Deadline for Queensland DNA lab chiefs over jobs

Suspended managers responsible for Queensland’s disastrous DNA testing threshold will on Thursday respond to ‘show cause’ notices and justify why they should not be sacked.

Suspended managing scientist ­Cathie Allen.

Suspended managers responsible for Queensland’s disastrous DNA testing threshold will on Thursday respond to “show cause” notices and justify why they should not be sacked.

A royal commission-style inquiry found managing scientist ­Cathie Allen and her deputies, Justin Howes and Paula Brisotto were behind a testing threshold that meant thousands of crime scene samples were ignored for years.

Ms Allen, found to have lied under oath, bore most of the blame for the lab’s harmful policies and procedures, which have allowed offenders to go free.

Described in Commissioner Walter Sofronoff’s final report as a “malignancy”, Ms Allen “set out to deceive her executive-­director, the director-general and the minister and succeeded in doing so”.

Serious findings were also made against Mr Howes and Ms Brisotto, who failed to act on concerns from other scientists in the lab that crucial evidence could be going undetected.

All three remain stood-down on full pay and were issued show-cause notices last month, which they must respond to by Thursday.

Queensland Health director-general Shaun Drummond will consider their responses to the notice, before deciding whether they should keep their jobs.

Two other forensic staff, understood to be in executive roles, have been issued with less serious “please explain letters” by QH. The state’s Crime and Corruption Commission is also examining “a number of matters” raised in Mr Sofronoff’s final report.

Mr Sofronoff found Ms Allen, Ms Brisotto and Mr Howes were responsible for the “the conception and drafting” of a scientific paper to convince police to agree to an unusually high DNA testing threshold in 2018.

Designed to improve turnaround times for police, the threshold resulted in key evidence being missed in murder and rape cases.

Plans to set a threshold were originally drafted as a project proposal, which required endorsement of the lab’s nine-member management team.

Senior scientists Kylie Rika and Amanda Reeves questioned data relied on in the proposal and warned against the new testing procedures.

Realising they would not get necessary sign-off, Ms Brisotto, Mr Howes and Ms Allen cut them out of the process, the report found. The project proposal was converted to an “options paper”, allowing the trio to bypass other scientists and put the decision in the hands of police.

Meanwhile, a new body, Forensic Science Queensland, will be set up this month to provide “independent, expert oversight and ­ensure scientific integrity”.