Blinded by science.

While sentencing 21-year-old Farah Jama (left) to 6 years in prison for the rape of a 48-year-old woman, Judge Paul Lacava said the attack was offensive, repugnant and intolerable in this society.

"You raped her when she was in a most vulnerable state," he said at the trial's conclusion in July 2008. "You obviously saw her and sized up the situation. Instead of assisting her ... you raped her for your own immediately and short-lived sexual gratification." The judge went on to say he was guarded about Mr Jama's chances of rehabilitation despite his youth because he had shown no remorse.

Farah Jama showed no remorse because he was innocent.

As he and his family testified in court, the young man was praying at his dying father's bedside on the night the woman claimed to have been raped in a locked toilet cubicle at an over-28s nightclub.

Yesterday, 'bad science' was the topic du jour as Mr Jama and a variety of legal types assembled to comment on the release of a report that:

... slammed Victoria Police, the Office of Public Prosecutions, and forensic medical officers over the case and the authorities' failure to consider any other evidence connecting Mr Jama to a crime that not only he was innocent of, but one that never occurred.

The report, written by a former Supreme Court judge named Frank Vincent, tore everyone in the state of Victoria involved in the collection and analysis of DNA evidence a new asshole.

Mr Jama had his conviction overturned last December. The prosecutor admitted the DNA evidence -- the only thing linking Mr Jama to the crime -- was contaminated, resulting in a 'substantial miscarriage of justice'.

Vincent's report stated:

The DNA evidence appears to have been viewed as possessing an almost mystical infallibility. The outcome was, in the circumstances, patently absurd.

Victoria's Attorney-General Rob Hulls had this to say yesterday:

I'm very sorry. This case is a wake-up call for everyone involved in the criminal justice system not to be blinded by science and the so-called CSI effect.

The 'so-called CSI effect'.

Is that all?

Could there be something different about Mr Jama, who moved to Australia from Somalia as a child, that caused Judge Lacava and the jury to blithely accept scientific 'proof' without any other evidence to wrongly convict him of a crime that never took place?

What is it about Mr Jama that caused Judge Lacava and the jury to overlook corroborating testimony given by members of his family?

What is it about Mr Jama that Judge Lacava and the jury could SEE with their own eyes that convinced them he was so improbably guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

I wonder ....