The Tall Man (23 page)

The deputy coroner found that at least one of Cameron’s cries for help as he lay dying must have been heard by Hurley, and that his response had been “callous and deficient”. Then she turned to the cause of Cameron’s death. Those present said her voice quavered.

Despite a steady demeanour in court, Senior Sergeant Hurley’s explanation does not persuade me he was truthful in his account of what happened. I reject Senior Sergeant Hurley’s account that he simply got up from the heavy fall through the doorway and went to assist the man who had just punched him and caused him to fall over. I find that he did respond with physical force against Mulrunji while Mulrunji was still on the floor

I am satisfied, on the basis of Roy Bramwell’s account of what he saw and heard, together with the immediately preceding sequence of events, that Senior Sergeant Hurley lost his temper and hit Mulrunji after falling to the floor.

I find that Senior Sergeant Hurley’s repeated clear statements that he fell to the left hand side of Mulrunji are in fact what occurred.

I find that Senior Sergeant Hurley hit Mulrunji whilst he was on the floor a number of times in a direct response to himself having been hit in the jaw and then falling to the floor.

It is open on Mr Bramwell’s evidence that the force was applied to Mulrunji’s body rather than his head. This is also consistent with the medical evidence of the injuries that caused Mulrunji’s death. It is also most likely that it was at this time that Mulrunji suffered the injury to his right eye.

After this occurred, I find, there was no further resistance or indeed any speech or response from Mulrunji. I conclude that these actions of Senior Sergeant Hurley caused the fatal injuries.

The police lawyers shook their heads. The Doomadgees all burst into tears. “About time they realise we’re people too,” Valmae told me on the phone the next day, her words ricocheting.

It was the first time in Australia’s history a police officer had ever been found responsible for a death in custody. The deputy coroner did not have the power to lay charges, but she had written to Queensland’s director of public prosecutions, Leanne Clare, recommending that her office consider charging the senior sergeant with manslaughter.

T
HE POLICE CLOSED
ranks immediately. Within hours, the president of the Queensland Police Union, Gary Wilkinson, had given a press conference in Brisbane. Tall, red-faced and heavy in the gut, he appeared on the evening news, an old-school cop full of righteous outrage. The deputy coroner, he said, had “conducted a witch-hunt from the start that’s been designed to pander to the residents of Palm Island, rather than establishing the facts. Clearly she approached this inquest as a foregone conclusion despite the mountain of evidence in support of Chris Hurley that she deliberately overlooked.”

An invitation subsequently appeared on the union’s website:

Send you [
sic
] support to Chris Hurley—click here All messages of support are appericated [
sic
] and will be passed onto Senior Sergeant Hurley.

[email protected]

The next day, September 28, the Queensland police commissioner announced that Chris Hurley would not be suspended or stood down. He would be taken off operational duties and given a desk job. The state premier, Peter Beattie, backed the decision and added, “I regard our police service as one of the best in the world.” He looked grave, harassed, nervous.

Beattie’s government had to maintain public confidence in the police, but in supporting Hurley, the premier and police officials appeared to be saying that Doomadgee’s unfortunate death was not unfortunate enough to ruin a young officer’s career. And in that moment it seemed a screen was pulled back on something very ugly. “We’re people too,”Valmae had told me and I’d been taken aback by her need to even say this, but now I wondered if she was right to point it out.

A little over a week later, Hurley put an end to the imbroglio by announcing that he’d decided “reluctantly” to stand down on full pay. Boe thought he did this on the advice of his lawyers, who wanted to keep their client off the front page.

They had no idea how many front pages Hurley was about to appear on. Two and a half months later, on December 14, Queensland’s director of public prosecutions, Leanne Clare, appeared at a press conference. Impeccably made up and wearing a white suit, she announced that she would not be pressing charges against Senior Sergeant Hurley. “Mr Doomadgee,” she said, “died from internal injuries caused by a crushing force to the front of his abdomen. The evidence suggests that in this case, this could only be the result of a complicated fall … Mr Doomadgee’s death was a terrible accident.”

Her decision caused outrage. Cape York Aboriginal leader and newspaper columnist Noel Pearson, well known for his impatience with Indigenous people who refused to take responsibility for the failings of their own communities, was especially blunt: “The last time the world was told equivalent nonsense about the death of a black man being an accident was when Steve Biko was bashed by the apartheid South African police and thrown out of a multi-storey building.”

Tony Koch did not buy Leanne Clare’s decision. He had never bought the story of the fall. The day after Clare’s announcement, his
Australian
opinion piece began:

The question giving most discomfort to the Queensland Government following the violent cell death of Mulrunji Doomadgee two years ago is a simple one. If the scuffle in the watch house had ended with the police officer lying on the floor with four ribs broken and his liver torn in half—and it was the Aboriginal man who got up and walked away—would two years of investigation have found that the Aboriginal man would not face any charges?

On December 19, five days after Hurley’s reprieve, the Melbourne
Age
ran a story on thirty-one-year-old Alyssa Norman, who ten days earlier had been sentenced to eighteen months’ jail for throwing a rock at a police officer during the Palm Island riot. The mother of four children, including one just eighteen months old, had pleaded guilty. Her original sentence, a twelve-month intensive corrective order to be served in the community, had been appealed by Queensland’s attorney general as too lenient. She had no prior convictions, but in revising her sentence the state’s chief justice, Paul de Jersey, took into account the police officers’ victim impact statements, noting that their lives—and often, he claimed, “career paths”—had been “seriously disrupted”.

On December 20, Premier Peter Beattie took the unprecedented step of going to Palm Island to explain the director of public prosecution’s decision. The Doomadgee family refused to meet him. In newspaper photographs Beattie looked sour, beaten. The community faced him holding placards: palm island wants justice for mulrunji. state sanctioned murder. When I spoke to Peter Beattie a year later, on December 17, 2007, he recalled the trip. “I can’t say it was easy,” he told me. Days like these were the low points of political life, he said, especially for someone who prided himself on his efforts to engage with Indigenous issues. And Tony Koch’s articles, in particular, were preying on him.

Beattie could not instruct Clare, but he told me that he had hoped she would send her files to a director of public prosecutions in another state for review. He thought she’d made her decision in a “high-handed way without explaining it”. Beattie, who is married to the daughter of an Anglican missionary from Pormpuraaw, said to me: “The test of your government, the strength of a democracy is shown in how you treat the weakest citizens, the most fragile people. The police cannot be above the law.”

In Queensland the DPP shared the right to prosecute with the state attorney general, but attorneys general very rarely exercised it. On December 22, two days after Beattie’s visit to Palm Island, Attorney General Kerry Shine asked for Leanne Clare’s files, and next day he announced he would be seeking an independent review of the evidence.

Many senior lawyers believed such a review would undermine the DPP’s independent prosecutorial discretion, that it amounted to a disgraceful political intervention in the legal system, and that Beattie and Shine had set a dangerous precedent. For those who took this view, Chris Hurley had had a suspended sentence for two years, with infringements to his liberty, constraints in the way he worked, and intense public scrutiny. But Leanne Clare had a history of controversial decisions, and just as many lawyers felt that as Doomadgee’s death had primarily been investigated by the main suspect’s friends, Hurley’s civil liberties had to be balanced with the disregard shown for Doomadgee’s.

On New Year’s Day, the attorney general appointed former New South Wales chief justice Sir Laurence Street to review the evidence. Sir Laurence was a southerner. His famous mother, Jessie Street, had been a key campaigner for Aboriginal rights. A senior Brisbane barrister, Peter Davis SC, was recruited to assist Street. Davis was cerebral and careful, the barrister other lawyers consulted if they needed to check a point of law. Street and Davis went to Palm Island twice to look around and to interview the protagonists. The Palm Islanders called the two men “sir” and “Boss Man”.

Soon after their first visit, on January 15, Cameron’s cellmate, Patrick Nugent, hanged himself. Police, I was told, had taken Patrick from a scene of domestic violence and driven him a distance away to cool off. His body was found somewhere between that place and his home. Local people threw rocks at the police officers who cut him down. Street and Davis called on the Nugent family to pay their respects.

After studying the transcript of the inquest, the two lawyers took issue with the deputy coroner’s findings that Doomadgee had been fatally punched. Street and Davis thought it was more likely Hurley had kneed Doomadgee in the abdomen, a backroom police technique used to subdue difficult prisoners. They decided that neither Lloyd Bengaroo nor Roy Bramwell were reliable witnesses: no one knew what Bengaroo would say, and they believed the defence would destroy the drunken Bramwell. But even without their evidence, Street and Davis said, Hurley had a case to answer.

The case against him is circumstantial. In interviews between investigating police and Senior Sergeant Hurley in the days following the death Senior Sergeant Hurley denied falling upon Mulrunji and denied assaulting him. The interviews contain no explanation as to how Mulrunji while in the custody of Senior Sergeant Hurley was so seriously injured. A jury could well find that the only rational inference that can be drawn as to the fatal injury is that it was inflicted by Senior Sergeant Hurley deliberately kneeing Mulrunji in the upper right abdominal area immediately after the fall while Mulrunji was lying on the concrete floor.

On January 26, 2007, Australia Day, Attorney General Shine announced that he had taken advice from Street and Davis. “In light of Sir Laurence’s opinion, and having given careful consideration to the matter myself, I have decided it is in the public interest that this matter should be resolved in court. Furthermore, Sir Laurence believes there is a reasonable prospect of conviction.” Chris Hurley would be charged with assault and manslaughter—the first policeman in Australia ever to be charged over the death of a prisoner in custody. His trial would begin in mid-June, five months away. If convicted he could face ten years’ jail.

N
OW THAT THE
Crown was prosecuting, Andrew Boe’s role in proceedings finally ended. Neither he nor Peter Callaghan would have any official involvement with the trial. I had the sense that on some level Boe was relieved, not that he stopped agitating from the sidelines. He did not gladly suffer fools, or people who didn’t share his passionate convictions, but he had been unfailing in his generosity, clever, incisive, and never less than tenacious. He’d gone for the police’s throat and had not relaxed his grip. The case would never have gone to trial without him.

The day after Hurley was charged, Boe received this letter:

Dear Andrew
,

I have been a QPS [Queensland Police Service officer] for over 20 years. I have just read the findings of Sir Laurence Street and recognise this as a huge achievement for all the Aboriginal people.

Not all police are racists and liars—many are. I have witnessed this for myself first hand.

It is time the community, the government and the QPS executive saw for themselves that some QPS officers actually support and respect the Aboriginal people. The public need to know that not all police in the union support the hysterical claims of the executive.

Good luck—at least one police officer was on your side.

The Queensland Police Union had a new acting boss. Denis Fitzpatrick, the vice president until now, took over from the raging Gary Wilkinson, who had been charged with contempt for his criticism of the deputy coroner’s findings. Fitzpatrick brought much the same style to the job. After the Palm Island riot, he’d called for the rioters to be charged with attempted murder. Now he said, “If they don’t want the police there, get them out. Let tribal law take over, let them police their own communities.”

The union planned a march on Queensland’s Parliament House, and in early February began touring the state’s northern cities—Cairns, Rockhampton, Gladstone—holding rallies with the Queensland Police Service’s 9,200 officers. Fitzpatrick threatened a strike—a not-unprecedented action, but one with potential consequences that he had almost certainly not considered.

To his legal team of Glen Cranny and Steve Zillman, Hurley now added a big gun, Queen’s Counsel Robert Mulholland. In his early sixties, Mulholland was a senior criminal barrister who had made his name in the late 1980s prosecuting Queensland’s police commissioner, Sir Terence Lewis, on twenty-three counts of perjury, corruption and forgery. Peter Davis, co-author of the Street report, would act as Crown prosecutor at the trial. Although he would produce no eyewitness to manslaughter, he’d argue that the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the facts was that by his actions Hurley had deliberately caused the death of Cameron Doomadgee.