The haunting realisation for Qld’s new lab boss

The freshly minted boss of Queensland’s forensic service says there are likely creeps who should be in prison but are instead walking the streets because of the failure of the state-run laboratory.

That is the haunting realisation for former NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller who was unveiled on Friday as director of Forensic Science Queensland.

He has the enormous task of repairing the scandal-plagued lab, restoring faith in the justice system and working through a backlog filled with thousands of DNA samples from rape and murder investigations.

Fuller told this masthead it was difficult to determine how many criminal cases were in limbo because of the about 13,000 samples still waiting to be tested.

But whatever that number is, he said “it’s too many”.

“No matter how it cuts, it’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of victims that are waiting for justice,” the former top cop said.

“And the other part of that is that there are people out there potentially committing crimes that should be in custody, so none of that’s lost on me.”

The lab has been in a perpetual state of scandal since late 2021 and the centre of two landmark commissions of inquiry after former forensic biologist Dr Kirsty Wright blew the whistle on alleged testing failures in the 2013 murder investigation of Shandee Blackburn.

More than 100,000 samples were ordered to be retested across the lab.

A damning report released last month revealed there were still 13,000 samples in the backlog that needed to be tested, with an average completion time of more than 400 days. In NSW, these results usually take a maximum of 10 days.

Fuller replaces Linzi Wilson-Wilde as boss of the statutory authority, who was brought in to repair the lab after the first inquiry but faced questions about her own suitability before eventually being suspended by Attorney-General Deb Frecklington.

Wilson-Wilde resigned in July.

Fuller was initially enlisted by the Crisafulli government to lead a new expert taskforce to overhaul the testing facility but was confirmed as the FSQ director on Friday.

And while he was desperate to wade through the thousands of samples to help solve major crimes, he was keenly aware the rush to get samples out the door was what led to the troubles in the first place.

“The last thing I want to say to the scientists is cut corners to go faster because everything that I need to talk about is excellence and doing things to the best of our ability,” Fuller said.

The first commission of inquiry noted a weakness in the lab was the inability to understand complex forensic science but Xanthe Mallett, a forensic anthropologist and criminologist not connected with the lab or the state government, said although Fuller is not a scientist his decades of experience as an investigator was ideal for leading the reform process.

“They’ve really got to make sure all of their policies and procedures and equipment is up to scratch,” she said.

“Public confidence is important in this space too, given how important it is that we have to trust our labs, and we have to know that the cases are being managed quickly, effectively, and responsibly.

“A lot of people knew about these issues, and they carried on, and that’s not OK.”

Mallett said Fuller would need to start from the ground up and closely examine every facet of the lab’s procedures.

“They need to bulldoze everything that’s gone wrong and really start again,” she said.

“They’re not in a position to start moving forward yet because they haven’t cleared house.”

Mallett described the current timeline to test samples in Queensland as appalling, which she said placed further strain on the state’s justice system.

Each time a court hearing is delayed, this re-traumatises the victim, she said.

“These are people who have suffered, and are victims of violent crimes, and their cases are just not being managed. You wait 400 days for the sample to even be run, and imagine what damage that is doing to investigations,” Mallett said.

“I really feel for the victims and their families in these cases because they’ve waited an awfully long time, and in some cases, the community could be at risk of violent offenders who could be identified and those samples just haven’t been managed properly.”

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