Equality of Arms?  Depends on who gets the contract.

A strange twist has occurred in the scandalous failure of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) to provide copies of laboratory case files as is the practice in every other civilised adversarial jurisdictions (see more).  Despite SPA’s exaggerated claims of world-leading DNA technology it now appears that, whatever resources they have, it isn’t enough. 

We were alerted to the fact that the SPA were outsourcing DNA casework to commercial suppliers in England when we received the ‘branded’ statements from the scientists involved.  But here’s the twist; for these cases we were provided with the English commercial laboratory casefiles as requested, disclosure deprived to us when the work is done in the publicly owned SPA laboratory! 

So, if you are a defendant in Scotland, you should hope that your DNA is dealt with by commercial labs in England to be sure that your defence has the proper look at the evidence against you.  Of course, that doesn’t negate the need to pay for that disclosure no matter which ‘prosecution’ lab does the work.  But that’s a different scandal.  

Furthermore, usually, contamination is the main concern within a DNA laboratory.  Unfortunately, one of these commercial labs outsourced by the SPA has encountered a modern problem – hacking

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