This episode contains adult themes and references to violence.

This podcast series is brought to you by me Headley Thomas and The Australian.

Many listeners will find it extraordinary and unacceptable that, after two very expensive commissions of inquiry, we are at the point in late twenty twenty five where victim survivors of serious crimes like sexual assault in Queensland are left waiting years for DNA evidence that might be crucial to their criminal cases.

As a laboratory, your job is to be a service providing.

The way you operator is that you have customers who are delivering samples and you need to perform timely analysis, precise analysis to give back to them so that they can do what they need to do with the results in a timely fashion.

And none of that is happening in that lab none of it.

That is the powerful voice of a courageous victim survivor of a sexual assault in Queensland.

As we discuss, we're not going to disclose your name or where you worked, or the company for which you worked, or the town that you grew up in.

I'm just going to say that you worked in a mining company in Queensland.

Is that good.

Yeah, that's good.

Have you worked out pseudonym?

What first name you'd like me to call you?

We can go with Magda.

She is a woman in her thirties.

She was working for a mining company during the first half of twenty twenty four when her allegations of sexual assault by a work colleague were made.

Magda is in a unique position to talk about the issues confronting the lab because of her own experiences.

My career is working in laboratories, so that's what I do.

Before the sexual assault that was inflicted upon you.

Had you heard about Queensland's DNA lab debacle or about any of the reporting like Shandy story that led us to this place.

Honestly, no, You'd see a headline here or there, but none of it grabbed my attention and made me go looking at just wasn't at the forefront for me to investigate.

And then you were attacked and you become curious.

What was your reaction.

When you realized what had been going on in Queensland's leading laboratory that is meant to be helping victims of crime like yourself.

I was absolutely gutted, so I started asking questions, what is happening?

I couldn't sit with that any longer because I just kept thinking, I am not going to make it to the courtroom.

The urgency was just intensifying, and that's when I really started digging into it, because I couldn't understand with the failures in the lab why they weren't outsourcing.

How come that had not yet been implemented.

After the alleged assault, she underwent a forensic medical examination.

Her examination kit was submitted to the Queensland Lab for testing, but even though more than sixteen months have passed since Magda's alleged assault, she was still awaiting the results of her kit testing.

When we spoke, Magda shared her experiences in the hope of bringing about change.

What's going on as you wait for justice to be started or justice to be delivered.

There's obviously the factor of the offender is still out there and he is still working with women, and he's still out there capable of grooming his next potential victim.

That itself is urgent.

And then the fact that I'm trying so hard to get myself to an externally safe place because my internal state is so shattered, and the very real ideation of suicide was not going away.

It was just getting stronger and stronger.

It was taking so much strength to fight through that as well as try and process everything else that was going on.

So the urgency was just screaming.

You were considering taking your own life.

Yeah, very much so.

And it wasn't just a consideration, Headley.

I had written literally a contract to myself on how my day would go and how I would carry out what I wanted to carry out.

And I had a list of recipients to share letters with just to let them know that I honestly I tried.

I really tried to make it to the courtroom, but I couldn't do it.

And I'm really sorry that if he does offend, it wasn't for a lack of trying.

I'm just exhausted.

How did you summon the strength to pull back from that?

It took a lot, And I just remember.

The one thing that he hasn't taken and that I'm not going to let anyone take from me is the fact that I still have a voice, and I'm going to use that voice no matter how much it shakes, no matter what comes from it, because there's a lot of people who don't have a voice for whatever reason they cannot speak out because they're silenced, or worse, they've been murdered.

So I still have a voice and I'm not gonna be silenced any longer.

No matter what.

Is your decision to talk to me today.

Part of that resolve, you have to use your voice.

Yes, experiences like Magda's are immensely private.

She carefully considered.

Whether she wanted to speak with me for the podcast.

It can be very difficult and painful to talk about these things, but Magda resolved that it can also be empowering and insightful and help others understand.

What is going on and what is going wrong.

And Magda shared with me a letter that she wrote about the impact of both her alleged sexual assault and the long lie for DNA testing results.

This is not just a letter, It is a glimpse into the aftermath of rape, the silence, the waiting, the delays that wound again and again.

When justice depends on a victim's survivor's ability to stay alive, stable, and strong through endless delays and trauma, it is not justice.

It is cruelty.

When justice is delayed.

When DNA is left waiting, your body and voice are held hostage over again.

Behind every case number is a human life, a victim, a survivor, a family waiting in pain, waiting and wanting accountability, wanting the cruelty to end.

Every day a case is delayed, the burden grows heavier.

If we die by suicide, exhaustion or despair, the case collapses.

Queensland's DNA lab failures, untested rape kits, unreliable results evidence in Limbo were not just negligence, they were silence.

They were complicity, and for many victim survivors that silence has been a near death sentence.

This is not failure by accident, It is failure by design.

It deepens trauma, it destroys trust.

What caused you to write that and what were you thinking as you went through that process?

My mind was just screaming.

There was so much clutter, so much pain.

There's been too inquiries so far and now a third.

As victim survivors, we need to be included in this.

This reform has to be approached from every single angle because this is not good enough.

What has happened and what is currently happening.

It needs to be changed.

After such a long delay, I asked Magna about the status of her case and whether she had received any results from the forensic testing.

Can you just clarify where your case is as you understand it from what you have been.

Told Headley, I think that's one of the challenges here.

I can't actually clarify because when I speak to the officer in charge, he himself doesn't know.

There's just still no results, that is the answer.

So I want to know where is my case.

Is it in the started case, is it in the not yet started?

So I don't know if it's in a queue, I don't know if it's shelved.

And I think that's what brings even more distress to this, because there's just no end in sight as to when this is going to come to an end.

In my view, some of the most shocking and upsetting findings of doctor Right's review relate to the testing of what Kirsty has called rape kits.

This is shorthand for forensic medical examination kits or fm e ks.

Kursey Right's findings are so serious that she recommended the lab immediately stopped testing all rape kits due to concerns over the reliability of their results.

Here is Kirsty reading the relevant part of her.

Report, The DNA review considers all testing of rape kits and any other evidence from sexual offense matters that may contain semen, including underwear clothing betting by Forensic Science Queensland should stop immediately due to the unreliable semen detection methods.

It is likely that all rape kits.

And evidence suspected of containing semen produced by Forensic Science Queensland using the unreliable methods will require review and where possible, retesting.

The three methods used by Forensic Science Queensland to detect seminal fluid were not reliably detecting seamen when it was present on rape kit samples.

It led Kirsty to conclude.

The unreliable seamen detection methods and the poorly performing seamen DNA extruction methods in combination could be significantly reducing the chance to identify offenders of sexual violence and failing victims of crime.

She found that victim survivors in Queensland were waiting for more than twelve months for DNA test results when testing should be completed in two to eight weeks and ideally within five days.

The delay is particularly concerning in cases involving sexual violence.

This is how the state's Chief Magistrate, Janelle Brassington put it when she wrote to Kirsty.

These are her words, it's not her voice.

Delay can impact on witness memory, can be a point of anxiety for both victims and defendants of not knowing how their matter is progressing, and it's often of hector and bowel applications, particularly for serious offenses.

Kirsty's DNA review report reveals that the situation was so grave by late twenty twenty four that Queensland Police officers took matters into their own hands.

They arranged for an.

Overseas laboratory to fully test fifteen high priority rape kits from unsolved matters.

After the rape kits were sent overseas, the Queensland Lab then contacted the overseas Lab, and the Queensland Lab then asked that the partially tested kits be sent back to Queensland.

Incredibly, Queensland Police were kept in the dark about all of that, even though it is the police who were supposed to have formal control over the evidence.

Despite its request, the Queensland Lab didn't organize an import permit for the return of the biological samples.

In the kits, and that meant the kits couldn't even be returned to Australia.

So the kits sat in limbo in the overseas lab for more than three months while back at home victims no doubt anxiously waited and hoped for their testing results.

Sorry sagas such as this demonstrate the lab's failure to support police and victims of crime.

It also demonstrates an unforgivable breakdown in communication with the lab's partner in solving crime, the police.

As Kirsty stated in her final report.

Courts Queensland wide relying on DNA evidence are now at a point of critical system failure.

There is a two and a half to three year delay in the magistrate's courts for cases awaiting DNA results.

The ramifications of delays such as these are debilitating for individuals.

As Kirsty reported.

A basic analysis of the current forensic science Queensland backlogs and capacity by the DNA Review suggests there is at least six years of work to just clear the backlogs.

The backlog is preventing offenders from being arrested, contributing to reoffending across Queensland, preventing justice for victims and preventing unidentified remains from being identified.

What is the reason for there being a thousand untested rape kit sitting there?

First of all, the lab chose not to outsource samples, so at that stage the backlog was out of control.

It was growing by a thousand crime scene samples per month and there was no way the lab was keeping up.

For some reason, the lab chose not to use the twenty nine point five million dollars allocated to it at the end of twenty twenty two.

If that money had.

Been used for rape kits, there would be no rape kit backlog there simply wouldn't be.

The second reason is the new rape kits were rolled out August twenty twenty three.

The lab wasn't ready for that roll out.

They hadn't trained their staff properly, They hadn't implemented and tested their methods properly.

They didn't have workflows in place either, so they weren't actually ready to start receiving these new rape kits, but decided to anyway and essentially just put them in the freezer.

Le urgent need Headley was to test the rape kits of children.

There wasn't an urgent need to buy expensive scientific equipment.

The money should not have been redirected away from rape kits and other major crime samples.

There is another very sinister aspect to the delay in testing rape kits in sexual assault cases, highlighted in Kirsty's report.

Of significant concern is the ongoing risk to child victims and victims with impairment involved in rape or sexual assault allegations.

These victims are most likely to know their perpetrators, either as carers or having regular contact with them.

Failure to test rape kits for these priority, unresolved cases is likely placing these vulnerable victims at high risk of further rapes or sexual assaults.

Kirsty's review found that all of the twenty nine and a half million dollars in funding should have been spent on outsourcing.

The external testing of seven hundred and fifty rape kits could have occurred in three months for a cost of about four and a half million dollars.

It is sobering that the spending of that relatively small amount of money from already approved funds could have completely cleared the rape kit testing backlog.

This would have avoided significant ongoing delay and emotional anguish of victim survivors like Magda, as well as the uncertainty faced by accused persons and the prevention of further offenses by those alleged defenders.

Kirsty found that the new rape kits were taking longer to process, and that's because Forensic Science Queensland had not properly prepared itself.

The lab scrambled to try to catch up and the backlog grew.

The delay in the testing was shocking.

The new Premier, David Chris Afuley reflected on some of these issues in September twenty twenty five.

I think about what would have happened if the tens of millions that had been set aside for outsourcing had actually been spent on what it was asked for and what the approval was given.

This lab could be.

Today functioning at a much higher standard and we could have dealt with the backlog overseas if the former government had even done what they said they were going to do after denying the problem for a couple of years.

The problem is deeper and larger and more tragic than anyone could ever possibly have known.

ABCTV's seven point thirty program looked at some of the effects that the testing delays can have on victim survivors, Angela Lynch says the delays have caused some to give up seeking justice.

Many of them can't sustain that ability to go through the whole process because it's three hundred days perhaps until you find out the DNA.

Then there'll be a period after that for charging, and then there's a whole court process that can take years after that.

They can feel pretty worthless.

They can feel wide a eyeb Why am I going through this?

I can't get on with my life.

Magda's comments about her own experiences are very similar.

Are you confident that kid has captured the evidence that you need to rely on?

I can't see why it shouldn't.

I'm going to be very concerned if it hasn't.

Before I had interviewed Magda, she listened to the account of a woman we call Olympia.

You might remember her candid disclosures about her assault, horrific injuries and their aftermath in episode eight of Shandy's Legacy.

What's your impression of the professionalism or not of the Queensland DNA testing laboratory as a result of your own experiences.

They made me wait and wait and wait.

My mental health was going nuts.

I felt suicidal a lot at times.

I felt like I didn't want to be alive anymore.

I'm disgusted at this lab.

Yeah, they treat us people as victims like that.

I know they've got so many other victims out there.

I get it.

I'm not the only victim.

And then to be let down and told no DNA, no match.

Do you trust their results?

No, I don't.

I just think that I've been robbed.

I've been robbed of my dusters.

Magda was encouraged by the strength of Olympia's voice.

Magda and I spoke about some of the more practical impacts that the assault and the incredibly lengthy weight for DNA testing results have had on her.

I have relocated a second time to avoid triggers, people, places, things, and get the adequate help that I need in a little bit more stability because the delays, they couldn't keep taking precedence over my healing.

But I still have quite a distance to go.

Profersional life has been very impacted by this.

The offender is a former coworker of mine.

I really don't know how my professional life looks moving forward.

I haven't been able to work since October twenty twenty four.

I'm on unpaid sick leave at the moment, and that is a stress in its own To work out what I'm going to do there, I really don't know.

So financially it's come of a huge cost professionally in terms of your growth within that company that's been effectively frozen.

Yeah.

Absolutely, the particular company, I have nothing bad to say about them.

They've been incredible with how they've assisted me.

I personally, within my own self, I don't see how I could return to the industry or the profession.

It just has way too many links and triggers, and I'm not sure how I could return safely.

So you'll be looking to retrain somewhere.

Yeah, in a new profession that allows me to evolve but doesn't put me back into situations that I feel will bring home.

I don't want this to stop my life, but I can't deny the damage that has been done.

Vicky Blackburn is in complete agreement with MAGDA about the impact from testing delays.

Here's Vicky reading part of a letter that she and Shandy's sister Shanner sent to the DNA Review.

A lack of knowledge and information provided to victims through the retesting process could add another level of trauma to victims.

This is because not having knowledge of the processes of how the retesting is undertaken can add more anxiety, more mistrust, and more feelings of not being heard or considered.

Magda has been a victim twice, first from the alleged sexual assault and then from the labs incompetence and significant failings.

What would you say to the people who have responsibility right now?

I don't actually have the words for it, because.

I just cannot wrap my head around the fact that this is a forensic DNA lab.

These samples represent lives that have been impacted by crime.

I think I still don't have enough of an understanding to be able to answer that without a whole lot of emotion and anger and the betrayal of what's gone on.

That just makes me sick to the core because this is not good enough.

What has happened and what is currently happening.

It needs to be changed.

Where do we go from here and what are the implications for women like Magda?

We have to get this system fixed.

But most importantly, it's about the victims of Queensland who are waiting way too long to get justice.

That was Deb Frecklington, Queensland's new Attorney General, and she was telling me and my colleague Qreena Berger about the challenges facing her and Mick Fuller now and into the future.

A major breakthrough since Deb Frecklington and Mick Fuller took charge of the lab after the sudden departure of Lindsay Wilson Wilde, has been an arrangement to deliver hundreds of crime scene samples to the United States, where a lab called Body Technology will test and report back for the Queensland.

Criminal justice system.

This unusual agreement to send victim's evidence from Australia to the other side of the world will clear some of.

The back clog in time.

Deb Frecklington and Mick Fuller, the former New South Wales Police Commissioner and now the new Director of Forensic Science Queensland, have to at the body Lab in Virginia.

We've been able to visit the lab be there when the first great kits were being opened by their scientists.

It was actually heavily quite humbling.

You're looking at this Queensland kit that represents a victim and Thankfully, we've got a scientist who is looking at it, going to assess it and get the results back to Queensland so we can get that victim justice that they deserve.

We're doing this over a two year period to try to clear that backlog to ensure those rape victims or victims of sexual assault get the cases cleared.

And that's what we've got to do, as well as the major crimes, and that hopefully will free up the resources back here in Queensland to continue that hard work.

In relation to the.

Backlogs, I interviewed one of those survivors who talk to me about the incredible anxiety that could have led to something more drastic arising from huge delay in the testing of the samples from her alleged rape.

She's a laboratory employee at the mining site and she told me that you spoke to her, do you recall.

Look, I absolutely do.

Here is a bright, vivacious young woman who was going about her job with a scientific background.

That's the other point of this beautiful girl.

She's had to change her entire life, she's moved away.

Justice in her mind has not been served and the reason why it is important to listen to those victims is because through their stories, it keeps you going to make sure we can fix the system.

My heart breaks for her.

Quite frankly.

I imagine being at work, how horrific it would be on an isolated mind site to have that happened to you and then have to wait on the evidence.

To prove it.

It's shocking and it's actually distressing.

But what it does is it drives me to know that we've got to keep going until the system is fixed, and that's going to be a long time off.

Deb Frecklington lauded doctor Kirsty Wright for having taken time and effort to talk to victims to get their story, and for having used her report to bluntly describe how victims such as Magda have been utterly failed by the lab.

There are so many others, Headley, that are out there that don't feel like the justice system has benefited them in any way, shape or for.

When Magda spoke with him Headley, she mentioned that the delay in obtaining her DNA results has been retraumatizing for her.

Are there any processes in place for liaison officers or people like that to engage with these victims and provide and with updates on the process, because I think the unknown is potentially very traumatic for these.

Victims without a doubt.

And the other thing I should say is the releasing of the new reviews is also retraumatizing to some of these brave women who did help with the reviews.

These people who have been retraumatized, continuing to be retraumatized, need an avenue to be able to have a connection between what is going on and when their matter is going to be looked at through the court system.

Now there is a hotline.

We put more money into that.

We put more money onto actual bodies in these offices to give people access to someone who can listen and can explain the process.

Most people are new to it when they've been offended against and they don't understand the process.

Add with that a failure of a DNA debacle like we've got that makes it just all the more retraumatizing for these victims.

I spoke to Magda just the day before this episode was coming out, and I wanted to give her a heads up first of all that it was about to drop, but also to find out how she's going and whether she's heard anything now.

She was cheerful and sounded and told me like she was going better.

But there's still a lot of trauma and distress and unbelievably complete uncertainty.

She still has been told nothing about the status of the samples from her alleged rape in terms of the testing.

Nobody has contacted her.

Nobody from the lab, from the Queensland Government, from the police have been able to tell her where things are at.

I'm just so shocked to hear that, Headley, and quite frankly appalled.

We know, oh the profound effect that the delay has had on Magda, and she's been so brave in disclosing that, and it's just unbelievable that she hasn't been updated.

So why is someone like Magda, whose assault occurred in the early part of twenty twenty four still waiting for an update all this time later.

It's now a year and a half, that's how long it has been.

The Attorney General told us that she met with Magda.

Magda also met Kirsty Wright, and she met the victim's commissioner.

Given the high level of contact that Magda had, you would think that she would have been told what was going on.

What about all the other people.

All the other victims of these sexual assaults who haven't had that level of contact, they must all be in the same boat.

And you can put more money into victimly, you can set up hotlines.

It's not worth Diddley's squat if people are not proactively contacting victims of crime and letting them know what's going on.

These public servants who are involved in this need to get busy and proactively start telling victims where their samples are at.

Are they on the way to the United States?

Have they been tested?

Are they coming back?

It can't be that hard.

Yeah, I agree.

They could make contact with victims directly, or they could reach out to the officers in charge and let them know what the current situation is for these samples.

The lab isn't currently testing rape kits.

All of the kids are going over to the Body lab in the States.

Results are coming back from Body, some are here already, and there are plans for more kids to go over to Body every month.

There's a priority list.

There is information that could be passed on to these victims.

Offenders.

Alleged offenders are also waiting in limbo to know what's happening with these cases.

Magda said to me, how hard could it be for the government to set up an online notification system password protected, where people like Magde could put in their case number or some other identifying feature and receive from that an update.

It might say something like testing underway, or testing soon to start, or testing complete notification due something that gives her an insight into where things are at.

Is completely unacceptable that after one and a half years, she has no idea.

Contacting a thousand people to provide an update on their case, or setting up a database that tracks a thousand different crime scene sample tests is not a particularly onerous task.

Many people know about our unconditional admiration for doctor Kirsty Wright.

Her journey with Shandy's story ard in mid twenty twenty one, a millisecond after my Google search for a DNA expert, doctor Kirsty Wright's name popped up on my laptop screen.

Kirsty was a bit wary when I first reached out.

I probably was too, we had not worked together before.

Then she started analyzing hundreds of pages from the laboratory's case file of Shandy's case.

The more material which I sent to her, the more alarmed Kirsty became.

The scientific language in those documents would have been impenetrable for most people, but for Kirsty was very easy to follow.

As she poured over those documents in her own time through twenty twenty one, she realized that the lab was failing catastrophically on multiple levels.

Listeners will recall Kirsty's astonishment that the lab was not even detecting DNA in fresh blood.

At the crime set in.

Something had to be going badly wrong in the lab.

We resolved to try to force the then Queensland Labor government, led by its Premier Anastasia Palichet, to run an independent inquiry into what Kirsty told me back then was a systemic forensic disaster, the biggest failure by a forensic lab in Australia, if not the world.

Kirsty told me and listeners back in twenty twenty one that thousands of criminals were not being nabbed and that many would be reoffending and victims could receive no justice while the failures of this government run DNA lab were not being formally addressed.

You and I first started talking in twenty twenty one, about four years ago, and now we have more evidence reported by one of the world's leading scientists, doctor Bruce Berdoley, commissioned by the new Queensland government to help you get to the bottom of what's been going on over these past two years.

He describes it as a lab in constant crisis.

Basically our failure of management, a really toxic culture in the new lab.

The lab wasn't only providing slower service, poorer quality service, it was providing a lot less service for the community as well, so it was failing on all fronts.

Scientists raising issues and concerns weren't listened to and were sometimes bullied as well.

We found that there was a large group of really ethically motivated and hardworking, benchworking scientists that really did want the lab to be fixed, and we're doing everything that they could to try to raise issues and solve issues, and they were really distressed coming to the lab and knowing that the results weren't reliable.

Were you seen by staff in the lab as a help or a hindrance and you went back for this review after those two inquiries and all of the water that had flowed under the bridge.

There were definitely staff that were very supportive and absolutely wanted to work with me and the review team to help fix the lab.

There are other staff that really weren't sure, and there was a group of staff that thought that I was some kind of a threat or some kind of a monster.

For a culture to be fostered where external scrutiny is seen as a threat, I think that's very, very dangerous.

Science is based on scrutiny.

That's the foundation of science, being able to scrutinize each other's work in a professional way, and I see that's what I've been doing for the past few years.

Did you identify any scientists who wanted to blow the whistle about what was failing over these past.

Couple of years, Absolutely that they felt that there was no avenue they could go to express that concern.

Now the thresholds rear their ugly head again in your review.

I think that's the worst thing that we found, and that's something I still just cannot understand.

That's what led to the first inquiry.

It was probably one of the most damning findings from that first inquiry, where the lab set a threshold that meant that samples below that threshold should have produced DNA profiles.

You educated me on the critical importance of the threshold issue when we were doing Shandy Story.

Here's a reminder from episode fifteen of Shandy Story.

It was aired in late twenty twenty one.

They've got an instrument, and his instrument will try to detect DNA and then measure DNA in a tube, and typically a lab sets a threshold and they say, Okay, if there's a quantity of DNA below the threshold, we don't think we're going to get a DNA profile.

So we're going to stop testing at stage two.

But judges and prosecutors and defense lawyers and victims of crime and alleged defenders and police don't actually know about this half way abandonment by the laboratory.

At the end of stage two, the decision is made in the lab to cease testing.

This is a significant decision with profound impacts for cases and particularly for victims of crime.

This is where the threshold levels for the lab's instrumentation come into focus and where doctor Kirsty writes Newest Discovery is so revealing.

The threshold used by the DNA lab is astoundingly high.

This threshold is twice as high as the threshold used by the New South Wales Forensic Biology Lab.

So that means that the new.

South Wales lab you would only need half the amount of DNA of prime scene DNA in your tube and they would decide that they would fully test it.

So the Queensland DNA Lab they require twice as much DNA to make that decision to fully test that sample.

Kirsty, in your view, has the Queensland and the biotree set and an appropriately very high bar for DNA to be taken seriously and tested further.

The threshold that they've used is extremely high, and I don't understand why they would set it so high.

You would have more than enough DNA in that sample if it was below that threshold.

You only really need very very small amounts of DNA to be able to get a profile.

For some reason, they're using this really sensitive DNA profiling method, but they're setting this incredibly high threshold for the crime scene samples to have to exceed to then fully profile.

I thought it was one of the most alarming things that came out of the whole package, the decision by lab managers to change the thresholds so that they actually were able to test fewer samples and get fewer results, resulting in fewer offenders being identified, and they actually took that as a win because it meant that they were achieving their targets in terms of processing.

But it was a terrible failure because it meant that they were letting go a lot of people who had raped, who had seriously assaulted, who had even murdered people, and whose DNA was left behind in crime scene samples, but the DNA was not being detected in the lab because the lab's scientific threshold for the detection of cells had been changed.

That's right, Headley.

The lab implemented a threshold that they knew was too high, and they knew that it would miss DNA from critical crime scene samples.

Those samples are now being fully tested, as per one of the recommendations from the Soffronoff.

Inquiry, and that's a good thing.

Oh absolutely, So it's good that these samples dating back to twenty eighteen are now being fully tested, and what we're finding is about twenty percent of those are now providing usable profiles.

They involve sexual assaults on children, where the first time they were tested, no DNA was detected, and now they're being fully tested.

There's semen on on pants, there's DNA on knives, there's DNA being detected on rape kit samples.

These cases the police have flagged as critical to identify the offenders or offender and are now providing useful results.

So this threshold is such a key issue and it's justice for the victims.

They're finally now getting the results that they should have gotten years ago.

But because of the backlog, it's coming slowly.

Yes, it is a matter of public record that as a result of the revelations in the podcast, a top level executive decision was made by the Queensland Government in mid twenty twenty two to completely remove those thresholds which Kirsty Wright had exposed in episode fifteen and in subsequent evidence at Walter Sofronoff's inquiry in twenty twenty two, the threshold levels got a lot of attention.

The craziness of that threshold policy was subjected too close scrutiny.

There was a good outcome.

The lab began fully testing all samples and that led to the DNA of offenders being identified.

But in her most recent review in recent months, Kirsty discovered that the lab had quietly made another very serious change while under the direction of doctor Lindsey Wilson Wilde, What is the current position that you discovered in relation to thresholds Under the last two years of management.

All samples were fully tested until the nineteenth of November twenty twenty four, when the new lab introduced a new DNA testing threshold.

In your view, is that new threshold an appropriate threshold?

Theoretically it looks like it is the correct threshold, But during the review I dug into it further and I looked at the experiments that the lab conducted to get that threshold, and you're not going to believe this.

As part of those experiments, the lab didn't fully test the samples under the new threshold.

So it set this new threshold, but then never fully tested any samples below the threshold, just to make sure they wouldn't produce a profile, and they implemented this threshold.

So I started looking for data.

I was curious to see if this new threshold was actually accurate, was it reliable?

And I foun found in some experimental data that one hundred percent of samples below the new threshold we're generating profiles.

We're talking about highly educated scientists working in a laboratory that is suddenly well resourced.

A couple of one hundred million dollars has been pledged because the laboratory has been through strife and scandal and publicity and inquiry on a scale that most laboratories would never ever see.

And the threshold was a big part of the problem.

How do you decide to introduce a new threshold with that backdrop but not test to see whether samples that are below that threshold could produce the DNA of an offender.

It's unbelievable.

Headly, of everything that I found in the review, was the most disturbing because this was the most important issue in the first inquiry.

This should have been the one thing that they did to their absolute best ability, and it was only half done, or it wasn't done adequately at all.

The team responsible for this new threshold, it's a new research and innovation team that was put together, multiple managers within the team total of ten scientific staff, and it was their job to be able to conduct these experiments appropriately.

And I don't think you even need to be a scientist to understand that before you introduce or nominate a threshold, you need to fully test the samples that fall below the threshold.

And headly this came about because the police flagged to me during the review that they had a Priority one sample that they sent to the lab after the new threshold was introduced, and it came back with no DNA detected.

And this was a particularly brutal and violent crime and the police were really relying on this DNA sample to help progress their investigation.

So the police, to their credit, took the decision to ask the lab to fully test this Priority one sample, and to their surprise, it resulted in a usable sample, usable profile, which progressed the investigation.

So that was my first flag that something was really really wrong.

It was a flag because the lab reported back to the police that there was not enough DNA in this sample, so we're not going to fully test it.

So the lab didn't fully test this Priority one sample because it fell below the new threshold.

It was the police who decided to tell the lab to fully test the sample.

If it was left up to the lab, this Priority one sample from this violent would never have been fully tested and would not have produced.

This usable profile.

So I was really surprised when I started to see that samples below this threshold started to generate profiles.

So I dug a little bit deeper and what.

I found, Headley, is the instrument the lab users to measure the DNA for this critical threshold isn't working reliably.

And even more disturbingly, the lab knows this instrument isn't working reliably, it.

Just gets worse.

So I was just lucky that I had that data and I requested it from the lab, and that's when I did the analysis and found that one hundred percent of those were generating profiles below the threshold.

It was quite staggering because if you go back to the first inquiry, the percentage of samples below the threshold that was generating results was ten point six percent.

I'm now talking about one hundred percent.

Do you know whether lab managers were surprised when you discovered this and showed them the results, or were they aware of what you had to discover for yourself through your own detective work in the lab.

The lab knew even before the review that the instrument they were using to measure the DNA in the samples wasn't working accurately.

They knew that they had the data that I had prior to the review, so they knew that the new threshold would mean that there was a very large number of samples that could provide profiles that weren't being tested.

They knew, or to put it another way, they knew that offended DNA was not being detected in a very large number of samples where it could have been detected.

Absolutely, they would know that there's a very very high risk of implementing this new threshold would lead to offenders not being captured and would lead to miscarriages of justice.

And they actually documented that.

Well, let's go to that.

Can you pass the documents that I've requested from the Office of the Attorney General the Recklington.

This is an internal document.

It's headed Risk Assessment.

It's dated May twenty twenty four.

What it says is that limit of detection, which is another word for threshold, was approved on the twenty third of August twenty twenty three, and was also approved some months later by the Interim Advisory Board for the lab in February twenty twenty four.

Can I just stop you there.

That's actually misleading because what I found through obtaining documents from the Advisory Board is the Advisory Board is actually asking the laboratory as a priority to complete the experiments, and the laboratory still have not completed the experiments that the advisory Board requested, yet went ahead and implemented the new threshold.

Anyway, what it says on page one of this risk assessment is that implementation of a limit of detection threshold in the current environment has the potential to expose forensic science as Queensland to further negative criticism and media attention.

When you read that paragraph, Kirsty, what did you take from it?

The risk assessment disturbs me.

This risk assessment is clearly highlighting the lab is nervous about implementing a new threshold.

They're sitting out plan, weighing the risks correct and they're identifying whether journalists such as myself are going to stumble upon this or be lenkes of information that could expose the laboratory and its management team to sustain criticism.

Because what they're proposing to do is the opposite of what the lab was meant to do, which was to fully test samples.

So one of the possible consequences that the lab actually notes in this risk assessment is missed opportunity to provide probative evidence to the justice system, and they say this represents an extreme consequence.

Okay, so they fully understand what they're doing.

Absolutely.

They also highlight as a possible consequence of the implementation of what they're proposing, negative media attention and possible notation in national media.

This represents a major consequence.

And the third thing they highlight is staff may fail to comply with the change due to lack of understanding or misconceptions around personal risk or otherwise.

I don't know whether I'm overthinking it, but that point seems to me to be saying staff who know that this is how the lab got into so much strife last time, may balk at going back to a method that is guaranteed to miss the detection of DNA and to miss the detection of offenders.

The risk assessment is flagging that staff may feel uncomfortable with not fully testing samples.

But the community wasn't told.

The police weren't even duld.

No, absolutely not.

The police had no idea how poorly these experiments were being conducted, and they had no idea that the lab that their instruments weren't working properly.

The new threshold was introduced and the police didn't get any training, any education about what that new threshold meant.

So without education, it's really difficult for the police to know when they should request for their samples to be fully tested or not.

They didn't tell the police that they never fully tested samples below the threshold before it was introduced.

The police were completely kept in the dark about that.

This document produced by the Lab says that it is expected that any negative media attention will not be sustained.

This is why this issue is so important.

It's this lack of appreciation and understanding about what their purpose is, the impacts that this has on police investigations.

So this represents such a betrayal of trust the community and the victims.

I cannot believe, of all things, the Lab has done this again, and they've knowingly done it again.

When you dug into it, Kirsty, what were you told by Lab staff about why they had done it again.

We tried to get to the bottom of that, and we got a lot of side stepping, got a lot of blank looks, and there was almost a belligerent response when we flagged what these issues were.

There was no real appreciation of why these were such a concern.

What is your understanding of why they went forward with this.

The risk assessment says that implementation of the new threshold has a potential to significantly reduce backlogs, and at the time this risk assessment was written in May twenty twenty four, the backlogs were out of control.

So once again, senior managers have decided to affect of the compromise on the potential to solve crimes by ensuring that fewer DNA crime scene samples are fully tested.

That's exactly right.

It's completely unbelievable, and it shows that this lab hasn't learned anything.

There has to be significant change within this lab otherwise this will keep on repeating and repeating and repeating.

I can't keep on going in and finding these things.

The heads must have rolled after you discovered these things and reported them.

Heads haven't rolled.

So no one's been sacked, but there hasn't even been any discipline reaction.

If those responsible for the failings and for the deception over the last two and a half years, if they are not removed from the laboratory, then the lab will not be fixed.

I am certain of that.

Have you conveyed that, yes to I've conveyed.

That to the new director, Mick Fuller, and I've also conveyed that to the Attorney General's office.

There's too much writing on this head leaf.

There's no way that the public will trust this lab again unless people are held accountable, unless there's significant change.

It's a betrayal of victims of crime.

It's a betrayal of police in the community.

It's a betrayal of taxpayers who have funded these incredibly expensive reforms.

We want the Queensland community and victims to be able to trust that lab again.

That's the number one priority.

We need to restore trust in the judicial system again.

Is it possible that the people who are making the decisions to not discipline those scientists worried that they're just going to run out of scientists so they just have to try to deal with it and a blind eye to these disgraceful decisions.

It's actually the opposite, because we found there was excellent benchworking scientists and they're the ones that we need to keep.

And they've expressed real distress that no one's been held accountable for what's in our reports and they don't want to work in a lab with those kinds of people.

We're going to lose the good scientists and a lot of them, just to keep a very small number of rotten scientists.

You've talked about this being a failure of management.

He held a comment on Lindsay Wilson Wiles's management performance over these past two years.

As part of my role in the review, I can't publicly name or criticize any specific scientists.

That was a restriction placed on me, but it actually ended up being a blessing in disguise because it forced me to take a different approach.

It forced me to really dig deep into documents, to review a large number of documents.

While these restrictions were imposed on me for possibly one desired outcome, it had the opposite effect.

I found so much more thanks to these restrictions.

Was the lab just set to be a task or is it just, in your view, very poor decision making near the top or at the top?

I think it's a little bit of all of that.

Pedley.

Can we turn this thing around?

Can this basket case become a world leading laboratory.

I don't like using the term world leading because we're not even close to that in our lifetimes.

But what we want is a lab that's going to serve the needs of the police and the courts and the community and the victims because the will is there across the system.

There's a lot of really hard working, dedicated people.

If we don't get good managers in this lab will just keep on failing and it'll be years and years and years of failure.

In the course of your new investigations, Kirsty, you dealt with magistrates and judges.

You've got feedback from people working in the criminal justice system.

What are they telling.

You in all levels of Queensland courts all across Queensland.

There's a high degree of frustration.

The Chief Magistrate and Deputy Chief Magistrate.

They've said the delays waiting for DNA results are now extending two and a half.

To three years.

Cases are actually.

Being thrown out because of the DNA delays.

We're also seeing people being released because of uncertainty around the testing time frames and some of these people could be a danger to the community as well.

It's reducing opportunities to remove repeat offenders from the street.

Well.

It's an enormous stress for victims of crime as well.

It's prolonging their initial trauma and introducing new trauma that uncertainty is just destroying their lives.

This is worse than I was.

I think this is the last chance to fix the lab.

This episode of Shandy's Legacy was investigated and written by me Headley Thomas and Karina Berger.

Audio production for this podcast series is by Wasabi Audio and original theme music by Slade Gibson.

This podcast series is brought to you by me Headley Thomas and the Australian newspaper and digital side.

Visit Shandy dot com dot au.

That's s h A n d e.

E dot com dot au for additional documentary material.

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