Queensland forensic lab audits more than 900 DNA statements after a courtroom error

Forensic Science Queensland is auditing more than 900 witness statements it supplied to police since 2023, after a scientist giving evidence in a Queensland court in June 2026 noticed a typographical error in the statement in front of them. Roughly a third of the statements have been checked. Between 10 and 15 per cent of those checked contained errors, including incorrect dates and incorrect case numbers, the ABC reported on 6 August 2026. The same day, an Australian Associated Press report put the total under review at almost 1,000 statements spanning three years.

The laboratory draws a line between the analysis and the paperwork that carries it into court. "The thing that's important is that the science is right," the director of Forensic Science Queensland, Mick Fuller, told AAP on 6 August 2026. "It is merely the information that has been taken from the science into the statement." Asked whether a prosecution could be compromised, he said it would be impossible for him to say no, and that he could not rule out errors in the roughly 600 statements not yet examined. The Attorney-General, Deb Frecklington, said of the case in which the error surfaced that it did not affect the criminal outcome, and that the government had been forthright about it.

Those two positions are not the same thing, and neither has been tested by an independent review that has reported. A statement is the document a prosecutor tenders and a defence lawyer cross examines on. An incorrect case number or date inside it is a chain of custody question before it is a typing question, and the audit that would answer it is still running.

The period covered by the audit begins in the same year the laboratory's results were found to be unreliable. On 4 August 2025 the Queensland government released a review by the forensic biologist Dr Kirsty Wright, conducted with the former FBI scientist Dr Bruce Budowle, and said the assessment found that Forensic Science Queensland had provided unreliable DNA results to police and the courts since early 2023, with systemic contamination uncovered. The government statement recorded a median turnaround of 412 days for major crime DNA results against a required 14 days, and untested sexual assault kits rising from 75 in 2023 to 511 by September 2024. It described courts relying on DNA evidence as being at a point of critical system failure, and announced 50 million dollars over two years to outsource testing and 6 million dollars for the Director of Public Prosecutions. A second statement on 5 August 2025 recorded Budowle's findings of environmental contamination and a workplace culture the review team considered quite toxic.

An earlier failure was arithmetic rather than biological. On 4 June 2025 the government disclosed that an incorrect formula introduced into a spreadsheet in 2019 had produced inaccuracies in 69 test results across 37 cases dating from 1982 to 2023, that kinship and paternity testing had been paused and outsourced, and that one incorrect DNA profile was uploaded to the national database in 2022. The statement said the recalculated figures would not change the findings in any of the cases.

This is a laboratory that has already been examined twice. The Commission of Inquiry into Forensic DNA Testing in Queensland, led by Walter Sofronoff KC, commenced on 13 June 2022 and delivered its final report on 13 December 2022, making 3 recommendations in an interim report in September 2022 and 123 in the final report. A second inquiry in 2023, led by Dr Annabelle Bennett AC SC and known as DNA Project 13, made two further recommendations. Forensic Science Queensland's own account of implementation, current to 26 June 2025, lists 79 recommendations closed, 4 completed pending approval, 2 substantially implemented, 34 in progress and 7 not yet commenced, against 170 million dollars committed. The laboratory now operates as an independent statutory authority under the Forensic Science Queensland Act 2024 and reports compliance with ISO/IEC 17025.

Some measures have moved. The ABC reported on 11 May 2026 that 601 sexual assault kits had been cleared through a United States facility, that historic samples awaiting retesting had fallen from about 40,000 to about 20,000, and that the major crime backlog had dropped from 11,703 untested samples in November 2024 to 3,488. By July 2026, AAP reported, that figure was 2,240.

What is not known is whether any of the remaining statements contain an error that mattered, how many prosecutions will need to be revisited, whether the audit's findings will be published in full, and when. Nor has it been explained why Dr Wright left an advisory role overseeing reform in May 2026, six months into a twelve month contract, a departure the Attorney-General declined to account for when the ABC asked on 6 August 2026.