PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Halfway through Sofronoff’s media conference on Tuesday, I asked: “Commissioner, given so many different, very intelligent senior people are involved in the administration of justice and involved with the laboratory, how does it come to be that over many years, effectively a rogue executive in charge of the lab gets away with running the lab so poorly that thousands of cases have to be retested or re-examined, and a toxic culture develops and the whole administration of justice goes off the rails? How does that happen that one person can do that?” Sofronoff: “What I concluded was that all of us here don’t know anything about DNA. People don’t know the difference between DNA, a chromosome, a gene. So when the scientists at the lab raised an issue that went to the heart of the ethical conduct of the work, it looked like an arcane scientific problem, a dispute."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMENTARY: "DNA inquest a horror story about a villain, Cathie Allen, and the brave heroine Kirsty Wright," by Hedley Thomas, published in The Australian, on December 11, 2022. (Hedley Thomas is The Australian’s national chief correspondent, specialising in investigative reporting with an interest in legal issues, the judiciary, corruption and politics.)
GIST: "It’s the horror story that a Hollywood script writer would struggle to make up.
Ambitious scientist in a sophisticated, government-run DNA testing laboratory works her way up to be in overall charge.
She wins over more senior public servants and politicians, who see her single-minded dedication to her work in the sterile environment.
But behind the lab’s doors, she’s a tyrannical bully who cares less for victims of serious crime than she does about making herself look good with faster testing turnaround times.
She terrorises staff who raise concerns about quality control.
Lies to police to get them to adopt a new process that would improve the lab’s productivity but would also mean fewer violent criminals can be caught and they can escape prosecution. So they can reoffend. Kill, rape and bludgeon innocent civilians.
She stalls and lies repeatedly to her bosses as a podcast investigation into a young woman’s murder sees an outsider scientist finding serious flaws, calling the lab “broken”, and declaring that offender DNA in thousands of criminal cases has been going undetected.
And when the pressure on politicians builds to such an extent that a public inquiry is inevitable, she even resorts to a self-serving cover-up which would destroy crime scene evidence.
It’s a horror story that really, truly happened, according to one of Queensland’s most experienced and well-respected legal minds, Walter Sofronoff KC, the head of the DNA Commission of Inquiry which wrapped up its six months of investigation on Tuesday.
In a first-world, well-funded criminal justice system such as Queensland’s, it’s hard to fathom how this could have happened.
We spend tens of millions of dollars on agency oversight from bodies such as the Crime and Corruption Commission and the office of the Auditor-General.
Then there are the thousands of police, the judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers – all of whom are working at times with DNA, yet failed to appreciate what the DNA inquiry has now found: a “malignant leadership” has distorted this vital part of the state’s criminal justice system.
While the villain in this piece is undoubtedly the managing scientist Cathie Allen, there is also a brave heroine. Kirsty Wright did a huge amount of work to identify the horrors in that lab in the Shandee’s Story podcast.
She spoke up about the defects she uncovered, and refused to take a backward step despite the reluctance of the Queensland government for six months to heed her warnings.
Halfway through Sofronoff’s media conference on Tuesday, I asked: “Commissioner, given so many different, very intelligent senior people are involved in the administration of justice and involved with the laboratory, how does it come to be that over many years, effectively a rogue executive in charge of the lab gets away with running the lab so poorly that thousands of cases have to be retested or re-examined, and a toxic culture develops and the whole administration of justice goes off the rails? How does that happen that one person can do that?”
Sofronoff: “What I concluded was that all of us here don’t know anything about DNA. People don’t know the difference between DNA, a chromosome, a gene. So when the scientists at the lab raised an issue that went to the heart of the ethical conduct of the work, it looked like an arcane scientific problem, a dispute.
“And there was no way in the world the executive director, the director-general or the minister would be able to recognise that what was being presented was not a dispute about scientific method for scientists to resolve, but a dispute that went to the heart of what they were doing and how ineffectively they were doing it as part of the justice system. It’s impossible because there’s nobody who’s in a position to think, ‘I’ve got to spend a couple of days getting on top of this DNA stuff, I’d better get a briefing from outside the lab’.
“Moreover, you don’t expect in Australia that a public servant of the rank of a managing scientist is going to lie to you. But ultimately that material was coming from this single person and the material was impenetrable in terms of the science. So as it goes higher up, all you get is the scientist saying ‘it’s all fine and Kirsty Wright is a disgruntled former employee’.”
“Those who have to deal with this, administrators and politicians … what do you do? There was no person who was in a position to understand the significance of what they were being told.”
Mr Sofronoff said he was “astounded” by what he found and the repercussions for justice.
That’s a horror story.
It happened in Queensland.
Politicians and senior public servants overseeing DNA labs around the world should be paying a lot of attention."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/dna-inquest-a-horror-story-about-avillain-cathie-allen-and-the-brave-heroine-kirsty-wright/news-story/a4916542deace3aa905485fb4a848345
Read the Australian Associated Press December 13, 2022 story at the link below headed, "Scathing report into Queensland DNA lab failures finds thousands of criminal cases need revisiting," and sub-headed, "Former judge finds lab manager focused on speed over accuracy and ‘deliberately crafted series of lies’ to cover up problems."
"Thousands of serious criminal cases in Queensland will need to be reviewed after an inquiry found a state-run forensic lab failed to properly test DNA samples for years due to “grave maladministration involving dishonesty”.
Former judge Walter Sofronoff recommended that the state’s Forensic and Scientific Services (FSS) be restructured in his report, published on Tuesday after a four-month public inquiry.
Sofronoff found lab managers had focused on speed rather than accuracy in DNA testing and “that scourge has invaded” the validation of process and equipment used, time management and resources.
“I have found that serious problems have existed within the laboratory for many years, some of them amounting to grave maladministration involving dishonesty,” the report says.
The former court of appeal president had no doubt the lab’s failures to obtain all the available DNA evidence from crime scene samples had affected criminal cases and court trials.
“In most cases that will have reduced the prospects of conviction by a failure to obtain evidence which could support a complaint,” Sofronoff’s report says.
“It is possible, but unlikely that the failures could have resulted in a wrong conviction.”
Sofronoff said “thousands of cases” needed to be reviewed to see if crime scene samples need to be retested for DNA.
He recommended a panel with a scientist, a police officer, a prosecutor and maybe a private lawyer to do so.
“So for victims of crime, who may have been told that there’s not enough DNA or that the DNA didn’t come up to proof, there’ll be decisions made about testing some of those samples in some of those cases,” Sofronoff told reporters on Tuesday.
The report largely blames the failures on FSS manager Cathie Allen, who has been in her role since 2008 without adequate oversight.
Over time she distorted the aims of the lab and placed obstacles in the way of scientists trying to do their work, it says.
Allen tried to cover up mounting problems with superiors, lab staff and police using a “deliberately crafted series of lies and misleading dodges”, the report says.
“It is apparent from the number and breadth of scientific issues identified as below best practice or inadequate in this report, and the extent of retrospective review that is required to prevent miscarriages of justice, that Allen has not been able to fulfil the responsibilities of her role,” the report says.
“This state of affairs has been caused by both the structure of her role within FSS and her personal performance of it.
“As a result, the department leadership was not equipped to grapple with the real problem: a malignancy in the scientific management of FSS.”
Sofronoff also recommends the lab be restructured with an independent head scientist in charge with a focus on scientific integrity and serving the criminal justice system.
Queensland’s premier Annastacia Palaszczuk ordered the inquiry after potential problems at the lab were brought to light in The Australian’s podcast series about the killing of Shandee Blackburn nine years ago.
The 23-year-old was stabbed more than 20 times on her way home from work in Mackay, with her former boyfriend John Perros charged with her murder but acquitted in 2017."
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/13/scathing-report-into-queensland-dna-lab-failures-finds-thousands-of-criminal-cases-need-revisiting
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resurce. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
——————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
------------------------------
