Shandee Blackburn murder: Anger over inquiry lawyer’s ‘bizarre’ submissions

A respected academic tells of her shock that Qld’s second DNA inquiry could find scientists did everything wrong but hold no-one accountable.

Adjunct Associate Professor Janet Chaseling has spoken of her shock and anger at the closing submissions of Andrew Fox, the senior counsel assisting the DNA inquiry. Picture: Annette Dew

A respected academic has told of her shock and anger that Queensland’s second DNA inquiry could find scientists did everything wrong but hold no one accountable, labelling a lawyer’s closing submissions as “bizarre” as she urged the forensic science community to own its mistakes.

Watching a live stream of the inquiry from home, Griffith University Adjunct Associate Professor Janet Chaseling could scarcely believe what she was hearing as the senior counsel ­assisting, Andrew Fox, went through his final submissions just over a week ago.

“I just was so angry when I heard that summing up. It really, really shook me,” Ms Chaseling has told a new episode of the ­investigative podcast series Shandee’s Legacy.

Mr Fox told the inquiry that the new chief of Queensland’s DNA lab, Linzi Wilson-Wilde, had not disclosed in an expert report to last year’s Sofronoff inquiry that a DNA extraction system was failing to recover DNA.

That was despite Dr Wilson-Wilde acknowledging the DNA recovery failure was obvious in a 2008 “Project 13” report she was provided with and examined for the Sofronoff inquiry.

But Dr Wilson-Wilde wrote in her expert report that the automated method’s verification was “not consistent with expected good practice”, and her evidence was that this was “science speak for flawed”, Mr Fox said.

It was open for the inquiry’s commissioner, Annabelle Bennett SC, to conclude that Dr Wilson-Wilde’s report “was an accepted way of phrasing a scientific opinion to convey that the ­automated method in Project 13 was not a valid method as a whole”. In other words, although she didn’t alert the first inquiry to the existence of the yield catastrophe, Mr Fox was submitting that the commission could find her phrasing had not misled the inquiry.

Investigations by forensic biologist Kirsty Wright and The Australian’s podcast Shandee's Story led to two commissions of inquiry.

Ms Chaseling said she was ­“absolutely gobsmacked” by the submissions.

“It seemed to me like sort of a cop out,” she said.

“You can’t just say something is not up to scratch. You need to say in what way it is failing.

“And I would have thought in an inquiry like this it needed to be followed up with what was the impact of this and what’s being done about it.”

She added: “For me, an expert witness has to give information, and that statement doesn’t tell you anything. It simply says there’s a problem. There’s no indication of what that problem is.”

Mr Fox told the inquiry the system of extracting DNA was failing when it was launched in 2007 and there was no evidence it was ever fixed, as revealed by independent forensic biologist Kirsty Wright and The Australian in reports that sparked the inquiry.

Queensland’s DNA lab will now have to review and retest where necessary more than 130,000 samples processed by the robotic system over the nine years it was in use.

“The bizarre thing to me was that summary at the end was in two distinct sections. The first one was saying that without any doubt at all there was a problem and everything that had been said by Kirsty was vindicated,” Ms Chaseling said.

“They admitted there was a big problem. And in the next section, they completely tried to vindicate anybody of it. That was what ­absolutely staggered me.”

Ms Chaseling is a retired lecturer and a longtime expert witness who has worked as an applied statistician with a special interest in forensic biology.

She has taught and worked with some of Queensland’s most accomplished scientists, including Dr Wright, and has followed both commissions of inquiry into the state’s DNA lab.

“I had not wanted to be involved with this, but that really annoyed me,” she said of Mr Fox’s final submissions.

It was “ridiculous” to suggest using words like flawed as a scientist would be inappropriate, she said. “This situation is made even worse by its impact on society. The justice system has been lied to. Criminal cases have not been solved. The public has lost faith in the forensic reporting in Queensland and maybe elsewhere.

“The bottom line is that forensic science is simply science and it is time the forensic community practised good science at all levels, including recognising accountability to the courts and general public.

“The whole business about now proving somebody was not at fault took me completely by surprise. In science, if you make a mistake you must admit it and take the responsibility for it.

“I definitely believe that the report that went to the first inquiry did not highlight this problem at all to the inquiry.”