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Reported by Shaun Chaiyabhat:

Drug samples tested at the Massachusetts state police lab have been confirmed to be the deadly opioid known as carfentanil.

State police said Wednesday the crime lab analyzed substances seized by state police or other police agencies. Three samples tested positive for carfentanil, with two submitted by Brockton police and the third submitted by Transit police in the Quincy area.

The Enterprise - 6/1/2017

In response to the commentary, "Sessions wrong to request mandatory minimum sentences" by Nancy Gertner and Chiraag Bains (May 16), it should be noted that Massachusetts is not in an incarceration crisis. In fact, a recent study by the Pew Center shows that Massachusetts has the second lowest rate of incarceration in the United States, and that the Massachusetts prison population is steadily declining.

Lenny Rowe
May 11, 2017

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Season 35 Episode 11 | 54m 46s

“FRONTLINE investigates the fight over the fate of juveniles serving life in prison for murder, following a landmark Supreme Court ruling. The film examines the impact of the order to re-evaluate thousands of juvenile murder cases and follows two of the first convicts to be released.

Aired: 05/02/17
Rating: NR”

-Posted on You Tube by Frontline

District Attorney Cruz was interviewed and appears in this documentary.

Christine James
March 23, 2017

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Christine James
March 9, 2017

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Christine James
January 5, 2017

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Christine James
November 25, 2016

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September 10, 2016

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We know addiction is a disease. People don’t ask to be addicts, and they can be treated. But when you combine addiction with stupidity, cruelty and indifference to the life of your own infant daughter, you have crossed a line. You deserve neither sympathy nor leniency, but rather disdain and, at most, pity.

Ryan Barry, 33, and his wife, Ashley Cyr, 29, are heroin addicts. They are clean now because they have been in jail for a couple of years. And they will be clean for at least several years to come after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the death of their baby girl, Mya, from the heroin they used and kept in an apartment they shared in Marshfield.

It was on Sept. 23, 2011, that first responders and police arrived at that apartment and found Mya cold and dead. Police found heroin and hypodermic needles in the bedroom where Mya slept with her mother and father. According to investigators, heroin had been mixed with baby formula in the bottle from which Mya had been fed that morning.

It took two years before laboratory analysis and police work produced enough evidence to indict Barry and Cyr for manslaughter in 2013. Both parents were held on $200,000 bail until their scheduled trials this week in Superior Court in Plymouth. Barry pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Wednesday and was sentenced to 10-to-12 years in prison. Cyr got 6-to-8 years for manslaughter the following day.

Marshfield Police Chief Phil Tavares, a captain at the time, was among the officers who went to the apartment in the Castle Green complex the day Mya died. “It was extremely upsetting,” Tavares said. “It’s a terrible tragedy for this child to never have been given a fair chance.”

Christine James
August 22, 2016

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