Lawyer blames intervention for rash of Territory murders
Paul Toohey; 5/9/08
The principal lawyer for the Northern Territory’s peak Aboriginal legal aid service says his organisation is dealing with an unprecedented number of murder cases, which he links to failures of the federal intervention. Glen Dooley said the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency had eight clients facing murder charges after a run of killings that started in April. “We can say that in the 15 months of the intervention that we’ve now got unprecedented levels of killing,” Mr Dooley said. “This shocks me. We’d normally pick up six killings a year. At this rate, we’ll pick up 20.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24295330-5013404,00.html; See below
WA jailing too many Aborigines, says sociologist
Victoria Laurie; 5/9/08
About one in 10 Aboriginal men is in prison in Western Australia, and that figure could rise to one in five within five years. Dr Dot Goulding, a sociologist from Murdoch University’s Restorative Justice Research Unit, said incarceration of Aboriginal people was headed for “shameful levels” in a wealthy state. “It’s got worse, not better,” she said. “Ten to 15 years ago, around 35 per cent of the adult prison population was Aboriginal, but now it’s consistently up around 41-44 per cent.”
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24295284-5013172,00.html; See Below
Quest for defence in Northern Territory
Paul Toohey; 5/9/08;
Glen Dooley started handling serious cases as a young Aboriginal legal aid lawyer in Alice Springs in the early 1990s. “Back then,” he says, “you could go to the Supreme Court, and if a person had no priors, you could ask for a fully suspended sentence for manslaughter and you’d be in the ballpark. “Things have changed. Since the late 90s the sentences have got tougher and tougher. Aboriginal blokes ran out of luck in the Northern Territory Supreme Court 10 years ago.”
The Australian; No Internet Text
Dooley, now principal lawyer at the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency, which services Top End Aborigines, summoned The Australian to his crowded and not very plush Darwin offices to challenge several assertions in an article I wrote for last weekend’s Inquirer section (”Killers should no longer expect leniency
in the NT”). It related to Ronald Djana, an Aboriginal fringe dweller from Alice Springs, who was sentenced in the Territory Supreme Court last week to a 27-year non-parole period for murdering his wife in a drawn-out drunken rage in a town camp. Djana had five priors for brutalising his wife and had said he intended to kill her.
It was stated that the case, and the hard-core sentence, sent out a general alert to Aborigines that the days of the cruisy five-year manslaughter sentence were over.
It also told how Alice Springs crown prosecutor Dr Nanette
Rogers, famous for her statements to ABC TV’s Lateline on Aboriginal violence, had more recently been refusing to cut manslaughter deals for Aboriginal men in cases where intent to murder could be shown. It was stated (by me) that Rogers had changed a culture among Territory crown prosecutors who, worried about the bad
conditions in which Aborigines lived, saw themselves as social interventionists by preferring to pursue manslaughter charges rather than murder charges; and that Aboriginal legal aid lawyers liked to sneer at Rogers as a crusader against Aboriginal killers.
Dooley is somewhat irate about these ,contentions. He says the historic high levels of manslaughter charges for Aborigines could be explained by a different type of killing that is a feature of the Territory — the slow pummelling kind, quite unlike typical white killings, where someone might be gunned down with unambiguous intent to kill.
Before going to Dooley’s arguments, he has this to say about Rogers: “We don’t sneer at her. My version of a shithouse lawyer is some bloke or woman who rolls up here and thinks they’re going to change the world. They’re not doing their clients any favours.
“I hire defence lawyers who do their job. That includes not worrying about the prosecutor. The bottom line is Nan’s good at her job and she’s respected. We don’t like her much, but only on a professional basis.”
Dooley doubts that Djana’s sentence will alert Aboriginal men to the fact that long jail terms now await those who kill their women. “The idea is to send a message to Aboriginal men, but it’s a completely bankrupt concept — particularly in the Northern Territory, where you’ve got one in 23 Aboriginal blokes behind bars at any given moment.
“Jail does not offer meaningful deterrence. They’ve been so overimprisoned for so long that it is not perceived as a real penalty or punishment. If someone was sober enough to take on board that he could go away for 27 years for killing his missus, righto. But when it comes to the completely misguided passion and tragedy of this violence, people don’t call to mind sentences like this.”
Dooley claims he’s only met “one true sadist” among all the Aboriginal clients he’s represented in 19 years in the Territory. “So many of these killings are the result of low-grade violence. Every so often the single stab wound or the single hit with the stick just tips the victim over the edge. The wrong artery is cut or the slight bit of brain damage kills the person. Don’t get me wrong.
There’s a shockingly unacceptable level of violence, but what you don’t get is a lot of killing where it’s clear the person has gone out to kill. And where you’ve got 47kg women with very high alcohol levels it affects the ability to deal with bleeding. They are generally in poor condition and malnourished, so there’s not a lot of resilience there.
“The tragedy of the Territory is this shocking level of low-level and mid-grade violence which eventually snares its victims over time.”
Dooley, who has also worked as a Crown prosecutor in the Territory, argues that there has never been any conspiracy to give Aboriginal killers an easy ride. He says prosecution cases often collapse because it cannot be shown which blow killed the victim.
“The deaths are hard to prove as murders,” he says. Pathologists’ reports on victims often feature “page after page of old injuries, shocking scarring which forms a sad record of someone’s life. Many times a single stab wound from a boning knife causes internal damage — it’s a lottery”.
“You have to draw some broad brush strokes here. When a white-fella wants to kill somebody, he’ll do it. The domesticity of the Aboriginal killings is heartbreaking. As we see, a lot of women want to go back to these guys.” And then they die. “It’s a tragedy,” says Dooley. “But I don’t think the police and Crown prosecutors sit back and just give us manslaughter.”
Dooley argues that Territory courts got tough on Aboriginal offenders before Djana. He cites the 1999 Court of Criminal Appeal case of Groote Eylandt man Inness Wurramara, who stabbed his wife through to the lung and attacked a man with a machete. His 15-month non-parole period was appealed and doubled.
The judges said at the time: “The type of violent offending to which the respondent pleaded guilty in this matter is all too familiar to those involved in the administration of justice in the Northern Territory. Often the violence is — as in this case — extreme in its nature, involving the use of offensive weapons. It frequently results in death or, as here, life-threatening injuries.
“Objectively viewed, the incidents are often extremely disturbing. For the victims they must be horrifying . . . Aboriginal women, children and the weak will be protected against personal violence insofar as it is within the power of the court to do so.”
Wurramara’s increased prison sentence was still not overly long, but, says Dooley, its effect has been telling. “In the mid-90s there were approximately 350-400 Aboriginal men behind bars in the Territory. Without any sizeable population jump, we’re now up to about 850-900. The rate of imprisonment for Aboriginal men has doubled in the last dozen years. Quite plainly that’s a result of much tougher sentencing from the Supreme Court, which has led the charge.”
With mandatory jail sentences for violent offences in the Territory, and plans to build a new and bigger jail, Dooley says “it will be filled quickly. And we’ll be down to about one in every 15 Aboriginal males behind bars”.
The Territory’s prison population is 80 per cent Aboriginal. If Aborigines were more likely to be pursued as murderers from now on, as The Australian has suggested, Dooley admits: “It’s dynamite for us. We don’t have the resources to deal with that.” The Territory’s director of public prosecutions, Richard Coates, also took issue with the Inquirer story. In written comments, he said it was he or his deputy who decided what charges to proceed with in homicide cases. He said DPP policy required lawyers “to set aside personal feelings”.
Coates rejected claims that prosecutors acted as social interventionists by charging the most brutal Aboriginal killers with manslaughter rather than murder. “This office has extensive experience in conducting murder trials involving Aboriginal victims and accused where juries have declined to convict the accused of murder,” he says.
“The Crown has in the past accepted pleas of guilty to manslaughter or the charge of dangerous act (that was repealed on December 20, 2006). Both charges are obviously less difficult to prove.
“The reasons for the Crown accepting pleas to these charges are various, but it should be noted that particularly in the case of homicides committed upon Aboriginal people — which comprise the majority of cases in the NT — it is often the case that many of the witnesses are affected by alcohol at the time of the incident.
“Many may not be desirous of assisting the police. Both factors may affect significantly the reliability of their evidence and in particular whether the Crown can prove that the accused intended to kill or seriously injure the deceased.
“Where there are reasonable prospects of securing a conviction for murder, that will be the charge, and it will then be a matter for a jury to determine whether the evidence is sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Domestic Violence, Murder