RIGGED: PODCAST

Chris, Ilyas and Jamie interview MassLive and Republican reporter Stephanie Barry about her reporting on the Greg Bigda case and the Springfield PD in general. Stephanie has been reporting on Springfield PD corruption for years and her insights and thoughts on these cases. This is a great, thought provoking episode on how corrupt our criminal justice system really is in Massachusetts.

To say that this episode is disturbing is a major understatement. Jamie, Ilyas and Chris review the video of Springfield Detective Greg Bigda who was indicted in 2018 by a federal grand jury for excessive force in connection with allegedly punching and kicking young car theft suspects during an arrest in 2016, two counts of “abusive interrogation” for threatening to kill and plant drugs on them, p...

The second half of our review of the federal investigation of the Springfield Police Department. *Spoiler Alert* The Springfield PD REALLY likes punching people in the face.

Luke Ryan returns to discuss the Department of Justice's 2018 investigation into the Springfield Police Department. This investigation uncovered the illegal, immoral and often criminal abuses of power undertook by the SPD's Narcotics department. The shocking details of the criminal activity of this department need to be heard to be believed. All that and a brief opinion on the Rittenhouse verdict,...

The conclusion of our look into the state's intentional misclassification of Class E drugs.

Chris, Ilyas and Jamie discuss the biggest story no one has ever talked about with this case, chemists from Hinton, Amherst and the State Police Labs intentionally falsely classifying drugs to send people who they know to be innocent to jail. While we have touched upon this subject in previous episodes, we haven't gone over exactly what happened until now. There has never been an article on this s...

Jamie, Ilyas and Chris review lawyer Nathan Tamulis' Feburary 2016 response to the Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General Supplemental Report. The sheer amount of contradictions, half truths and outright falsehoods that exist in this report is depressingly unsurprising.

Ilyas, Chris and Jamie go through the rest of the OIG's Supplemental report. They discuss the inconsistencies in the report and begin looking into the Class E drug classification disaster that was briefly touched upon in the report. Much of the testing malfeasance covered in this episode was done by chemists not named Annie Dookhan yet the OIG still insists Annie Dookhan was the lone bad actor at...

Jamie, Ilyas and Chris begin season 2 of Rigged by covering the latest news on the former Attorney General employees who hid the extent of Sonja Farak's drug use from defense attorneys. They then discuss the 2016 Inspector General supplemental report which got little to no media attention. This report documented the OIG's retesting of samples that the lab ran multiple times while only reporting th...

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...