Massachusetts has agreed to pay an approximately $14 million settlement to refund the fees of thousands of people wrongly convicted of drug crimes.
The state will pay back probation and victim-witness fees, fines, drug analyses, court costs, GPS monitoring, restitution and other costs for some 31,000 people, CNN reported Thursday. The settlement, if approved by a judge, could return between $150 to several thousands of dollars to those impacted.
“Shifting costs to ‘users’ of the criminal legal system creates extraordinary hardships for defendants and their families,” Luke Ryan, one of the lawyers representing individuals with annulled convictions, reportedly said. “In addition to erecting sometimes insurmountable barriers to re-entry, legal financial obligations require probation and parole officers to allocate substantial time to acting as collection agents that could otherwise be devoted to rehabilitation and public safety.”
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has agreed to a settlement that would pay back fees associated with legal cases, probation and fines for tens of thousands of people who were wrongfully convicted of drug charges, according to court documents. https://t.co/EUsTyCDpR0
— CNN (@CNN) June 3, 2022
The settlement agreement was filed Thursday to compensate for the people who were involved in a case where two former lab chemists tampered with drug samples, CNN reported. (RELATED: Massachusetts AG Accused Of Misuse Of Power By 11 Attorneys)
Former state chemist Annie Dookhan pleaded guilty to 27 counts, including obstruction of justice and tapering with evidence, in 2013 and was released from prison three years later, according to CNN. The other former chemist, Sonja Farak, was convicted of tampering with drug evidence inside a state crime lab located in Amherst and was sentenced in 2014 to 18 months in prison, according to MassLive.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey told CNN that the two former state lab chemists’ crimes unjustly impacted thousands of people and that the state is “pleased to have engaged” in refunding them.
“From the start, we have recognized that defendants with vacated convictions should be refunded and are pleased to have engaged in a collaborative effort to reach a fair and efficient resolution for all involved,” Healey said, according to CNN.
ACLU of Massachusetts Legal Director Matthew Segal said returning the money to the wrongfully-convicted people does not account for the prison time they served, CNN reported.
“This isn’t a case about being compensated for serving time which you shouldn’t have served. This is about returning people their own money that was wrongfully taken from them in connection with their convictions,” Segal said. “So every penny that is part of this settlement is a reminder of all the ways that we punish people as part of the war on drugs.”