The silver bullet

Around 1900, a magic bullet was developed that would ensure no one would be wrongly convicted and the guilty would not escape. It was not fingerprinting – that had been around for centuries – but a way of cataloguing the prints.

It took some years for the science, as it was called, to be accepted in all countries. But gradually we realised prints were the ultimate proof. As Lady Justice Rafferty said, ‘If fingerprint evidence emerges when you are defending a client then you tend to hold your head in your hands. There is not really a question mark over it.’ But as the years went by, a string of cases showed that fingerprint experts might be wrong and prints might even have been planted. By the 21st century it was accepted that their reliability might be, at best, suspect.

Fortunately, in the 1980s a new magic bullet was discovered. DNA was so foolproof that the wrongly convicted would be released and there was really no point in challenging its efficacy. Defence lawyers held their heads for a second time.

Now, many years after the infallibility of DNA evidence became accepted, I hear from Jordan Roles, who works with my friend Chris Nyst in Queensland, of shock and horror among the state’s lawyers. In June 2022, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the Independent Commission of Inquiry into Forensic DNA Testing in Queensland. At the end of the year, the inquiry’s head, former president of Queensland’s Court of Appeal, Walter Sofronoff KC, called its findings a ‘horrible read’, citing ‘disturbing oversights’ by state-run forensic laboratories in conducting forensic DNA testing over a period of years.

DNA testing was found to be so hopelessly wanting that prosecuting authorities were forced to order that the DNA evidence used in thousands of criminal prosecutions had be reviewed and re-tested immediately.

Now Queensland’s deputy chief magistrate, Anthony Gett, has given some idea of just what the resulting backlog meant. Over 10,000 prosecution cases are effectively on hold, awaiting re-testing of the DNA evidence.

Moral: Anything involving human beings is intrinsically unreliable.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor