It would be more meaningful and helpful if you could replicate this leak detection with the actual 3.32.0 release code, published 2020-05-22. Also, I took a look at line 15871 of the prerelease shell.c version nearest to the 2020-04-06 date of the code you apparently used, and could see that the memory allocated by the call to sqlite3\_mprintf() is in fact reliably freed later in the same sequence of statements, without the possibility of branches avoiding the free. For that reason, it would be useful to know what input was being processed to produce the alleged leak.