When Bad Scientists Help Murderers, Rapists, and Drug Dealers

As a forensic scientist, you possess specialised knowledge that most of the world does not. Whether your speciality is toxicology, ballistics, DNA analysis, or forensic pathology: your opinions and analyses have real consequences.

Your work can put a murderer behind bars. It can exonerate an innocent person. It can identify a rapist who would otherwise remain free, or expose a drug trafficker whose criminal enterprise has devastated countless lives.

It is an extraordinary responsibility.

That is why any good forensic scientist takes their duty seriously. We validate our methods, perform quality control (QC), maintain the integrity of evidence, and document our findings accurately. We follow the science, even when the results are inconvenient or contrary to what investigators want to hear.

Most importantly, we do not take shortcuts that result in guilty people walking free or, worse, innocent people going to prison.

Sadly, we aren't going to talk about those scientists.

Instead, we are going to examine four disgusting forensic scientists whose conduct, decisions, and failures raise deeply disturbing questions about scientific integrity, professional accountability, and the administration of justice.

These are not harmless laboratory mistakes. When forensic science goes catastrophically wrong, the consequences extend far beyond the laboratory. Innocent people can lose their freedom, criminal prosecutions can collapse, and victims can be denied justice.

The question is not necessarily whether these scientists intended to help criminals. The question is whether their conduct did.

Annie Dookhan BSc – Chemist, Massachusetts State Police Forensics Unit

Annie Dookhan was, by any reasonable assessment of her documented conduct, an appalling forensic scientist.

She either could not, or chose not to, perform even basic laboratory procedures properly, including microscopy.¹ She falsified test results, claimed to have performed analyses that never occurred, and admitted contaminating samples with controlled substances.

This is unconscionable conduct for anyone entrusted with forensic evidence.

In some respects, it is even more disturbing than the familiar scenario of a corrupt police officer planting a weapon at a crime scene. A police officer who plants evidence corrupts an investigation. A forensic scientist who knowingly falsifies analytical results corrupts the very mechanism intended to independently test the police account.

The scientist is supposed to be the safeguard. Dookhan became part of the problem. We won’t talk about this dropkick, I prefer focusing on an offender’s victims rather than the offender.

One of her most notable victims was Mr Leonardo Johnson, a Massachusetts man accused of supplying cocaine to an undercover police officer in November 2008.^2,3

I should note that this occurred in the United States almost two decades ago, and that Mr Johnson is black. Given the well-documented history of racism in American policing, the police account should not be accepted, especially with what we’re about to discover.

In fact, that is precisely why forensic laboratories exist. A scientist is not supposed to accept a police officer's suspicion as scientific fact. Their job is to independently establish what the evidence actually shows. And in Johnson's case, what the police believed to be crack cocaine was allegedly a cashew.

Yes, a cashew.

Mr Johnson maintained that he all throughout his arrest and trial the suspicious item was a cashew rather than cocaine. You would imagine this was precisely the sort of dispute that an independent forensic examination could resolve. If I received a cashew from police, my question would be “do you want me to test it, or eat it?”

On 4 February 2009, Dookhan recorded that she had performed two preliminary tests on the substance and that both had returned positive results for cocaine.

There was just one problem. She had not performed either test. She had simply recorded the results as positive.

This practice is known as dry labbing. Rather than performing the required scientific analysis, the analyst records a result without actually conducting the test. It is not a minor procedural irregularity. It is the fabrication of scientific evidence.

On 10 February 2009, the substance underwent several tests using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) conducted by a real scientist (who I assume probably thought “hmm… that crack cocaine looks a lot like a cashew”). Every one of those tests returned a negative result for cocaine.

Read that again. The actual analytical testing returned negative results.

At this point, a competent laboratory should have reviewed their screening processes and confronted the discrepancy between Dookhan's supposed preliminary positive results and the negative instrumental analyses.

Instead, something considerably more disturbing happened. On 12 February 2009, Dookhan prepared the substance for another GC-MS analysis. Dookhan admitted to contaminating samples with drugs to produce positive results.⁴

On 13 February 2009, the substance was reported as testing positive for cocaine.

But that was not the end of it. The records for the earlier tests conducted on 10 February were then retrospectively altered to indicate positive results.

Results that had originally been negative were recorded as positive.

On 17 April 2009, Dookhan provided prosecutors with a discovery package containing the positive findings but omitting the negative analytical results.

Think about what that means. The prosecution was presented with forensic evidence that supposedly established the presence of cocaine, while the testing that contradicted that conclusion was withheld.

This is precisely the opposite of what a forensic scientist is supposed to do.

In November 2009, Mr Johnson stood trial. Dookhan testified that she had conducted preliminary testing and obtained positive results. She also falsely claimed to hold a master's degree in chemistry.

On 18 November 2009, Mr Johnson was convicted of possessing/distributing a controlled substance within a school zone. This is a felony.

He was sentenced to two years and one day in prison. By the time Dookhan's misconduct was publicly exposed in September 2012, Johnson had already endured imprisonment arising from the tainted conviction. He could not recover that lost time.

Nor could a subsequent judicial decision simply erase the consequences of having been branded a convicted felon drug offender. A felony conviction in the United States is very different from an indictable offence conviction in Australia. It can have severe consequences extending well beyond imprisonment, including restrictions on employment, professional licensing, housing, firearms possession, and voting rights.

For Mr Johnson, the damage had already been done. And Mr Johnson was far from alone.

18,938 defendants were affected by the mass dismissal of convictions arising from Dookhan's misconduct. That is the scale of the disaster. Not all of those 18,938 would have been innocent either. Some of those people were undoubtedly hardened drug dealers that were effectively let out on the street. Because of cases like Mr Johnson, it would have taken over 700 years for a single court to hear all 18,938 cases, so they just issued a broad dismissal and effectively assumed that everyone was innocent (not quite the meaning of a mass dismissal, but close enough).

Some defendants had already served their sentences. Others, like Mr Johnson, had lived for years under the stigma and legal consequences of criminal convictions supported by unreliable forensic evidence.

The impact on innocent people is obvious. But as I said, guilty people were set free too.

Thousands of cases dismissed. Almost 19,000 defendants affected. An innocent man imprisoned after laboratory records concealed negative results.

And a justice system left attempting to untangle years of corrupted forensic evidence.

That is Annie Dookhan's legacy.

And, as we will see in Queensland, the consequences of forensic failures are certainly not confined to the United States.

Queensland Health Forensic and Scientific Services Scandal (2007 – 2022)⁵

Catherine Allen MSc(ForSc), BSc Managing Scientist (Forensic DNA Analysis and Forensic Chemistry)

Justin Howes MSc(ForSc), BSc(MolBio), BA, DipManagement, CIVTAE  Team Leader (Forensic Reporting and Intelligence)

Paula Brisotto BAppSc Team Leader, Evidence Recovery and Quality

With Annie Dookhan, we saw what happens when one disgraceful forensic scientist is allowed to run amok in a laboratory: fabricated evidence, innocent people imprisoned, and thousands of criminal convictions rendered worthless.

But what happens when the problem is reversed?

What happens when a forensic laboratory fails to properly examine evidence that could identify murderers and rapists? What happens when three senior scientists help introduce defective testing practices, ignore warnings from their own colleagues, and allow misleading information to find its way into criminal proceedings?

And what happens when those same scientists are supposed to be the people responsible for ensuring the laboratory operates with scientific integrity? For that particular disaster, we need look no further than Queensland Health Forensic and Scientific Services (QHFSS).

At the centre of this scandal were three senior laboratory managers: Catherine Allen, Justin Howes, and Paula Brisotto.

These were not inexperienced graduate scientists who had accidentally selected the wrong method or mislabelled a sample. They were senior laboratory personnel with scientific qualifications, managerial responsibilities and considerable influence over the procedures used to analyse evidence in some of Queensland's most serious criminal investigations.

Their decisions mattered.

The laboratory's historical problems extended back to at least 2007, but the principal scandal examined here concerns the development and implementation of the so-called Options Paper, culminating in the disastrous DNA testing arrangements introduced in 2018 and exposed by the 2022 Commission of Inquiry.

By the time retired judge Walter Sofronoff KC completed his inquiry in December 2022, the findings painted an appalling picture of laboratory management.

This was not merely a laboratory suffering from outdated instruments or insufficient funding.

It was a laboratory in which scientific concerns had been disregarded, established safeguards circumvented, inaccurate reporting practices perpetuated, and senior management had failed to respond appropriately to warnings. Sofronoff also made explicit findings of dishonesty.

And the consequences extended to murder investigations, sexual assault cases, and the reliability of evidence provided to courts.

The Options Paper: When management decided not to look for DNA

To appreciate how extraordinary this scandal was, we first need to understand a very simple scientific principle: Not finding DNA is not the same as not looking for DNA.

DNA testing is a multistage process. Biological material is collected, DNA is extracted, the amount present may be estimated through quantification, and the material may then undergo further processing to develop a DNA profile.

Having a small quantity of DNA does not automatically mean that obtaining an interpretable profile is impossible.

In October 2016, an Options Paper was developed concerning changes to the laboratory's DNA profiling procedures. By early 2018, a related set of decisions concerning testing thresholds and the removal of DNA concentration steps had resulted in a deeply troubling change to the processing of crime-scene evidence. Samples containing low quantities of DNA could be classified as DNA Insufficient for Further Processing (DIFP).

In practical terms, the laboratory could decide not to proceed with further DNA profiling, even where additional processing might have produced a useful result.

The approach was extended to Priority 1 and Priority 2 samples, including evidence from urgent and major-crime investigations. Think about that for a moment.

I will be explicit here because a lot of people gloss over this. A child who is raped (anally, vaginally etc.) is effectively retraumatised when the forensic medical examination (rape kit) is conducted on them.

They have to be incredibly brave to undergo that examination. The detectives, the forensic medical examiner, the parents or guardians: everyone involved believes that collecting this evidence is the right thing to do. That it might help identify the offender. That it might bring the child some measure of justice.

But imagine if they were told:

“Oh, by the way, the lazy pricks in the laboratory might not even bother to process this evidence any further because there's only a small quantity of DNA.”

Would they still have put that child through such a distressing examination, knowing that potentially valuable evidence might never receive the analysis it deserved?

And before anyone dismisses this as some outrageous hypothetical, hundreds of semen samples from sexual offence investigations were not subjected to DNA profiling.

During the Sofronoff Inquiry, the Commissioner estimated that approximately 400 samples had been affected by a laboratory workflow that was subsequently changed. Not all 400 samples would necessarily have come from offences against children. We do not know how many did.

But even the possibility that evidence collected from a sexually assaulted child was left without potentially useful DNA analysis should horrify anyone who takes forensic science seriously. One preventable failure affecting a child's opportunity for justice would be one too many.

Sofronoff described how Allen, Howes, and Brisotto developed the Options Paper approach, enabling the changes to proceed without securing the scientific agreement that the normal procedures required. Let that sink in.

The laboratory had safeguards intended to prevent scientifically questionable changes from being introduced without adequate agreement. Senior managers encountered scientific resistance. Rather than obtaining the required consensus, they found another way to pursue the changes.

What is the fucking point of having scientific safeguards if laboratory management can circumvent them when the scientists disagree?! This is justice denied for murder victims, raped kids, and other victims of crime.

A forensic laboratory is not supposed to operate like a corporate sales department, where managers can simply override inconvenient technical objections to improve productivity. The purpose of scientific governance is to ensure that decisions are supported by evidence, validation, technical scrutiny and documented reasoning. If scientists disagree about the reliability of a proposed method, that disagreement should trigger additional investigation.

It should not be treated as an obstacle to be managed. Yet that is the governance failure described in Sofronoff's inquiry.

The extraordinary problem with ‘DNA Insufficient for Further Processing’

Perhaps the most alarming feature of the scandal was not simply that samples were being excluded from further profiling. It was how those results were communicated.

The laboratory used reporting language which could convey that samples contained insufficient DNA for further processing. But the fundamental problem was that additional testing could, in some circumstances, produce useful profiles.

The inquiry found that the wording used in formal witness statements was untrue. This is an extraordinary finding. Forensic witness statements are not casual laboratory notes. They are documents relied upon by police, prosecutors, defence lawyers and courts.

They can influence decisions about whether to prosecute, whether additional evidence should be sought, how a case should be presented and how the scientific evidence should be understood.

A forensic scientist's words carry authority because the criminal justice system assumes they accurately describe the science. Hell, I’m in the private sector and in some cases I’ve aided lawyers in convincing police to drop charges because the science wasn’t on their side.

Alicia Quartermain: A scientist who actually wanted to do the science

One of the particularly infuriating aspects of this scandal is that competent scientists within the laboratory were raising concerns. Alicia Quartermain was among them.

Ms Quartermain had demonstrated that further processing of some samples originally classified as insufficient could produce usable DNA profiles. That should have attracted immediate scientific attention. If samples previously abandoned by the laboratory could yield interpretable profiles, the obvious response was to investigate the implications and determine whether the existing testing thresholds were scientifically justified.

Instead, her concerns were left inadequately addressed. On 7 March 2019, Ms Quartermain sent an email raising concerns about the DIFP reporting language.

Howes was copied into that correspondence. On 29 April 2021, Quartermain again wrote to Howes expressing concern that reporting the samples as DIFP was technically incorrect. Howes forwarded her email to Brisotto.

And what happened? Nothing

This was a forensic laboratory handling evidence from serious crimes, not an office arguing about who was responsible for ordering printer paper.

How is that an acceptable standard of scientific management? It isn't.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (the part of the government that actually prosecutes serious crimes) surveyed 195 Crown Prosecutors concerning their understanding of DIFP results.

Only four (2%) understood that samples reported in this way could undergo further testing at the laboratory. In other words, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed did not properly understand the limitations of the laboratory's reporting terminology.

The laboratory had allowed scientifically misleading wording to persist for years. The people receiving those statements often did not understand that further analysis might produce useful results.

Imagine being a murder investigator or prosecutor and being led to believe that potentially crucial DNA evidence could not be taken any further, when additional testing might actually identify a suspect.

Shandee Blackburn: The case that helped expose the laboratory

I’ve now spent too much time focusing on the dropkicks, and not enough focusing on their victims like Ms Quartermain – or, more appropriately, the hundreds of actual victims of crime those dropkicks failed. Perhaps no case better illustrates the human consequences of Queensland's forensic DNA scandal than the murder of Shandee Blackburn.

On 9 February 2013, Shandee, with her life barely started aged just 23, was stabbed to death while walking home from work in Mackay. Her former boyfriend, John Peros, was subsequently charged with her murder.

The prosecution alleged that Mr Peros had killed her, but the forensic investigation failed to produce DNA evidence that investigators had expected might be present. Samples from his vehicle did not identify Blackburn's DNA. Samples from Blackburn's body did not identify Peros's DNA.

Even blood at the crime scene failed to produce expected DNA findings. Peros was acquitted at trial in 2017. In 2020, a coroner found facts raising a strong inference that Peros had killed Blackburn. I should point out, he has been acquitted. He can never be charged again for that crime.

The failure of the forensic evidence became a central issue in renewed scrutiny of the case. Dr Kirsty Wright examined aspects of the laboratory's work and identified serious concerns. Journalist Hedley Thomas and his colleagues pursued those concerns publicly.

Their work, together with the persistence of police and scientists inside the laboratory, helped expose the broader problems. Sofronoff himself recognised their contributions in the foreword to his report.

The lesson from Shandee Blackburn's case is not that DNA testing would necessarily have secured a murder conviction.

No responsible scientist could guarantee that.

The lesson is that unreliable forensic practices can deprive investigators and courts of evidence that should have been properly examined.

And once a serious criminal prosecution has concluded, those failures may be impossible to remedy.

The scientists who refused to stay silent

There are far too many victims to name, this article is already the longest I’ve ever written and will become a book if I broke down every murder and rape that people got away with thanks to Queensland Health. So instead, I will pay respect to the whistleblowers who were subjected to potential for stress, bullying, risk of termination, and/or other workplace penalties.

They included Kylie Rika, Emma Caunt, Ingrid Moeller, Angelina Keller, Amanda Reeves, Alicia Quartermain, and Rhys Parry.

These scientists demonstrated something that the laboratory's management had apparently forgotten: Scientific integrity does not mean agreeing with your boss. It means being prepared to question methods, challenge assumptions, identify errors, and insist that results are accurately reported. Sometimes that requires disagreeing with people who hold considerably more institutional authority than you do.

The existence of these scientists, who are a credit to forensic scientists everywhere, is also why it would be wrong to condemn every employee who worked at the laboratory. The scandal was not simply that the laboratory contained serious scientific problems. It was that people within the laboratory identified those problems, raised legitimate concerns, and were not adequately heard.

Conclusion

The comparison with Annie Dookhan is instructive. Dookhan fabricated forensic results, helping imprison innocent people and ultimately destroying the legal sustainability of thousands of drug cases.

Queensland's forensic DNA failures exposed the opposite danger. By failing to properly process potentially valuable evidence, applying scientifically disputed thresholds, and using misleading reporting language, a laboratory can deprive investigators of information that might identify serious offenders.

In one scandal, fabricated positive results corrupted prosecutions.

In the other, inadequate testing and reporting could conceal the significance of evidence that was actually present.

Different failures. Different consequences. But the same underlying betrayal of forensic science.

The purpose of a forensic scientist is not to help the prosecution, protect laboratory management, or make performance statistics look good.

It is to establish what the evidence demonstrates, using scientifically defensible methods, and to communicate the results accurately. Anything less undermines the administration of justice.

And when the evidence concerns murder or sexual assault, the price of that failure may be paid by victims and their families for the rest of their lives.

References

¹E. Quijano, ‘Massachusetts lab tech arrested for alleged improper handling of drug tests’, CBS News, 28 September 2012, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/massachusetts-lab-tech-arrested-for-alleged-improper-handling-of-drug-tests/, (accessed 11 October 2026).

²Johnson v Han, Civil Action No 14-cv-13274-IT (D Mass, Talwani J, 17 July 2015).

³Johnson v Han, Civil Action No 14-cv-13274-IT (D Mass, Talwani J, 16 June 2017) (‘Default Judgment’).

⁴‘Statement of the Case — Dookhan’ (Legal Document, 20 December 2012) https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/563115/statement-of-the-case-dookhan.pdf.

⁵Walter Sofronoff KC, Commission of Inquiry into Forensic DNA Testing in Queensland: Final Report (Final Report, 13 December 2022).