Netflix’s latest documentary series, How to Fix a Drug Scandal, focuses on the story of Sonja Farak, a former Massachusetts crime lab chemist who was found to be abusing the drugs she was supposed to test, casting doubt on thousands of convictions the state had won based on her tests. But the Farak affair wasn’t the only drug testing scandal to rock the commonwealth in the 2010s. The series also includes the story of Annie Dookhan, who, like Farak, compromised thousands of drug cases, but for a totally different reason. Here’s what you should know.
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Who is Annie Dookhan?
Annie Khan was born in Trinidad, and moved to Massachusetts with her parents during childhood. There, she attended the elite high school Boston Latin Academy. She began her college years in 1996 at Regis College, before transferring to University of Massachusetts Boston, where she majored in biochemistry. After college, she began a career as a chemist, and began working at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute in late 2003. The following year, she married Surrendranath Dookhan, an engineer who also had roots in Trinidad. They had a son in 2006.
Dookhan had a history of making self-aggrandizing lies and exaggerations. The Boston Globe reported that she lied on her resume on multiple occasions, writing that she’d graduated from high school magna cum laude, despite the fact that the school doesn’t award that honor. While working at the Hinton lab, she included on her resume that she’d been awarded a master’s degree at the University of Amherst. She also at times told colleagues that she was in the process of divorcing her husband, and that she was pursuing a PhD at Harvard. But no divorce was ever filed, and she was never a Harvard student.
But Dookhan was a highly-regarded chemist, whose productivity at the state lab so outpaced that of her colleagues that one of them called her the team’s “superwoman.” In her first year on the job, she tested more than 9,000 drug samples—three times her co-workers’ average. According to the Washington Post, the following year, she tested four times as many as the next most prolific chemist. Her co-workers were suspicious of the remarkable numbers of tests she performed, but Dookhan—who arrived early, worked late, skipped lunches, and took paperwork home, seemed like a hyper-diligent employee. But the numbers were so improbably high that her supervisors conducted an audit of her work in 2010, though they didn’t find any serious problems with her performance.
But one Supreme Court case made the difference between Dookhan’s performance and that of her co-workers more difficult to ignore. The Melendez-Diaz ruling in 2009 found the Court declaring that criminal defendants had the right to question in court the chemists who performed drug testing in their cases. Suddenly, Dookhan and her coworkers had to spend much of their time in court. One chemist told the Associated Press that after the ruling, their average numbers of tests performed decreased from around 400 to 200. Meanwhile, word around the lab—where some of her colleagues had suspicions about her performance—held that she was testing around 800 samples per month.
Boston Globe//Getty ImagesAnnie Dookhan in court in 2013.
In 2011, Dookhan was suspended from her laboratory work after being caught forging one of her coworkers’ signatures, sparking an investigation. Drug samples she had identified as being narcotics were retested, and some were found to not actually be drugs. When questioned by police, she admitted to a practice called “dry labbing,” identifying samples just by looking at them, rather than performing the required tests. She also admitted to tampering with samples, writing in a statement to police that she “turned a negative sample into a positive a few times.” She said that she actually tested around a third to a fifth of the 60,000 drug samples that crossed her desk. Her only known motive was the desire to maximize her performance and further her career.
In November 2013, she pleaded guilty to charges including perjury, obstruction of justice, and evidence tampering. She was paroled in April 2016. Dookhan’s crimes had an immense ripple effect, as her actions caused thousands of drug convictions to be cast into doubt. In 2017, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court dropped 21,587 drug convictions that had hinged on samples processed by Dookhan.
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