DNA and The Justice Game

The interpretation of DNA evidence used in Queensland criminal trials became a matter of concern when Professor Michael Moore, the then Director of Queensland Health and Scientific Services, revealed to the media in May 2002 that the John Tonge Centre (JTC) had not received accreditation by the National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA) until 1999, two years after the Renton trial. However, even with that accreditation, the JTC continued to bungle DNA evidence used in other serious cases including the 1997 Arnott's biscuit extortion case and the Frank Button case in which Button was convicted of rape and served 10 months of a 7-year-sentence before independent DNA testing proved he was not the rapist.

Renton’s conviction for a bank robbery he claims he did not commit still rests on the disputed DNA evidence used at his trial. Boettcher’s scientific conclusions support Renton’s claims but as the legal processes have been exhausted he enters his seventh year of walking the yard inside the maximum-security block at Townsville prison. Renton’s case reinforces the jail yard philosophy that there’s no sympathy for an innocent man doing hard time inside the Queensland prison system. The only sympathy you will find in the Queensland incarceration process remains in the dictionary - nestled somewhere between shit and syphilis.

I left the Queensland prison system and was paroled back to NSW in October 2000. I continued my journalism studies but the Renton case and the interpretation of DNA evidence in criminal trials kept niggling at me, like an itch you can’t get at. An innocent man doing hard time, I could relate to that. They “fitted me up” for an armoured van robbery in 1991. I wasn’t good for it, but they kept me in prison until they arrested two other blokes and then told me: “Whoops, we made a mistake. Sorry about that,” before letting me out again.

That’s how the game was played in my day. If they didn’t get you for what you did then they put you in jail for what they thought you did. As a career criminal I had experienced the “fit-ups”, the “verbals”, the “pay-offs” and the jail time. It was all part of the game. Like playing cops and robbers when you’re a kid - someone has to be the goodie and somebody has to be the baddie. But when you’re a kid the game ends after your mother calls you in for dinner.

The game never ended for Marc Renton. They are still playing with his life in the game they call justice and the scientific interpretation of DNA in Queensland.