Queensland DNA lab inquiry: This was a magic carpet ride for pure cowardice

Queensland DNA lab boss Linzi Wilson-Wilde. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Wet lettuce leaves have fallen with more force than retired Federal Court judge Annabelle Bennett’s findings about those responsible for the Queensland DNA lab’s criminal-freeing Project 13.

Recklessly indifferent scientists who knew about this unmitigated disaster in DNA testing yet still introduced it in 2007 without a validation – resulting in it missing DNA in thousands of crime cases for the next nine years until 2016 – will not be held accountable.

They abrogated ethical and scientific responsibilities in 2007.

And they were as quiet as church mice last year as retired judge Walter Sofronoff’s DNA inquiry – the first one – strived to discover everything there was to know about why the lab was failing to detect DNA in crime scene ­samples where it was known to exist.

Even failing to find DNA in a pool of blood in the gutter where a young woman, Shandee Blackburn, was stabbed to death in Mackay in 2013.

The lab scientists’ cowardice for failing to come forward last year and alert Sofronoff and his legal team to Project 13 – the biggest stuff-up in the lab’s history – was bad enough.

Their subsequent blame-shifting in Bennett’s hand-holding sessions at her lightning-fast inquiry, which would not have been necessary if the scientists had spilt the beans to Sofronoff in 2022, was embarrassing. Attempts to style some of the same scientists as “whistleblowers” is offensive.

They should have been subjected to forensic cross-examination in the latest Commission of Inquiry.

Instead, they got a magic carpet ride and, in Bennett’s ­report, they’re depicted as hapless victims of a “systemic failure in governance”. They were, Bennett found, “doing their best to overcome problems as they arose”. Really?

Tell that to the victims of the rapists who escaped justice ­despite leaving their semen ­behind on battered women and children; and to the murder victims’ families who still await the arrest of the killers who walk free because Project 13 continued for nine years.

Several scientists doubled down on the effrontery by backing their new boss, Linzi Wilson-Wilde, in witness statements and other guff, notwithstanding her failure to call out Project 13 when she was an expert witness at ­Sofronoff’s inquiry last year. They must all be in line for public service promotions after these collective failures.

For effectively misleading (but not “deliberately”, according to Bennett) Sofronoff’s DNA inquiry because of the inexplicable omission in her expert witness ­report of the obvious disaster of Project 13, Wilson-Wilde is not castigated for incompetence.

Nor is she rebuked for repeatedly insisting in recent months that she had identified the yield disaster when Sofronoff’s inquiry paid her to examine key Project 13 documents last year.

There is no evidence to suggest that she did notice the disaster; yet, bizarrely, Bennett’s inquiry did not put to Wilson-Wilde that she had simply missed the problem; and that she had been misleading the public and telling porkies to the minister and other senior bureaucrats since late August.

It never happened because the inquiry appeared to lack courage; it baulked at asking the hard questions and readily accepted the self-serving spin of witnesses.

Instead, the second inquiry ­reported that Wilson-Wilde “did not draw in any way the first Commission of Inquiry’s attention to the deficiencies of the Project 13 report in any way that conveyed the importance of the fact that there were major inadequacies …”

But never mind. Bennett found that the lab’s new chief executive was “performing well in that role and implementing, in a staged and managed fashion, the recommendations of the first inquiry”.

Bennett’s final report doesn’t say it, but if Wilson-Wilde had just owned up to being fallible three months ago when shown the latest discovery by Kirsty Wright, there would have been no need for this second inquiry at vast public expense. All of it was avoidable.

Instead, Wilson-Wilde kept digging in. Sofronoff and another retired judge, Julie Dick – the newly appointed co-chairs of a high-powered DNA advisory board which is the oversight body for the lab – backed their chief executive.

None of them wanted this public inquiry.

It’s a credit to Health Minister Shannon Fentiman that it was called.

But, in the end, everyone is blame-free, anyway.

The scientists who implemented Project 13 – as well as ­others in the lab who knew of it and kept their mouths shut – should count their lucky stars and buy Lotto tickets. Like Wilson-Wilde, they’ve been saved.

Bennett’s findings will not be unpopular in George St, Brisbane. A state election is looming and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk needs clear air as the polls suggest she’s a target for toppling.

Fentiman, the senior politician tipped as the potential leader most likely to lessen the scale of the predicted defeat at the hands of a resurgent Liberal ­National Party, made the right call in ­establishing the second ­inquiry.

But her Labor government’s “heads-must-roll” accountability was sated in the first inquiry run by Sofronoff.

The few scientists wearing “black hats” who got blowtorch questioning in 2022 were ruthlessly dispatched after Sofronoff’s findings on the DNA lab were handed down last December.

It is, now, politically inconvenient for a comparable standard of accountability, particularly as the lab’s new-broom chief executive wears a “white hat” as the leader of a forensics reform agenda for Palaszczuk and Fentiman with a $200m funding boost.

Finally, for the umpteenth time, Kirsty Wright was right. Again. The forensic biologist who is motivated by evidence, not ­patronage and self-serving promotion, runs rings around every scientist, bureaucrat and lawyer connected to Queensland’s DNA lab.

Is that why they are determined to keep her at arm’s length, even to the detriment of the criminal justice system?

Wright condemns the deceptions and the cover-ups like the disaster that was Project 13 ­because, for her, it is about the facts. And science.

Sometimes it’s also a matter of life and death.