Setting the record straight first step on road to justice

Walter Sofronoff KC has made the only finding possible to restore integrity to the Queensland criminal justice system where the use of DNA evidence is involved. Thousands of criminal cases have been affected by failings at a state-owned and run forensic laboratory that failed to test DNA samples on the false premise that they would not yield a result. It is possible only to speculate how many perpetrators of crimes, including rape, sexual assault and possibly murder, have not been brought to justice as a result of the failings. Or how many victims of crime have been let down by a system that mishandled forensic technologies in a way that had not happened in any other jurisdiction. Queensland authorities must ask deep questions about why it has taken the pressure of journalistic exposure to force the medical and forensic bureaucracy to confront failings that had been long known.

An investigation by The Australian’s Hedley Thomas and David Murray into the 2013 murder of a Queensland woman, Shandee Blackburn, 23, was crucial in uncovering the failings and forcing reluctant authorities to act. Thomas said none of it would have been possible without the selfless efforts of whistleblowing forensic scientist Kirsty Wright.

Mr Sofranoff’s recommendations are the latest instalment in a series of backflips. In June, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was forced to scrap the state’s anomalously high threshold for testing DNA. Previously, to conduct a full DNA test in Queensland, crime scene samples had to have double the number of cells required in NSW. The Queensland lab had not tested below this threshold since 2018, believing the chance of finding new DNA from these samples was 1.86 per cent.

But a review by the Queensland Police Service found building usable profiles from DNA samples below the previous threshold was as high as 66 per cent in sexual assault cases. This suggested that hundreds of sexual assault investigations might have been discontinued when they could have gone ahead.

Mr Sofronoff has recommended that every witness statement issued since 2018, when samples were reported as having insufficient or no DNA, be identified by the lab “without delay”. The lab must prepare a correction explaining “the statement was not correct and that the sample contains a low level of measurable DNA which, if fully processed, might produce an interpretable profile”, for those samples initially reported as having “insufficient DNA”. Mr Sofranoff said the possibility of obtaining a profile from these samples cannot be excluded because, although it might be that the samples contained insufficient DNA to develop a DNA profile, it might also be that the samples contained sufficient DNA to obtain a partial or full DNA profile.

We share the view of Mr Sofranoff that the practice of putting forward untrue statements as true expert evidence is a profound issue for the administration of criminal justice, for the integrity of police investigations and for the human rights of victims of crime. Setting the record straight is the first to step to restoring the right to justice for what may be thousands of victims of serious crime.