DNA scientist Kirsty Wright excluded from interim Queensland advisory board
The forensic scientist who exposed all of the wrongdoing in Queensland’s DNA lab has been excluded from helping on the reform process.
The woman who exposed the wrongdoing in Queensland’s DNA lab has been excluded from helping on the reform process.
Kirsty Wright called out the lab’s failures on The Australian’s podcast Shandee’s Story and was proved spectacularly right in retired judge Walter Sofronoff’s subsequent commission of inquiry triggered by her findings.
The independent forensic biologist has since continued through research in her own time to unearth catastrophic problems overlooked by the inquiry’s paid experts and kept secret by the lab’s staff, affecting DNA results in thousands more criminal cases than previously thought.
Yet a new advisory board overseeing the lab is underpinned by a recommendation that excludes Dr Wright and all other Queensland scientists from serving on it.
Dr Wright said she was “shocked and confused” at the inquiry’s recommendation that the board include two or three eminent forensic scientists “from jurisdictions other than Queensland”.
Mr Sofronoff co-chairs the interim board with retired District Court of Queensland judge Julie Dick.
“I really did think it was designed to exclude me. That was my first thought – they don’t want me on the board,” Dr Wright said.
“Why? What have I done wrong to not represent victims of crime and Queenslanders on this independent board?”
When the inquiry report was released the Palaszczuk government committed to implementing all 123 recommendations.
Health Minister Shannon Fentiman said on Sunday that the government had been consulting on legislation that would formally establish the advisory board.
“The draft bill does not include a requirement for advisory board members to be from jurisdictions other than Queensland,” Ms Fentiman said.
“Members appointed to the interim board have been appointed based on relevant qualifications, skills, experience, knowledge and standing.”
Based on the Gold Coast, Dr Wright works for the Australian Army developing forensic capability for counter-terrorism and national security needs, and as an RAAF reservist squadron leader helps recover and identify fallen soldiers from historic and current conflicts.
She is a visiting fellow with the Genomics Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology, was involved in the response to the 2002 Bali bombings, led an international team identifying victims of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, was manager of the national DNA database, and was pivotal to identifying the remains of murdered schoolboy Daniel Morcombe.
Dr Wright said she had “absolutely” wanted to serve on the new advisory board, designed to watch over and support the lab and to give scientists a place to report concerns as they arise.
“I wanted to continue to assist in the reform of forensic services in Queensland,” she said.
Shandee’s Story exposed serious, systemic problems in the lab including a failure to recover DNA from samples that should have been rich with it, and unusually high testing thresholds that prevented potentially vital samples from being fully processed.
Further research by Dr Wright has since identified that an automated DNA extraction method may have been failing from 2007 to 2016, casting a cloud over the new chief of the lab, Linzi Wilson-Wilde, and raising doubts about thousands more results in serious crimes.
Professor Wilson-Wilde reviewed the extraction method for the Sofronoff inquiry last year, but failed to include in her report evidence she came across showing it was catastrophically failing to recover DNA, The Weekend Australian revealed. She has denied misleading the inquiry, saying she was engaged to look at a separate serious contamination issue.
However, the inquiry’s written instructions to Professor Wilson-Wilde asked her to provide advice on the impact of “any deficiency” identified in the extraction method.
Asked why she didn’t raise in her report the extraction issue after seeing it, given that the failure to recover DNA was the central issue in Blackburn’s case and a clear focus of the inquiry, she said: “I wasn’t asked to look at a yield issue at all.”
Dr Wright said she had not heard anything from Professor Wilson-Wilde about assisting with reforms until the new lab chief emailed her late last month, after The Australian started investigating the extraction method issues.
A 2008 “Project 13” lab report that Professor Wilson-Wilde reviewed for the inquiry showed the automated method was recovering up to 92 per cent less DNA than a manual method.
Professor Wilson-Wilde’s report also failed to mention plainly false claims in the Project 13 scientific paper’s abstract or executive summary that the automatic and manual results were “comparable”.
Ms Fentiman expressed “full confidence in Professor Linzi Wilson-Wilde” and said the public should feel reassured by recent lab successes in identifying suspects previously missed.
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