Forensic probe doesn’t stop here
Queensland Health Minister Shannon Fentiman has made the correct and necessary call in ordering a new commission of inquiry into deeply troubling failings involving former and current management of the state’s DNA lab. Ms Fentiman said on Wednesday that a retired judge would lead another independent inquiry into the lab, just 10 months after Walter Sofronoff KC handed the state government his damning findings about the operations of the lab.
It was the minister’s only real option in a scandal that rapidly was spiralling out of control. No one wants more disruption for the lab after the turmoil it has been through. But this newspaper’s role is to report without fear or favour, and it was in that spirit that our journalists Hedley Thomas and David Murray have approached their series of reports exposing new failings in the lab that were not picked up in the Sofronoff inquiry last year. Mr Sofronoff, the retired Queensland Court of Appeal president, was absolutely the right person to hold last year’s inquiry into the lab, triggered by the heroic investigations of forensic biologist Kirsty Wright with The Australian’s podcast Shandee’s Story. He deserves the state’s thanks and admiration for exposing forensics failures on a scale that has never been seen before in this nation, and probably the world. But in Dr Wright’s view, and in our view, Mr Sofronoff was badly let down by one of the experts engaged to advise him at the inquiry; and by extension, the taxpaying Queensland public was let down.
That expert, Linzi Wilson-Wilde, is now the most powerful scientist in Queensland, having been hand-picked for the role of Forensic Science Queensland chief executive following the 2022 inquiry. Professor Wilson-Wilde’s expert report to the inquiry did not flag that an automated extraction method introduced in the lab in 2007 was catastrophically failing to recover DNA, and that the lab knew this and went ahead with the method anyway. The problems with the extraction method were glaringly obvious in an August 2008 Project 13 report reviewed by Professor Wilson-Wilde for the inquiry, showing the automated method was recovering up to 92 per cent less DNA than a manual method.
A plainly false abstract or executive summary at the top of the Project 13 report fraudulently stated that results from the automated method were comparable with the manual method and recommended its use, despite the contrasting facts within the body of the report. According to retired forensic scientist Ron Grice, a high school student could have picked up the drop-off in DNA recovery in the Project 13 report as well as the lie in its abstract.
Just as concerning are Professor Wilson-Wilde’s explanations for not raising these issues at the inquiry, including her statement that she wasn’t asked about DNA yield and instead was tasked with looking at a separate issue of contamination. Dr Wright believes the problems with the extraction method plagued the lab for up to nine years, affecting as many as 100,000 crime scene samples, and blames it for Shandee Blackburn’s killer still remaining free.
Ms Fentiman’s original plan to have a new advisory board co-chaired by Mr Sofronoff and retired Queensland District Court judge Julie Dick SC to conduct a review was untenable. As reported in this newspaper, the board’s three scientific experts have links to Professor Wilson-Wilde that give rise to conflict of interest concerns. The inquiry chief, retired Federal Court judge Annabelle Bennett SC, has appropriate terms of reference to get to the bottom of these high-stakes issues. Our investigations and reporting have been critical in exposing the lab’s failings. We will continue to probe to ensure the government does not fall short in its responsibilities to set things right.