FACTS & FIGURES
UNDERSTANDING DNA Jason Murakami and Ron Behlau* examine the significance behind the Commission of Inquiry into DNA testing in Queensland.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT in June by Premier Palaszczuk of a Commission of Inquiry into DNA testing in Queensland is one of the most significant justice inquiries in this State for the past 20 years. The Government's decision to establish the Inquiry followed a first-time joint campaign by scientists such as Dr Kirsty Wright, journalists such as The Australian's Hedley Thomas and
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Sky News' Peter Gleeson; and lawyers from the Griffith University Innocence Project and culminated in the Inquiry being announced less than three weeks after the Innocence Project's written submission to the Government calling for the all-important Inquiry. Former Court of Appeal President Walter Sofronoff QC has been appointed Commissioner
of the Inquiry and will examine primarily whether the collection, testing and analysis of DNA has been reliable and conducted in accordance with best international practice methods in this State. The Griffith University Innocence Project has been shining a light on the use of DNA in our justice system for the past two decades, having negotiated Australia's first post-conviction DNA testing guidelines in 2009 and staging the nation's first public ‘Understanding DNA’ forum in 2016 as well as working on hundreds of cases involving the use of DNA by State prosecution authorities. To appreciate the significance of the pending Inquiry, it is timely to understand the development of the use of DNA testing in our justice system. In 1984 Dr Alec Jeffreys from Leicester University in the UK stumbled onto the differences in individual’s genetic information, which could be used for identification. Dr Jeffrey adopted a process of identifying, what he called, an individual's ‘DNA sequence’ by measuring an area on it which he called minisatellites and later called alleles. He determined that the differences in the minisatellite/alleles measurements were particular to each individual. This method of DNA identification was first used in a criminal justice system in the mideighties in the UK to identify Colin Pitchfork as the killer of two girls after crime scene biological material was compared with Pitchfork's biological material sample. By the early 1990s, Dr Jeffrey's identification techniques became the foundations of the science of DNA profiling as we know it today. As a result of the high demand by policing authorities around the world standardised systems to highlight individual minisatellites/alleles for comparison were developed. One of the most widely used earlier systems was called the ProfilerPlus DNA identification system. The ProfilerPlus DNA identification system was the market leader and was used throughout the common law jurisdictions by the majority of staterun scientific departments. Its primary use was for testing crime scene biological product such as blood, saliva, skin, semen, hair, fingernails etc.
