Serious questions have been raised over whether severe staff shortages and extreme budget pressures at Queensland’s government-run forensic science laboratories drove a controversial ruling that has cast a cloud over thousands of major crime investigations.
Together Union state secretary Alex Scott has hit out at both sides of politics, describing them as culpable in creating an environment that resulted in the decision, which led forensic scientists to provide misleading statements to courts.
“Both this government and the previous government were consistently warned about problems within the centre in relation to the underfunding, the under-resourcing and the cultural problems,” Mr Scott said.
“We’ve been calling for too long for the government to actually step in and make sure it has enough money and staff to do the job properly.”
Mr Scott has called on the commission of inquiry into forensic DNA testing in Queensland to examine the extent to which resourcing failures were involved.
An interim report by inquiry head Walter Sofronoff KC, a former Queensland Court of Appeal president, found that between early 2018 and June this year, laboratory scientists gave “untrue” or “misleading” witness statements about the detection of DNA in some crime scene samples.
Mr Sofronoff found that under an agreement between Queensland Health and the Queensland Police Service, crime scene samples that did not contain quantities of DNA above a certain threshold were not processed further and were reported in witness statements as having “insufficient DNA for analysis”.
He said this was despite the possibility of obtaining “an interpretable profile”.
