Affidavit in CPCS v. AG

Affidavit – 2018

Affidavit of Nasser Eledroos In Committee for Public Counsel Services and others v. Attorney General and others (SJ-2017-0347)

[From ACLUM.org] Almost every day for eight years, state drug-lab chemist Sonja Farak manufactured drugs, stole samples, and tested evidence while under the influence, throwing thousands of drug cases into question.

But the Amherst drug lab scandal doesn’t stop there.

After Farak’s arrest in 2013, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office (AGO) claimed her misconduct lasted under five months. All the while, they had crucial evidence showing that the misconduct was more severe.

That means thousands of people were convicted based on bad evidence — and the AGO hid that information from them and the courts. Since then, thousands of defendants affected by misconduct at the Amherst lab have been kept in the dark about what happened and denied any meaningful chance at a remedy for their wrongful convictions.

On September 20, 2017, the ACLU of Massachusetts, together with the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) and law firm Fick & Marx LLP, filed a petition urging the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) to dismiss every case in which Farak was the state's chemist. The petition calls for the dismissals due not only to Farak's wrongdoing but also the AGO's misconduct. It also asked the court to establish rules to prevent this type of prosecutorial misconduct.

In the Fall of 2018, I was presented with the opportunity to support the relief effort following an October decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, where the scope of relief had been extended to nearly every drug case that Sonja Farak touched.

This meant that all of a sudden, people who were currently incarcerated as of the decision were eligible for the same relief that was granted to people who had previously faced an adverse consequence on a drug conviction, years ago.

Identifying these incarcerated people however, was not an easy task.

As outlined in my affidavit, I developed complicated mechanisms to use datasets that do not have any ability to “talk” to each other to give about a dozen people who were presently incarcerated, a new lease on life. This involved using Levenshtein distances and cosine similarities to match names from data received from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Department of Corrections, and the Trial Courts.

Read my affidavit here (Page 5).