What made the DNA evidence so incriminating? A medical examination of the woman at a hospital sexual assault centre appeared to have identified semen traces on a cervical swab, and laboratory analysis of the semen revealed a match between its DNA profile and a sample of Jama’s DNA already held on the police database. The scenario presented in the prosecution case almost wrote itself: Jama was supposed to have drugged the woman, dragged her into the toilet cubicle, assaulted her, and then made his escape by clambering over the top of the cubicle, leaving his victim slumped behind a locked door. What else could explain the match of the two DNA samples?

Using a tainted microscope slide in collecting the semen sample could, though Jama had already begun serving his six-year sentence before this occurred to anyone. His solicitor, Kimani Boden, obtained a re-testing of the sample that did not confirm the match, and launched an appeal against the conviction. The crown prosecutor appointed to contest the appeal, Brett Sonnett, agreed that the case against Jama was unsustainable and applied for an acquittal. This was granted in December 2009, by which time Jama, then aged twenty-two, had already spent a year and a half in prison.

So much for the CSI effect. The Jama case led to an official inquiry into the dubious prosecution, and ultimately to a reassessment in all Australian jurisdictions of the reliability of DNA evidence and to more rigorous procedures for avoiding the contamination of samples. All of this Szego recounts with the liveliness of, well, an episode of CSI. But the legal injustice done to Jama is only half her story. Underlying that tale is another, more complex narrative of the discontents of race, gender, religion, and class in twenty-first century Australia, and, unlike the judicial and forensic story, those discontents find no satisfactory resolution.

Jama’s DNA was on the Victoria Police database because the supposed rape at the nightclub was not the first time he had been accused of sexual assault. Earlier in the same week, Jama and two other Somali youths had met a young white woman in a pool hall. She later performed oral sex on each of them in a parked car, an experience that distressed her. She complained to police but withdrew the complaint when the police advised her that there was no prospect of obtaining a conviction. In police interviews, the men had all insisted that the sex was consensual, and there was enough ambivalence in what the woman admitted having said to them in the car for a jury to accept the men’s account.

The car park encounter led to the subsequent charging of Jama for the rape at the nightclub that probably never happened, and which he couldn’t have committed even if it did, because he wasn’t there. The young woman from the pool hall, like the woman found in the toilet cubicle, received a routine examination at a hospital sexual assault centre. It was the same centre, and semen identified in a clipping taken from the young woman’s matted hair is believed to have come into contact with a slide subsequently used for the cervical swab taken from the woman found in the toilet cubicle. Thus began the process that led to the tainted trial.

Jama himself seems to have had a curiously Clintonesque interpretation of the events in the car park. When police interviewed him later about the woman found in the toilet cubicle, he told them that not only had he never engaged in any kind of predatory sexual behaviour but that he was, indeed, a virgin. Fellatio, apparently, didn’t count as ‘real’ sex. Szego does not suggest that there was anything disingenuous in his comments; on the contrary, she asks whether they indicate not merely naïveté about sexual practices but a cultural incomprehension of the attitudes to sexuality and gender roles that a young woman such as the one he and his friends met at the pool hall might have.

Szego asks many similar questions in the course of telling Jama’s story, but this interrogative rhetorical style does not always conceal her own views. When she comes up against what she considers to be cant or hypocrisy, whether from Anglo or Somali participants in the saga, the reader is in little doubt about what she thinks. That is no defect in a book such as this, but it is not surprising that not everyone she sought to interview was happy to speak to her. Jama declined to cooperate, accusing her of seeking to use his suffering to enhance her career. That his experience of the legal system has made him bitter and resentful is understandable. Nonetheless, Szego has done him justice in a way that the system never could, as one day, perhaps, he may come to understand.