The statements will be tracked down and corrected by taskforces across the police,health and justice departments. They will then retest every related sample,expected to be in the thousands,and assess the impact on any criminal cases.

But the larger,still unanswered question,is how and why this occurred,and who — if anyone — is responsible. While Sofronoff steered clear in this report,two senior staff members at the labhave been stood down by the department,pending the outcome of a final document due in December.

The questions will likely be unpicked in public hearings set to start next week,too. A submission from the Director of Public Prosecutions suggested the decision may have been made in the context of “workload pressures”.

Several reviews and reports stretching back to at least 2005 point to resourcing and funding issues in Queensland’s forensic space. The latest,from the Queensland Audit Office,found the lab hadstruggled to keep pace with the increased demand for DNA analysis in the five years to 2018.

About $1 million had been lost from the lab’s budget and four full-time equivalent staff had dropped from its roster,while the number of samples analysed jumped by 21 per cent and formal interagency bodies responsible for higher-level planning disappeared.

“This void has meant that unnecessary delays and inefficient practices impede the delivery of forensic services in Queensland,” the 2018 report noted.

Until Sofronoff makes his own findings,a small shift in wording will ripple throughout the state. While some have already told him police “knew” what was meant by the statements,Sofronoff was unsure they,or lawyers,judges and juries,did.

“It is also unlikely,and nobody suggested,that any victim of crime to whom a police officer reported such a result was given a conceptual scientific explication,” he said.

“The choice of language has been unfortunate. It has been in use for a long time. It should not be used any longer.”

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