Inquiry fails to censure expert’s silence on lab’s catastrophic DNA yield failure

Forensic Science Queensland chief Dr Linzi Wilson-Wild. Picture: Liam Kidston

Imagine you are a senior DNA scientist with impressive credentials and you’re giving expert ­evidence to one of the most ­important public inquiries in Queensland’s history.

It’s a commission of inquiry being run by a retired judge called Walter Sofronoff, working with a team of lawyers determined to discover why the Queensland government’s DNA testing lab has been failing to find the DNA of murderers in crime scene samples.

The stakes are extraordinarily high. Not just murderers but rapists are getting away with evil wrongdoing because the lab wasn’t finding their biological ­traces in blood and semen.

They’re free to reoffend because they’re not being identified in the first place.

Susan Hedge, one of the ­inquiry’s lawyers, sends you a handful of internal scientific documents, discovered during a sweep of potential evidence in the disastrously failing DNA lab.

Ms Hedge loves mathematics and she’s a dab hand at quadratic equations, but she is no forensic biologist; that’s why she’s gone to you, Dr Linzi Wilson-Wilde, expert witness, to examine and report on a curious little-known lab document relating to “Project 13”.

Now here’s the big question. When the Project 13 document, which you swear you duly examine, reveals to you in glaring (written and charted) detail “the smoking gun” – the inescapable evidence of a catastrophic failure in DNA yield, arising from the lab’s move to an automated testing system in 2007 – do you:

a) Urgently call Ms Hedge and exclaim: “I’ve found it! The DNA disaster mystery appears solved – the automated robots are the ­culprits for an obvious and massive collapse in DNA yield; that’s what must be failing thousands of victims of crime from 2007 until 2016. I’ll set it all out in my expert findings.”

Or do you:

b) Say nothing to Ms Hedge about the lab’s catastrophic DNA yield failure, despite the profound impact it must have had on the criminal justice system from 2007; elect to write nothing (not a single word) about the catastrophically collapsed DNA yield in your ­expert report; convey, instead, bland platitudes of “science-speak” which fail to alert the ­lawyer to the calamity you’ve identified; and then remain silent while Mr Sofronoff’s inquiry blissfully misses it.

Council Assisting Susan Hedge. Picture: Liam Kidston

In the wacky world of forensic science in Queensland, Dr Linzi Wilson-Wilde chose b) in October last year.

And when, two months later, the first DNA inquiry concluded without having discovered why DNA was failing in the murder of Shandee Blackburn, and so many other cases, the one scientist who still insists that she had identified the “smoking gun” (yet failed as an expert witness to report on it) was headhunted from Adelaide to be one of Brisbane’s highest-paid public servants: chief executive in charge of forensic services and the beleaguered DNA lab with a $200m funding package to make it world-class.

You cannot make this stuff up.

But it gets weirder. Friday was the final day of public hearings for the Project 13 inquiry, the lamest, strangest commission of inquiry in recent memory in Queensland.

This (mercifully brief) event has been more like a jolly jamboree of legal mediation in a hot tub with a gentle rubbing of witnesses’ backs than an adversarial hard-hitting exploration in the time-honoured Queensland way.

It was set up last month as a ­direct result of the dogged persistence and forensic brilliance of the one heroic figure in this entire DNA debacle, Dr Kirsty Wright. Dr Wright’s recent discovery of the Project 13 failure – and her disclosures about it in The Australian and our Shandee’s Story ­podcasts – finally forced the government to start the second DNA inquiry. Dr Wright’s earlier discoveries with me, in 2021 and 2022, forced the first commission of inquiry, run by Mr Sofronoff.

DNA Lab whistleblower Dr Kirsty Wright (right) with Vicki Blackburn, mother of Shandee Blackburn outside the inquiry on Wednesday. Picture: David Clark

In the new inquiry, we waited in vain for the commissioner, retired judge Annabelle Bennett, and her counsel assisting, Andrew Fox, to seize on and press a few very rational and available propositions – that Dr Wilson-Wilde’s failure to report to the first inquiry about the catastrophe of Project 13 amounted to her having egregiously “misled” Mr Sofronoff’s otherwise excellent inquiry; that it was an extraordinarily serious failure which caused Mr Sofronoff’s inquiry to miss the biggest event; that for victims of crime like Shandee Blackburn and her family, it was unforgivable and could have had lasting ramifications; and that these failures of Dr Wilson-Wilde were compounded by subsequent false claims she made.

Instead, in his closing submissions, Mr Fox went back into the legal hot tub with a nice warm sponge. Yes, he reported, things with Project 13 were very bad, as Dr Wright had found; and, yes, Dr Wilson-Wilde did indeed fail to report on the DNA yield disaster to Mr Sofronoff’s DNA inquiry; and, yes, there will now need to be re-testing of many, many thousands of crime scene samples, going all the way back to 2007; and no, Dr Wilson-Wilde as the new scientist in charge of the lab had not made any planning for such testing until The Australian went to her with Dr Wright’s findings.

But never mind. Because her leadership of the lab, Mr Fox told inquiry Commissioner Bennett, has been otherwise brilliant. And Dr Wilson-Wilde enjoys “the ­confidence and backing” of the lab’s scientists.

They’ve got a bit in common. Like Dr Wilson-Wilde, several of those lab scientists had also remained silent during Mr Sofronoff’s inquiry about their direct knowledge of Project 13.

But let’s not split hairs. This is accountability, Queensland-style.