investigation
Blak deaths in custody: Senseless deaths, a royal commission and time for Indigenous justice

Sitting on the lounge in her mother’s Geraldton home, Della Roe looks tired and run down. Curtains soften the sunlight streaming through the windows, highlighting her striking eyes. At times they seem blue like a perfect summer sky, at other times an olive green like the leaves of an eucalyptus. But there is no hiding their overwhelming sadness. At this moment, lost in her painful memories, Della Roe is a woman who appears to be a shell of her former self. Behind her propped up against the wall are three huge placards, each with a different photo of a beautiful young woman. It is her daughter, known for cultural reasons as Ms Dhu who nearly seven years ago died in South Hedland after she was arrested by police on a warrant for unpaid fines. Ms Roe starts to cry. “Why would they celebrate the royal commission?” she says. “Nothing is gonna bring them back, nothing is gonna bring back John Pat or my daughter.” After her arrest Ms Dhu had been taken to the Hedland Health Campus, just 1km away from the police station, on two occasions and given back to the police after hospital staff found nothing wrong with her. On the third occasion, she was pronounced dead. The cause was later determined as septicaemia and pneumonia from a broken rib. Tragically, she is one of the 474 Aboriginal people to have died in the justice system since the landmark inquiry that was supposed to put a full stop on a dark chapter of Australian history. It is now 30 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was handed to the Federal Government. The report made 339 recommendations to address the underlying issues as to why Indigenous Australians were interacting with the justice system at a higher rate than their non-Indigenous peers and to prevent further unnecessary deaths. The hopes of turning around the horrible statistics of the 1980s and 1990s — tied to the implementation of those recommendations — are fading. To Ms Roe, as well as many in the wider Indigenous community, it just seems like another broken promise. “Our lives have been torn apart ... we’re still sitting on the edge waiting for justice, people are still dying in those jails, what’s happening,” she says through tears. THE DEATH THAT SPARKED IT ALL The weather in Roebourne — a small Pilbara town in the State’s North — slowly gets hotter in September as the region edges closer to summer. On September 28, 1983, the thermometers in Roebourne maxed out at 37C. A day that made locals sweat under their collar and thirst for a nice cold beer. Unfortunately the local drinking spot — the Victoria Hotel — had a notorious reputation for fights and arrests. That night, while some people slept a fight broke out at the pub and the next morning news spread that a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy was found dead at the police station. His name was John Pat. WATCH OUR ORIGINAL FIVE PART SERIES BLAK DEATHS IN CUSTODY: Many locals thought the well-respected young man had the making of a future leader of the community. “I saw him as a person who was very gentle, very respecting,” his Aunty Pansy Sambo told The Sunday Times. “He was very strong. He respected his mates, I’d never seen him violent or growly with anyone.” The town was shocked and anger began to brew. Michelle Adams was just a teenager when her uncle John died but she still remembers the community reaction. “I remember that night, police from Karratha, police everywhere all across town, they (the locals) smashed the shops’ windows,” she said. “(It was) a very, very big reaction to what happened. But the people, they didn’t want to talk about it because it was very hurtful, it’s like they shut down.” The State Coroner determined John had died of severe head injuries. An autopsy revealed the full extent of his injuries. He had a fractured skull, haemorrhage and swelling, two broken ribs and a torn aorta, the major blood vessel leading from the heart, as well as bruises on the back of his head. There are various accounts of what happened to the teenager. Over 50 witnesses testified at the coronial inquest into his death. The only elements of the story that stayed the same were that a group of Aboriginals had got into a physical fight with five off-duty police officers. The fallout from the teenager’s death boiled over after the trial of the officers in the Supreme Court. In 1984 — less than a year after Mr Pat’s death — an all-white jury delivered a unanimous not guilty verdict. The community was shocked. “I think generally that’s what people would logically believe that, if, if you kill somebody, then you have to go to jail, or you have to spend some time in prison because it’s, it’s not a standard that we accept in society,” Mr Pat’s niece Michelle said. Mr Pat’s family demanded justice. They toured the nation alongside other Blak deaths in custody victims such as Charlie Michaels, Dixon Greene, and Robert Walker. “I think it would have been a shock to the court system that someone was going to stand up ... I think it shocked them to see Aboriginal people would not take this lying down,” Ms Sambo said. The tour was organised by Defend Black Rights, who were calling for a royal commission into several Aboriginal deaths. Protests and rallies were held across the country to put pressure on the Commonwealth government to investigate the deaths. One of those protesters who called for the royal commission included then-teenager, now-human rights lawyer Hannah McGlade who is an executive officer with the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service. “We were seeing one death a week across Australia of primarily young Aboriginal men at that time,” Ms McGlade told The Sunday Times. “We just believed that a royal commission would shine a light on the killing of Aboriginal people in prisons and in police cells and we had high hopes that change would really comeabout,” she said. In August 1987, prime minister Bob Hawke announced the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Initially one commissioner was appointed with the expectation that it would take only a matter of months. But soon when the scale of the issue became apparent, two more commissioners were appointed including now-Labor politician Pat Dodson. Over the next three years, the commissioners examined 99 deaths across the nation. Mr Dodson, a Yawuru man from the Kimberley, was the only Aboriginal commissioner. He told The Sunday Times there was a lot of expectation on him from the community. “There was a lot of anger in the Aboriginal community as to why people were dying in custody and particularly police custody ... people believe rightly or wrongly that there was foul play afoot.” Every jurisdiction — except the ACT — had a Blak death in custody examined in the royal commission, with the most in WA (32). On April 15, 1991, the final report from the royal commission was handed to the government. Federal Indigenous affairs minister Robert Tickner tabled it in Parliament four weeks later. The most significant finding was that Aboriginal people were no more likely than non-Aboriginal people to die in custody but were considered more likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Mr Tickner told The Sunday Times the recommendations were supported by all levels of government. “No one thought they were unrealistic ... the evidence of that is they achieved strong cross-party support from every government in Australia, and from both sides of politics,” he said. “No one thought they were unrealistic, that was not being said by anybody.” RECOMMENDATIONS REMAIN UNIMPLEMENTED Incredibly, almost 30 years later, many of the recommendations are still yet to be implemented. Mr Tickner said it was an “enormous disappointment”. “It’s not good enough to just have a verbal commitment to a concept, you’ve actually got to drive the change from the leadership of the government to make these things happen.” Mr Dodson was originally “optimistic” about implementation. But he is scathing now. “Nothing of that (report) is asking more than what we should be doing for any citizen in this nation. And the fact that, because we’re Aboriginal people and (recommendations) have been neglected shows that there’s not the leadership at the Federal government level, not the interest nor is there any passion or anxiety or concern to get things moving,” he said. “It sends a very negative message that we don’t count and that the causes for our concerns don’t account, which is a wrong conclusion.” Of the recommendations remaining most are related to self-determination for First Nations people. This week, several experts called for action. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar AO said Australia must stop the “mass incarceration” of its Indigenous people. “We have long held the solutions and countless inquiires and reports have given us the way forward,” Commissioner Oscar said. “But time and again we fail to effectively implement them, and as a result, we continue to see First Nations men, women and children dying in our so-called justice system. “The answers are known, and Indigenous people stand ready to work in partnership with governments to prevent this crisis in our communities.” PREVENTABLE DEATHS Ending automatic police arrests for unpaid fines was one measure the royal commission recommended because it led to high numbers of Indigenous people being imprisoned. Mr Dodson said Aboriginal people were even getting arrested at funerals for this offence. “It was clearly a cause for the over-representation of Aboriginal people in custody,” he said. “It makes me angry that people who are poor, who are powerless, who are sick, who are at the mercy of someone with authority can be treated as a lesser human being.” But reform was a long time coming and proved too late to save victims such as Ms Dhu. It took a change in government for Western Australia to change the law. In 2017, Mark McGowan’s Labor party won the election and one of the commitments was to reform fine default laws. Attorney-General John Quigley, who represented the police officers in Mr Pat’s death, told The Sunday Times he knew the State needed to change. “As a barrister, I accepted the brief for the Police Union on many occasions but that was a job. I think, politics or whether it is a vocation, where you are given the opportunity, not only to represent people but to try and improve the circumstances under which we will live,” he said. “I saw some of the tragic circumstances that First Nations people endured and that certainly had a huge effect on me.” Mr Quigley said WA was a “backwards State” when it came to repealing the fine default laws. He called it a “dumb business model” which was costing taxpayers more money imprisoning someone than what they were collecting in unpaid fines. In September 2019 he introduced the fine default laws in honour of Ms Dhu, a young woman that he admits should not have been jailed. “It is sad that it took us so long to get to that position. You’ve got to have a will, you’ve got to have the determination and you’ve got to have a determination to reform,” he said. “I can’t sort of give a medical outcome there but I think she’d be given every chance to be alive [and] she wouldn't have ended up in jail under our new laws.” But for those grieving Aboriginal families who have lost loved ones since the royal commission there is little comfort. The new laws won’t bring them back, and the void their deaths have left will remain. “It’s not fair on my family or the rest of the families who go through this shit. There were people way before me that this happened to,” Ms Dhu’s mother said. “No one has gotten any answers. It’s the same for waiting for this royal commission, they should stand up to the plate and start doing what they have to do and start giving us our justice.”

investigationBlak deaths in custody: Senseless deaths, a royal commission and time for Indigenous justice

investigation
Blak deaths in custody: Senseless deaths, a royal commission and time for Indigenous justice