Queensland DNA inquiry bogs down in science-speak

The Project 13 DNA inquiry on Wednesday registered a momentary heartbeat.

Kirsty Wright, left, and Vicki Blackburn in Brisbane on Wednesday. Picture: David Clark

The Project 13 DNA inquiry on Wednesday registered a momentary heartbeat.

At 10.15am in Court 40 of Brisbane Magistrates Court, Forensic Science Queensland chief Linzi Wilson-Wilde took to the witness stand for the second time during the inquiry, headed by retired Judge Annabelle Bennett.

A continuation of the hearing’s dourness was expected, replete as it has been with “hot tub” interview methods, lacklustre questioning and a plethora of bureaucratic gobbledygook.

But on Wednesday, counsel assisting, Andrew Fox, slightly bared his canines as he began questioning Wilson-Wilde about her expert review provided to the initial and expansive Sofronoff inquiry last year, and why her analysis of the now notorious Project 13 automated DNA testing regimen, implemented in 2007 with disastrous results, was lukewarm at best.

Wilson-Wilde, who has hovered about the inquiry all week with a phalanx of Queensland Health staff, was appointed to sort out the train wreck that was the state forensic lab in January this year.

She brought to the job a raft of credentials, both bureaucratic and academic, and an alphabet of letters tailing her name.

Her task – to rebuild the lab from the ground up – was previously described to the inquiry as “herculean”.

What nagged her into this latest inquiry, however, was whether she had at the very least underplayed the significance of Project 13 – a robotic DNA testing regimen that has become the former lab’s heart of darkness – to the Sofronoff inquiry. That concern was one of several that prompted the establishment of this inquiry.

Not only did the Project 13 testing system fail in thousands of serious criminal cases, but most importantly it misfired in identifying DNA from the murder scene of young Shandee Blackburn in Mackay in 2013.

This was, and remains, the albatross around the inquiry’s neck.

Mr Fox’s grit was short-lived. He pressed Wilson-Wilde on her use of language in her written assessment of Project 13 – that strange linguistic combination of words and phrases that would simultaneously placate the handful of scientists among us and the burgeoning residents of that other country we call government bureaucracy.

In the witness box Wilson-Wilde, while making some admissions, remained a master of this science-public service lingo and navigated Mr Fox’s queries with apparent ease.

“Why engage in science-speak?” Mr Fox pleaded. “Why not just say it?”

“That is the terminology I use,” she replied.

“Why not engage in more strenuous language responsive to what you’d seen that more accurately and clearly reflected your reaction to that (Project 13)?”

“I would not write that way.”

With this linguistic debate, Fox’s canines retracted. And there they stayed.

After three days, at least from the perch of the public gallery, there’s a very strong sense that there are actually two inquiries running parallel to each other here. One is a ghost inquiry, the one you anticipated, the one with a laser focus on Project 13, who was behind it, why was it adopted, how deeply did it disfigure the administration of justice, and what was the true measure of its impact on the Shandee Blackburn murder investigation?

The other inquiry, the one we’ve got, gestures to its ghostly cousin, nods in its direction, but in reality buffets about like a dodgem car, ricocheting off random or insignificant obstacles, changing direction at a moment’s notice, hamstrung by verbiage and its own processes.

The truth was in there, somewhere. But where?

After Wednesday’s hearings, Shandee’s mother, Vicki, left the Brisbane Magistrate’s Court building nonplussed.

What did she make of the inquiry so far?

“Not much,” she said.

That was the sort of pure, plain language that Mr Fox might have appreciated.