Clarification: Alec Loftus, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, says Secretary JudyAnn Bigby did not see the monthly composite reports on the state drug lab’s output until August 2012. In an earlier interview, Loftus had indicated she did see the reports when they were filed. For a fuller explanation on how Annie Dookhan’s output was obvious, see the story in this month’s issue of CommonWealth referenced below.

A Declaration of Homestead is a fairly standard legal document that protects what is usually a homeowner’s largest asset from being seized to settle most debts short of foreclosure. Most homeowners who file a declaration do so on the advice of their attorney at the time they close on their house or not long after.

Yet John Auerbach didn’t file a homestead declaration on his Jamaica Plain condominium until last May, 14 years after he purchased it in 1998. The timing of Auerbach’s filing is interesting because it came three months before he resigned as commissioner of the Department of Public Health in the wake of the Annie Dookhan scandal at the state drug lab. Dookhan is alleged to have tampered with evidence in as many as 35,000 drug-related cases between 2003 and last year.

Auerbach, who repeatedly declined to answer questions when reached at his office at Northeastern University, was not alone among the principals involved in the Dookhan case covering their assets. Julianne Nassif, one of Dookhan’s lab supervisors, filed a homestead declaration on her Westwood home in October 2012, a little more than a month after being fired and 14 years after buying her home with her husband. A State Police investigation and an internal review of the laboratory found that there were red flags raised by and brought to the attention of Auerbach and Nassif regarding Dookhan’s work at the state drug lab that were either ignored or dismissed.

The homestead filings by Auerbach and Nassif, who did not return a number of calls for comment, suggest they were trying to limit their liability should they get drawn into negligence lawsuits alleging they knew or should have known about Dookhan’s activities. While state law exempts a portion of a home’s value from creditors under the homestead statute, filing a declaration protects the value of the house up to $500,000 from any debt levied against an owner. The homestead filing, and its insulating effect on an individual’s assets, could also ward off attorneys representing plaintiffs alleging they were wrongfully convicted because of Dookhan’s actions.

“Filing a declaration [of homestead] makes sense,” says attorney Nicholas O’Donnell, who specializes in civil litigation at the law firm of Sullivan & Worcester and has no connection to the Dookhan case. “Someone who thinks they have liability might think, ‘At least I can protect my home.’”

Other players in the Dookhan case, ranging from soon-to-be former Health and Human Services Secretary JudyAnn Bigby to former Hinton lab director Dr. Linda Han, had already filed declarations of homestead on their properties. Dookhan has not filed a declaration on her Franklin home; a review of Norfolk Registry of Deeds records indicates the house is in the name of her husband, Surrendranath Dookhan.

In June 2011, Dookhan was caught removing samples from the evidence locker and forging a co-worker’s initials on the signout sheet. She was removed from analyzing drug samples but still allowed to testify in cases. In March of 2012, she was forced to resign from the lab.

Two months after Dookhan resigned, as her alleged violations became known to superiors, Auerbach filed his homestead declaration and then resigned at the end of summer. Nassif was responsible for monthly reports that went to Auerbach and Bigby that clearly showed Dookhan’s otherworldly lab production, which dwarfed colleagues’ output. CommonWealth’s current issue has a story examining the lab’s records and how Dookhan went undetected for so long.

O’Donnell says the lab records could bode ill for whomever is named as a defendant in potential lawsuits, especially the state and its administrators. “An allegation that the Commonwealth failed to adequately supervise her, particular in respect to red flags in her output in relation to other people. that’s a powerful fact for any plaintiff,” says O’Donnell. “Cases are decided on a number of facts but, as we say, that’s a good fact for the plaintiff and a bad fact for the Commonwealth.”

O’Donnell and other lawyers think, if there is a suit, it will likely be attempted as a class action because the state’s liability is capped at $100,000 per claim. Bunch cases together, and the state could be looking at a major outlay beyond what it is already spending to retry, release, and reinvestigate those convicted by Dookhan’s work. If the estimates of how far Dookhan’s actions reach are accurate, a figure of $350 million in liability claims is not out of the realm of possibility and a claim at that level is likely to draw top litigation attorneys.

Shannon Liss-Riordan of Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C., one of the state’s leading class action law firms, said she can understand why individuals might file homestead declarations to protect their homes because they’re probably “quite scared,” but she said she doubted individuals would be the focus of any legal action in regard to Dookhan. “I can’t imagine individuals who work for the state are going to have anywhere near the resources to satisfy plaintiffs in a case like this,” she says. “The state is the pocket here.”

Photo of John Auerbach courtesy of the Patriot Ledger