Victims of crime still being denied DNA-linked justice – along with police and prosecutors who rely on forensic evidence to put violent criminals behind bars – have new reasons to be hopeful.
Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli’s promise to appoint Kirsty Wright “to oversee reform” of the state’s beleaguered forensics lab is the best news since a public inquiry two years ago showed why the forensic biologist is a national treasure.
Wright must be the smartest, most persistent and bravest DNA scientist in the country.
And yet she has been pointedly excluded by former premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, current Premier Steven Miles, Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath and Health Minister Shannon Fentiman.
How these four experienced politicians made such deeply flawed decisions is difficult to comprehend for everyone who understands Wright’s integral role in the DNA debacle.
Miles and D’Ath came off second best in state parliament on Tuesday amid attempts to justify their snubbing of Wright.
They should stop digging.
The facts are incontrovertible. The discovery of every scandalous failure in the Queensland government-run DNA lab, which abrogated its responsibility to serve the criminal justice system properly for almost 20 years, is down to the efforts and brilliance of Wright.
No one amid the prosecutors, defence lawyers, police, judges or serving scientists stepped up to blow the whistle on this lab’s shameful conduct. Almost all were ignorant that the lab had been scientifically corrupt for many years.
Wright discovered the truth by chance. In 2021 and 2022, she was helping me understand DNA evidence in the unsolved murder of Shandee Blackburn, who was savagely stabbed to death in Mackay in 2013. I was investigating her murder for a podcast, Shandee’s Story. By chance I had been given copies of some of the lab’s documents about forensic evidence in the case. Documents like these are rarely, if ever, made available to journalists.
Wright started examining some of the documents. Shocked at what she was seeing, she asked me for more. Her nagging concerns about the integrity of the DNA lab grew into grave fears, then certainty, that Queensland killers and sex offenders had been getting away with murders, rapes and other serious offences for many years because the lab was deliberately (criminally in my view) avoiding proper testing.
Think about that for a minute. A lab, staffed by highly intelligent scientists, knowingly missing detection of incriminating DNA in blood and semen left by violent offenders at crime scenes.
It is a matter of public record that when Wright started revealing these truths about the lab’s catastrophic failures in the podcast, and in related news stories in The Australian, the responses from Palaszczuk, Fentiman and D’Ath amounted to political avoidance. Miles had nothing to say. Police Minister Mark Ryan went to water, too.
They all tried to hose it down, as if there was nothing to see. They took self-serving advice from advisers, bureaucrats and lab managers. They threw victims of crime under a bus.
Finally, after months of irrefutable revelations of scientific failure and a very awkward media conference for Palaszczuk, the then premier raised the white flag and agreed to a public inquiry, headed by newly retired judge Walter Sofronoff KC.
His excoriating inquiry confirmed that Wright’s discoveries were, in fact, not too shocking to be true. The lab was, officially and formally, one of the world’s worst forensics disasters.
After the public hearings, sacking of the lab’s heads and a scathing final report in late 2022 from Sofronoff about the egregious failures of the lab, a reform package worth some $200m was unveiled by the Labor government.
At this point, you would expect that the brains trust in the then Palaszczuk government would beat a path to the door of the one scientist who had identified all the wrongdoing in the first place, and plead with her to help advise a new team on the reforms and the retesting of tens of thousands of crime scene samples.
Bizarrely, this didn’t happen. Wright was shunned and avoided. When Palaszczuk stood with Sofronoff to unveil his findings, which vindicated Wright, she failed to acknowledge the scientist’s remarkable efforts. Instead, Palaszczuk paid tribute to so-called brave “whistleblowers” in the lab – scientists who were part of the problem in the first place.
It was cringe-worthy.
Sofronoff’s 2022 inquiry and report were not the end of it. Undeterred by the politics, the nastiness and the stupidity underlying the government’s snubbing of her, Wright kept looking under the rocks that Sofronoff’s inquiry had missed.
She discovered damning evidence of another major failure, a scientific process called Project 13 that affected thousands more cases. Embarrassingly, the lab’s newly appointed head, Linzi Wilson-Wilde, had confronting evidence of Project 13 staring her in the face when she was paid to examine documents as an expert witness to Sofronoff’s 2022 inquiry, yet she failed to report on it.
Wright’s revelations about Project 13 in new podcast episodes and in The Australian last year rocked the government again, prompting another commission of inquiry. That’s a first – two public inquiries in less than a year into the same scandal, DNA testing.
Credit to Fentiman for calling it; shame about the way that it unfolded. The second inquiry was an oddity – perhaps the lamest inquiry in the state’s history – but its findings vindicated Wright, again.
As a result, thousands more crime scene samples were allocated for proper testing for the first time. Numerous violent offenders will be unmasked as a result.
The evidence did cast a serious pall over Wilson-Wilde and other scientists who failed to act or speak up about Project 13, but the inquiry didn’t pack any punches and they still work in the lab.
After all of this – not one but two public inquiries, and confirmation of unprecedented lab failure unlike anything seen in Australia or internationally, identified because of the unpaid work of a forensic biologist who wants the state’s lab to properly serve victims and the criminal justice system – how has the new Miles-led Labor government managed Wright in recent months?
Abysmally. Wright applied for a modest role on the Miles government’s new 11-member forensic advisory board. Obviously she was over-qualified; she should be running it. Yet in August Wright was told she had missed out altogether; the government said others had more “merit”.
This is mind-bending stuff, so awful you cannot make it up.
Years ago, Wright was in charge of the national DNA data base. Her award-winning work over the past 25 years for labs, police and prosecutors has been exceptional.
She is the one forensic biologist who proved wrong a coterie of time-serving, arse-covering advisers, bureaucrats, scientists and politicians, resulting in a $200m repair-and-reform package that ushered in the creation of the forensic advisory board.
Yet she was deemed not good enough to be one of the advisers on the board.
Not surprisingly, Crisafulli wants to reverse this rot. He has backed a winner in Wright.
If he becomes Queensland premier after the state election in October, the best forensic scientist will play a vitally important role to ensure there is maximum benefit derived from DNA evidence.
Victims of crime, and the community at large, will be infinitely better off.
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