Queensland DNA lab actions `a massive scientific scandal anywhere in the world’

You don’t have to be a scientist to see that a Project 13 report at the centre of a new DNA inquiry is fraudulent to its core.

It was left to forensic scientist Dr Kirsty Wright and this newspaper to question the impact on thousands of cases. Picture: Justine Walpole

This is the inquiry we shouldn’t have needed but had to have.

We shouldn’t have needed it, because retired judge Walter Sofronoff’s first inquiry into Queensland’s DNA lab last year appears to have done everything right.

It hired a distinguished scientist to look into the introduction of an automated DNA extraction method.

Yet that expert, Linzi Wilson-Wilde, failed in her report to the Sofronoff inquiry to detail glaring issues that had serious and obvious ramifications for many thousands of criminal cases.

Project 13 tested a new, automated DNA extraction method on mock samples before it was let loose in 2007 on real Queensland crimes.

DNA testing delays were at the time causing the then-Labor government of Peter Beattie to be pummelled by the courts, opposition and public.

Millions of dollars of public money were thrown at the lab to deal with the crisis, and its answer was automation – introducing robots to rapidly extract DNA rather than relying on scientists laboriously doing it by hand.

Independent forensic biologist Kirsty Wright describes it as the biggest change in the lab’s history.

Obviously, it required the most thorough validation possible to ensure results were robust, and that victims and the criminal justice system weren’t let down.

Instead, according to a Project 13 report, the lab’s own limited verification process showed the robots were catastrophically recovering up to 92 per cent less DNA from samples than a manual method.

Despite this, the report falsely claimed in its abstract or executive summary that the automated and manual results were “comparable” and recommended it go ahead.

You don’t have to be an esteemed scientist to see that the Project 13 report is fraudulent to its core, or to pick up on the method’s glaring failure to recover DNA.

Graphs in the report make the vast differences between the results of the automated and manual methods blindingly apparent.

As retired scientist Ron Grice has said, a high school student could have seen it.

But the one senior scientist who was asked to examine the automated method for the Sofronoff inquiry, and who was provided the Project 13 report, Wilson-Wilde, didn’t mention any of this in her own expert report.

Forensic Science Queensland chief executive Linzi Wilson-Wilde. Picture: Liam Kidston

Wilson-Wilde is now in charge of all forensic services in the state. She says she saw the issues but left them out of her report because she wasn’t asked to look at “yield”, or the recovery of DNA from samples.

It was left to Wright and this newspaper to raise questions about the effect on thousands of crimes.

As a result, the government has said a staggering 7000 extra criminal cases are being reviewed, a development that would be a massive scientific scandal anywhere in the world.

Now, a second inquiry begins Monday with all the powers, though not the time, of the previous inquiry.

Retired Federal Court judge Annabelle Bennett SC and her team will again demand documents and compel witnesses to give evidence, but will have only a lightning few weeks to provide a final report.

There are many questions for the inquiry to consider. How could the method be introduced when its failure was inevitable, and what if anything was done to fix problems over the next nine years that variations of it were used?

How could a senior scientist of Wilson-Wilde’s standing justify her expert report being silent on the biggest issue of the whole, horrible debacle?

And exactly what has been done, and when was it done, since the end of the Sofronoff inquiry to address the impact of the DNA recovery issues that Wilson-Wilde insists she saw last year?