A Massachusetts district attorney is set to vacate thousands of drug convictions due to issues with evidence and a "catastrophic failure of management," according to a press release.

Rachael Rollins, district attorney of Suffolk County, Mass., on Monday announced a plan to vacate all drug convictions within the county between May 2003 and August 2012. The plan, dubbed the Hinton Lab Initiative, cites that the evidence certifications for cases during that time period were carried out by the William A. Hinton State Lab, where chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak – both of whom were later charged with mishandling evidence – worked, the release stated.

"No defendant harmed in this ignominious chapter of Massachusetts law enforcement history should continue to bear the burden and be marked with the brand of the Commonwealth's extensive wrongdoing," Rollins's office wrote in a court filing, according to The Boston Globe.

Farak was convicted of tampering with drug evidence in an Amherst, Mass., crime lab, though she was not charged for tampering with evidence at the William A. Hinton State Lab, and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Dookhan was also found guilty and sentenced to three to five years in prison, CNN noted. The William A. Hinton State Lab has since been closed.

Nearly 83,000 samples from Suffolk County were analyzed at the William A. Hinton State Lab during the years that both Farak and Dookhan worked there, the release noted. Over 7,800 of those cases have been vacated, but the initiative will review the almost 74,800 certifications that still remain.

"Since one certification can be used for multiple defendants or one defendant can have multiple certifications, the precise number of defendants is still to be determined," the press release stated.

“With this filing and the Hinton Lab Initiative, we are starting the hard work of instilling integrity back into an important part of the criminal legal system,’’ Rollins said in the release. "After years of litigation, this is an important step toward restoring trust and faith in the criminal legal system. By working together with our courtroom partners, today we no longer rely on potentially falsified or fabricated evidence, and finally declare what we should have over a decade ago, that the abject and systemic mismanagement of the Hinton Lab has rendered anything produced there inherently suspect.”

Rollins also noted that next month the district attorney's office will begin identifying defendants and reviewing cases in order to determine next steps.