The Tall Man (30 page)

Tracy sat with her hunched and frail white-haired mother, Mary. In her late seventies, Mary wore thick woollen hiking socks and slip-on sandals, their soles worn right down. When she was a child, she and her family had been removed from the Atherton Tablelands, inland from Cairns, and sent to Palm Island, where Mary grew up in the dormitory.

Elizabeth, Valmae, Jane and Claudelle sat upstairs; Hurley’s brothers sat downstairs. Both families knew what it was to live in sick limbo. They had that much in common, but it was about to end.

Hurley’s mother sat with her shoulders slouched, as if conscious of being scrutinized. There were rings under her eyes, and her jaw had a sad, slackened cast. I’d noticed that she would glance down wincing as she heard in detail how her son, flesh of her flesh, had caused the death of a man the same age as himself, through accidental or deliberate force. She was said to believe completely in his innocence.

So did his older brother, Senior Sergeant Tony Hurley, who, five weeks after the trial, would publish an article in the
Police Union Journal
describing the media as “poison-penned, fork-tongued, cloven-hooved satyrs”, producing “caustic exhibitions” with their “lynch mob mentality”. It seemed he shared Hurley’s rage. “My elderly parents,” he wrote, “have only kept their sanity through prayer and the constant support of family, friends and well-wishers.”

Robert Mulholland began his summing up. “What impression did he have on you?” he asked the jury.

Hurley shifted in his seat, looking vexed.

“In our submission, you would not have the slightest hesitation in accepting Mr Hurley told you the truth. If you accept it, that’s the end of the case.” Taking off his glasses, Mulholland looked at the jury; then, replacing them, he leaned forward. The prosecution’s case, he told them, was “nonsense”, “superficial”, “unfair”, “ridiculous”, “desperate”, “absurd”; it assumed “a cynical view of police officers”, and was full of “tawdry or cheap shots at Mr Hurley and a determination to get him—
to get him
! Despite the evidence!” Mulholland’s glasses, now in his hand, moved up and down in the air like a gavel. He stood before the jury, incensed for Hurley.

Hands on hips, he spun an example of why one should never rush to judgment:

[T]he husband and wife on bad terms. Let us assume they go for a swim on a lonely beach together and imagine further that tragically one of them drowns. The one still living might be said to have had an opportunity to have caused the drowning … but that doesn’t, of course, mean to say that he or she did it.

Mulholland’s tone turned conversational as he pleaded with the jury to use their “common sense”. At the police station, Hurley helped women and children. He dealt with a bunch of “drunken, disorderly residents … who made a nuisance of themselves and wanted to carry on about the police presence and used some bad language and so on”. Mulholland reminded the jury that Cameron, on the other hand, had been drinking methylated spirits, that Patrick had been sniffing petrol—that all these people were drunk, swearing and out of control.

Leaning right over the lectern now, with the casual manner of a man at a bar complaining about what coppers have to tolerate, he said:

Members of the jury, isn’t he precisely, precisely the sort of police officer you’d like to have as your local copper?

When Senior Sergeant Hurley went out that morning … he was performing a service for all of us, no matter where we are and where we live in Queensland. Whether you’re out in the back blocks somewhere, whether you’re up in the Gulf or you’re out in far western Queensland or you’re down in the south, it doesn’t matter. When Senior Sergeant Hurley went out that morning to respond to the request, he did it on our behalf.

In a pro-military town, a town where the street market sells 000-size ammo-print baby clothes, it made sense to play up the nobility of Hurley’s service. Mulholland suggested that if this local copper hadn’t locked up Cameron, there might have been “some further act of violence to the one that we know Roy Bramwell had mounted earlier in that day”. Mulholland did not mention that the senior sergeant let Roy, having just bashed three women, back out into the community, nor that he did so after seeing their beaten faces at the hospital that morning, and with the knowledge that one of them was scared Roy would strike again.

An Aboriginal law student attending the trial with some Palm Island friends told me she had never been in a courtroom with a greater sense of “us” and “them”. Tracy and her mother had moved to the gallery. Downstairs, everyone was now white. Upstairs, everyone was black. The seats were filled with the aggrieved, with people looking for one of “them” to be convicted.

There was the family of Errol Wyles, a boy killed four years earlier when a white driver repeatedly reversed into him while he was riding a bicycle. The police did not tell his parents he was dead for two days. Their son’s killer was sentenced to fifteen months for dangerous driving.

There was Lex Wotton. Three months earlier, he had pleaded guilty to rioting and was sent to jail while awaiting trial. Then, having decided he’d made a mistake, he successfully withdrew his plea and was now out on bail. His trial was almost a year away. Seeing Hurley in the dock was what he had been fighting for.

A lot of Palm Island families with only minor involvement in the riot were still paying off debts from their legal troubles. Parents who’d been sent to jail were only just returning home, and their children were often still affected by the police raids two and a half years earlier. Lex himself seemed partly broken. When I’d spoken with him previously he was almost megalomaniacal about his calling. “I have visions of myself at the United Nations, talking, travelling all over the world, teaching my faith and giving people a sense of me …” Now one of his front teeth was missing: in his cell he’d pulled it out to stop the aching. Faced with the possibility of Hurley’s acquittal and his own potential jail time, he was subdued.

Also upstairs was David Bulsey, the father of Eric Doomadgee’s goddaughter with the irregular heartbeat. Staring down at the jurors, Bulsey worried that they were too old, that they’d start forgetting things. On Palm Island, sixty or seventy is close to geriatric. Next to him, his wife, Yvette, thought one younger juror with honey-streaked hair had Indigenous blood. Yvette could tell by her nose, but the juror wouldn’t look at them.

The lawyers spoke over the dull drumming of the rain. Through the windows I could see the union men walking back and forth on the concrete balcony. The room was cold. People were sniffing. Members of the jury occasionally shivered. Elizabeth and Jane Doomadgee were sharing an old ski parka. Valmae and Tracy had bought a jacket each from Best & Less for $11. Townsville was in a rain shadow; the skies here were stoic compared to the venting tropical storms in other parts of northern Queensland. Of course, in the wet season you expected rain, but this was the dry season. And in a town where you couldn’t even buy a coat, airplanes were grounded in the deluge. When we stopped for an afternoon break, rain still bucketed down and the old Aboriginal women in flimsy sandals stepped through the puddles.

The union men and Hurley’s supporters had claimed one of the court building’s balconies and stood smoking, staring down on the street. Edna Coolburra, who’d been chatting with Cameron the morning he died, asked if she could share my umbrella. I could feel the police watching intently as we crossed the wet road together:
She’s one of those
.

R
OBERT
M
ULHOLLAND
had two modes, theatrical and legalistic. Sometimes he talked with an arm of his glasses in his mouth, as if pushing back his words—but to no avail. He did not favour brevity. He began to read vast swathes of the trial transcript, recapping the last few days verbatim, and as he did his skin turned waxy. Only occasionally would he look up at the jury. Even Hurley was yawning. Mulholland had been speaking all day and gave no signs of concluding. An earnest young constable outside the courtroom said, “He’s probably promised his wife a holiday, and he’s budgeted so much and has to keep going.”

Conjuring a scene of whites doing it tough, Mulholland asked the jury to imagine two family members on their drought-stricken farm: “and this happens, as we know, would be happening today throughout Queensland”. Say one of them took a gun and committed suicide in front of the other, he went on. Say the survivor could not remember the position of the gun. “That person, that member of the family, would, according to the prosecution theory, be facing a charge of manslaughter! Got the demonstration wrong, because in the emotion and the dramatic circumstances, a recollection was faulty! What’s the difference?”

He spoke at length of Dr Lampe and his opinion that a fall caused Cameron’s death. “People involved in traumatic events,” Mulholland told the jury, “indeed quite often do not remember things accurately.” He described how hard it was to remember the events of a minor car accident. Or “incidents on the footy field where recollections differ”. Or a pub brawl, where all the eyewitnesses remember seeing different things. He went through cases of mistaken identity. He described the sensation of slipping in the bathroom: “a moment of panic, terror even!”

“Is it my imagination or is there an air of desperation?” asked the
Townsville Bulletin
journalist, massaging his temples.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, day six, Andrew Boe was sitting at the back of the courtroom in a navy suit and crisp white business shirt. He’d just flown in from the United States, where he was working on a case. He had no need to be in Townsville, but he couldn’t stay away. The Doomadgee sisters were delighted. “My little Chinese kickboxing brother,” Elizabeth called him.

I was relieved to see Boe too. I’d missed his courtroom energy and aggression. But I asked him whether, if he’d known how long the legal process would take, he would still have acted as he did on reading of Cameron’s death.

“Would I do it again? I don’t know the answer to that. It would be hard. To make sense of my life then I had to have a cause.” This cause had preoccupied and even sustained Boe for two and a half years, but it had also exhausted him and taken him away from his family. And it was his greatest fear that the person to gain the most from the Palm Island case would be himself—the inquest had extended him as a lawyer and as a human being, but he was unsure if anything had fundamentally changed on Palm Island. And his efforts might yet leave nothing changed for the Doomadgees.

In the courtroom, bets were being placed on how much longer Mulholland could go on. Then, at 12:10
P.M.
, after a day and a half of summing up, his face locked in sudden outrage. He hooked his thumbs around the top of his robes and pulled them close, as if bolstering himself.

The prosecution theory is absurd and offensive as well as unfair … the prosecution doesn’t have a case, never had a case against him. You would have to have eyes political to conclude that Senior Sergeant Hurley did what he is accused of.

The death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island on the 19th of November 2004 was and is a tragedy, as is any death in custody of a person black or white. The outstanding social, economic, and political issues of Palm Island and of other Aboriginal communities would make you weep. However, they are all complex issues and this trial is not concerned about whether those issues exist. It is concerned with the single question in each charge of whether the prosecution has proved beyond reasonable doubt the guilt of Senior Sergeant Hurley. And convicting a man who is not guilty of those offences of manslaughter and assault will not bring Mr Doomadgee back, nor will it do justice to his memory, indeed, quite the reverse. It will compound the tragedy of his death and will make for a double tragedy …

People who would discuss this case in racial terms have got the wrong attitude … Mr Hurley will never forget that he was the accidental instrument of another young man dying. That is a cross he will carry for the rest of his life, whatever happens here.

Now it was Peter Davis’s turn. His concern for fairness seemed to deprive him of any sense of theatre or showmanship. That was not his style. When he stood it took him a while to straighten out. He stayed slightly hunched, hands in his pockets, serious, wry, cerebral. He rocked on his feet. Behind him sat Hurley with his fists clenched. The court was awake.

Hurley accepted that his body had in some way killed Cameron Doomadgee, Davis said. There existed, therefore, two “factual possibilities”. One: “a complicated fall whereby the injury occurs”. Two: manslaughter. Davis reminded the jurors of the two pathologists’ evidence: Cameron’s body was immobilized on the floor while a force was applied to his abdomen that pushed the organs back and cleaved the liver around his spine. “In the history of recorded medical science an injury like this has never actually been caused and recorded by blunt trauma. But it happened in the police station on Palm Island.”

Davis spoke in clear, straight lines. He spoke in a white heat while keeping cool. He asked the jury to consider the defence’s theory:

This is it: that Mulrunji is in front of the accused when the two of them trip into the police station. Mulrunji is facing into the police station, it seems, and the accused is behind him … and this is the bit that really defies belief. In the trip Mulrunji pirouettes in midair … so as to land on his back or nearly on his back while the accused, from a position somewhere behind him … somehow falls over on top of him with such force as to take the contents of his abdomen and cleave them across his spine, thereby rupturing his portal vein and apparently creating medical history. And then four hours later when interviewed the accused person, Senior Sergeant Hurley, doesn’t even realize he’s fallen on him. And incidentally, not only does he not appreciate that he has fallen upon Mulrunji, but he gives a pretty detailed version of how he didn’t fall on Mulrunji at all.

Hurley’s girlfriend was escorted out of the courtroom by his brother the police officer. The defendant now sat completely still, hands clasped in his lap.