview where he confesses to more incompetence and general bad lab practices.

There are trainwrecks, there are shitshows and then there is the Amherst Drug Testing Lab supervised by Jim Hanchett. Under Hanchett's "supervision", Sonja Farak was allowed to freely steal from police submitted evidence for nearly a decade and why not. Hanchett himself admitted that the lab was too cheap to buy real drug testing standards so he would just pinch from the used samples to make the s...

After years of litigation, the Massachusetts ACLU prevailed in court and obtained several internal OIG emails which depict conversations the MA OIG had regarding their Hinton Lab investigation back in 2013. The emails directly contradict the OIG's own conclusion that Annie Dookhan was the lone bad actor at the Hinton Lab. Corruption at the highest level of the lab and in the state government are e...

Part 2 of the epic interview the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office had with former Amherst Chemist Sharon Salem in November of 2015. This interview was part of the AG's investigation into the practices at the drug lab and came almost two years after the Massachusetts Inspector General told the public that Annie Dookhan was the sole bad actor in a Drug Lab scandal that resulted in the dismiss...

Episode 6 of the Rigged Podcast has Jamie, Ilyas and Chris Post again listening to previously unknown interview with UMass Amherst chemist Sharon Salem. According to official FOIA responses from the Massachusetts Attorney General's office, this interview does not exist. Yet somehow, the Rigged Podcast was able to obtain this damning look into the "scientific" practices of the now shuttered drug te...

Exclusive audio from an interview the AG's office did with Amherst Chemist Rebecka Pontes.

In a landmark decision in the ongoing Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal, Attorney Jim McKenna obtained a internal Inspector General email that undermined the Inspector General's assertion that Annie Dookhan's drug testing numbers were higher than other chemists. The email names seven chemists that tested at a consistently higher rate than Dookhan for six months or greater. It also indicates that the...

We explore guest Chris Post's time working at the public defenders office (CPCS) in Massachusetts. Specifically we discuss Sonja Farak's time at the Hinton Lab where she is suspected of stealing drugs long before she was transferred to the Amherst Lab. Farak also tested at a higher rate than Dookhan and worked closely with her before transferring to the Amherst Lab.

Lawyer Dana Curhan joins the Rigged Podcast to discuss the case that opened the door for all future dismissals of cases based on Annie Dookhan's testing. This also set the precedent of the state lying about Dookhan's relationship with prosecutors and why she was rigging drug evidence.

The events of the Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal can be traced back to the outcome of the landmark Melendez Diaz v Massachusetts Supreme Court Case. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley argued the case for Massachusetts and it didn't go well. The case and it's implications for the Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal are explored in the first Episode of Rigged: The Massachusetts Drug Lab Scanda...

The Podcast beings with the following quote from Richard Nixon's Domestic Policy Chief John Ehrlichman: "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then cimrinalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up...