Picture the scenario. A senior and highly trained scientist in a white coat in a government-run laboratory.
The detection of DNA is a specialty. But not just any old DNA.
Our scientist is empowered with finding and profiling DNA from some of Australia’s most dangerous offenders.
They are rapists and killers. They have launched attacks on the defenceless, sometimes in a frenzy of violence. They’re often messy and careless.
Which means their unique biological calling-card is left spattered and smeared at crime scenes – inside their victims, on a beer bottle or furniture or flooring or a weapon. From these surfaces, forensic evidence and tape-lifts can be taken, sealed and sent to the DNA lab.
Crucial work unfolds in the lab: test the victim’s underwear or the abandoned knife or the beer bottle or the sweat smear on the sofa or floorboards, then make a forensic report.
Chances are that something probative is going to be found. The testing equipment is so sensitive and sophisticated that just seven or eight human cells out of the several hundred million cells we shed every day will identify a criminal’s DNA. Or mixed profiles from multiple criminals if there’s a gang attack.
Then it’s up to police and prosecutors to build the case against another grub who needs to be taken off the streets. When a DNA match is made and an arrest occurs, another attack is averted.
All of this is what should be happening as a matter of daily routine in the Queensland government’s beleaguered DNA laboratory. Especially since two public inquiries run by retired judges – Walter Sofronoff’s in late 2022, then Annabelle Bennett’s in late 2023 – investigated and reported on the lab’s scientifically corrupt conduct over many years in which it failed victims of crime.
But what we now know from fresh and confidential internal lab documents obtained by The Australian, after more investigative work by leading forensic biologist Kirsty Wright, is that the rot in that lab continued.
Despite the weeks of hearings at those inquiries, dozens of witnesses and lawyering at vast public expense, grave findings from the former judges, and then promises and press releases from politicians about far-reaching reforms, the Queensland government-run DNA laboratory’s new senior staff couldn’t help themselves. They devised new testing shortcuts.
And they must have known these would result in offenders’ DNA going undetected in crime scene samples. A senior lab manager gave the go ahead in August 2023, and several months later the lab created its “risk assessment” – a nine-page case study showing how public servants paid to serve the criminal justice system justify compromising it.
The “risk assessment” reveals a high-level decision to change scientific settings – and, in doing this, realise what was described as the “potential to significantly reduce backlogs”.
There’s the lab’s objective in black and white: managers want to reduce the waiting lists of samples from crime scenes which require forensic testing for suspected DNA.
It’s a reasonable aim. But surely not if it undermines the primary objective – the reason for the lab’s very existence – which is the profiling of the DNA left by rapists and murderers.
The “risk assessment” acknowledges that, yes, the change to the scientific settings, the shortcut, “increases the risk to miss an opportunity to provide probative evidence to the justice system”.
But, it adds, delays due to the backlog mean there’s a risk of “missed opportunity to provide valuable evidence to the justice system”. There’s a head-scratch.
“Additionally, large backlogs and subsequent workload demands are a potential psychosocial risk factor at FSQ.”
Right, here is the trade-off at the heart of a debacle first uncovered in the Shandee’s Story podcast investigation with the work of Dr Wright.
Her efforts and The Australian’s persistence with the former Queensland Labor government led to the two inquiries, which vindicated what we said was going badly wrong – and then some.
It’s probably the world’s worst DNA forensic lab disaster, affecting thousands and going back two decades. Mostly because executives in that lab opted to take shortcuts with the testing – even though those shortcuts would inevitably miss the crucial DNA evidence. Shorter waiting lists were prioritised over making more DNA matches to dangerous criminals.
But as Dr Wright explained during Shandee’s Story, the lab did not ever need to compromise or throw victims of crime under a bus. All it needed to do was outsource its backlog of samples to overseas and interstate labs for testing – something that’s finally happening now under the new lab head, former NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller, with the blessing and financial backing of new Queensland Attorney-General Deb Frecklington.
The lab’s latest “risk assessment”, produced before the recent change of government and change in lab leadership, must have been written by someone alive to the risk of journalism.
Under the subheading of Reputation, it explains the risk of “negative media coverage and notation in national media in the event our newly implemented scientific (shortcut) does not meet community expectations”.
But even if it all leaks out and there’s instantly bad press, the document’s author reckons it’s a risk worth taking, adding “it is expected that any negative media attention will not be sustained”.
Another highlight in the document is the author’s observation that “staff may fail to comply with the change due to lack of understanding or misconceptions around personal risk or otherwise”. It appears to be suggesting that the bench-working scientists who know the right thing to do will hesitate.
But, it goes on, “a number of mitigation strategies will be in place to ensure the likelihood of the risk of missing probative evidence is reduced to ‘Rare’ “.
Dr Wright discovered this document a few months ago as part of the Premier David Crisafulli’s election pledge for a root-and-branch review of the lab’s performance since a couple of hundred million dollars was budgeted to fix it following the two inquiries.
Dr Wright, who worked in the lab two decades ago, has seen a lot of scientific negligence and deception since we teamed up in Shandee’s Story. But she was not expecting to find so much more, so soon after all the purported reforms and improvements.
She discovered that contrary to the rating of “rare”, it should have stated “regular” – because the lab knew when it introduced its shortcut that its instrumentation was seriously defective.
The lab’s claim that a failure to detect DNA would be “rare” was not supported by evidence. It didn’t bother doing the scientific experimentation to test its claim of “rare”. But Dr Wright concluded from her review and her testing that DNA was missed in 100 per cent of cases.
“This risk assessment is clearly highlighting the lab is nervous about implementing a new threshold,” she told me for Episode 16, of Shandee’s Legacy, our sequel series.
“The lab knew, even before the review, that the instrument they were using to measure the DNA in the samples wasn’t working accurately.
“Absolutely they would know that there’s a very, very high risk this new threshold would lead to offenders not being captured and would lead to miscarriages of justice. And they actually documented that.
“So it set this new threshold but then never fully tested any samples below the threshold, just to make sure they wouldn’t produce a profile.
“I did the analysis and found that 100 per cent of those were generating profiles below the threshold.
“The police had no idea how poorly these experiments were being conducted and they had no idea that the lab knew that their instruments weren’t working properly.
“This represents such a betrayal of trust with the community and the victims. I cannot believe, of all things, that the lab has done this again – and they’ve knowingly done it again.”
What does it take to ensure that a now well-resourced lab, dealing with the detritus of serious crime, does things properly?
Dr Kirsty Wright’s view is that the new management needs to identify and remove those senior scientists who were part of this latest debacle. Show them the door, finally – with a referral to the Crime and Corruption Commission, which has been conspicuous with its silence these past four years.
Episode 16 of Shandee’s Legacy, the sequel series to Shandee’s Story, is out now on The Australian’s podcast app.
