The Tall Man (31 page)

The jury, Davis noted, had been told repeatedly by Mulholland to use their “common sense”. Davis asked: “Can I offer one example?” He cited Hurley’s claim that he was not at all angered by Cameron Doomadgee’s behaviour. Cameron had hit him on the jaw, struggled with him, and made him trip hard through the doorway of his own police station.

Now common sense might tell you [that] as soon as he starts admitting of anger, well, we can then start thinking what might have happened from the back of the police van to the door. Once he starts admitting of anger, could he have given him the jab Penny Sibley saw? Once he admits of anger, well we can start thinking then that there’s a reason why he may have knee-dropped into Mulrunji when they’ve both fallen into the police station.

So common sense might tell you that there’s a little bit of a reason why in the context of this case, this accused may well want to play down the anger. But he doesn’t play it down, does he? He disallows it completely. He says, “I was not angry at all.”

Well, what does common sense tell you about that? Does common sense tell you, well, perhaps he did get a bit upset? Perhaps he did get a bit angry? And if he is angry why is he saying he’s not?

And of course while we’re on the topic of common sense, does it really strike you as according with your common sense, the notion that this accused could fall on Mulrunji with such force as to cleave his liver across his spine, and not remember falling on him at all? Does that accord with your common sense?

Peter Davis, donnish in his black court robes and with his long, thin white hands, made an unlikely boxer, but now he moved around lightly on his feet, as if led by his agile mind.

The senior sergeant sat scratching under his collar. All his copper mates were wired, sprung, ready to defend their own. Behind me, another two-metre-tall police officer leaned forward, breathing heavily. As Davis continued I could hear the cop cracking the knuckles of each finger.

Hurley’s two brothers sat in close concentration, displaying no emotion. Did they believe you should ferry around a drunken woman who’d just been beaten and then have to listen to drunken men—the kind that had beaten her—call you a fucking cunt? Should you just take it? Did they believe that if a drunk slapped your face, you should turn the other cheek?

Hurley’s mother, watching her son in the dock, looked so sad. She had not taken her eyes off him all the way through Davis’s devastating summary.

Davis pointed out that Hurley and his lawyers had always said he could have lied to get out of this, lied and claimed he had fallen on Doomadgee. Davis said: “He just told the wrong lie.” Hurley hadn’t known how Doomadgee died, Davis reminded the jury, when he made his original statement; he didn’t know the autopsy results and he assumed it was an aneuriysm or a heart condition. Why would he need to say he’d fallen on top of Doomadgee?

The conversation with Leafe is only a matter of an hour or so after the incident. The memory is clear in his mind because he says to Leafe, “Look, I fell next to him. I didn’t fall on top of him.” Then he has two interviews and he says the same thing and let’s assume that’s right. So let’s assume he’s right when he says I did not fall on top of him.

Well if he’s right, he’s guilty … What possible innocent explanation is there for the horrific injuries that the pathologists found on Mulrunji?

Davis crossed his arms and leaned towards the jury, affecting disbelief. “How could it be that the accused person could impact—“ Davis made a fist and punched his hand—“with Mulrunji with the force that is usually only seen in motor vehicle accidents, cleave his liver in two almost across his spine (that must have been a smashing contact)”—he punched his hand again—”and he’s missed it! He’s missed it! That’s the defence case: missed it!” Davis’s hands were now in the air, in an
I know nothing
pose.

Hurley’s mother gripped the side of her seat and stared straight down.

Peter Davis took his time. He kept up eye contact with the jury. They were all watching him. He’d built a relationship with them, speaking in soft, reasoning tones. “You may also harbour prejudice,” he said frankly. “Can you please put that to one side? Prejudice is a normal human emotion and those of us who say we’ve never held it are probably not looking at ourselves closely enough.”

The barrister had been on his feet for just over an hour. As he ended his address, he gathered his papers, picked them up, and banged them up and down on the lectern. “Don’t dare convict this man! Don’t you dare convict him unless you’re satisfied beyond reasonable doubt. But gee, it really does look like he’s done it, doesn’t it?”

It was clunky. But there was a feeling that Davis had pulled it off. There was now among the blackfellas real hope, even quiet jubilation.

Chris Hurley looked numb, frozen in his own suit of fate, but for a moment the mask cracked. His bottom lip quivered. He wiped quickly at his eyes. Then he was still again, solemn.

Whatever the jurors thought, the defence lawyers looked badly rattled. All the bravado of the union men evaporated. Even the worst of the starers cast their eyes down. Tomorrow morning the judge would give his instructions and the jury would go out to deliberate. After listening to Davis, Andrew Boe thought Hurley’s best hope was a hung jury.

Once the court had adjourned, Peter Davis met Andrew Boe and the Doomadgee family—Elizabeth, Valmae, Jane, Tracy Twaddle—and the black community on the floor below, where the walls were adorned with portraits of white judges in their wigs. There were about thirty people, old and young, some coming forward to be near Davis and Boe, others, such as Lex Wotton, hanging back. Davis had put his heart into this, and now, exhausted, he said, “A lot of people have had ideas on how the trial should have gone, but I have done the best I could. I don’t know what the jury will come back and say.”

Elizabeth was standing in the coat she was sharing with her sister Jane. Tracy sat next to her mother. Their grief over the deaths of Cameron and Doris and Eric had been subsumed by this bigger fight. They were not just fighting for Cameron. His death had led to better watch house conditions in all remote Queensland communities, to the installation of padded cells and round-the-clock surveillance cameras. And the women were proud of that, but now they were tired and anxious.

The Doomadgees had found the week’s legal proceedings confusing. They didn’t ask any questions of the lawyers, but when their supporters did, they nodded in agreement. A man asked Davis why Roy Bramwell had not been called. Or Lloyd Bengaroo. Davis and Boe explained that both men posed too great a risk. Roy would have been destroyed by the defence lawyers, due to his drinking and inconsistencies. Lloyd was considered “more copper than blackfella”: the prosecution had not known what he would say, and neither had the defence, who also opted not to call him. Earlier in the year, Lloyd had been bashed in a Townsville park by a Palm Island man, one of Lex Wotton’s relatives. Now he had finally been given a transfer off the island.

Peter Davis told the group that whatever happened, Hurley had admitted he was responsible for Cameron’s death. He had been charged with manslaughter and the case had gone before a jury. These were major achievements. Neither had ever happened before. Davis said he knew that a blackfella just needed to half look at a copper and he’d get arrested, but regardless of the jury’s decision, Hurley had admitted liability.

“How can we live our lives like that?” asked Lizzy Clay, the mother of Dougie, who’d given evidence at the inquest that Hurley had belted him across the Palm Island police station.

Wearily Davis said he was sorry, but that was just too big an issue for him to solve.

For a moment there was a sense that some of them were angry with him. But the activist Gracelyn Smallwood turned it around.

“You did a fantastic job,” she said. Gracelyn was sitting down, fielding calls on her phone, wearing her stop black deaths in custody T-shirt, which she washed and dried each night. I’d heard Gracelyn talking furiously about the barristers, robed in their “Captain Cook outfits” while the Aboriginal witnesses sat shaking, but she could see how hard Davis had fought. “Whatever happens we have had a win,” she said. “Every young copper on the street will now think differently. They won’t want to go through this.”

Then David Bulsey stepped forward, fixing Davis with his wonky, intense stare. This man who’d been arrested in the raids following the riot and sent to jail shook the lawyer’s hand. It was so gracious. And then the family and their friends, people who had also been ground down by too much tragedy, all stepped forward to shake Davis’s hand, for fighting on their behalf.

Seeing this, I went under. Tears seemed to come from nowhere and I had to leave. I walked down the hall to the women’s toilets and looked at my red and swollen face. It was not the first time I had cried in the two and a half years I’d been following the story, but this time it felt pathetic to be standing there weeping, to fail to match the Doomadgees’ composure—and what made it worse was Cameron’s sisters following to offer comfort. Jane and Valmae came and took me in their arms, checking that
I
was all right.

Peter Davis told me later that after twenty years as a criminal barrister, dealing with rapists and baby killers, he had “developed an exterior where it all reflects”. The legal details of this case would fade, but the handshakes at that meeting would remain one of the most touching moments of his life.

O
F THE JOURNALISTS
covering the trial, Tony Koch was the only one who had believed Hurley might be convicted. But Peter Davis’s summary created confusion among most of the others. I didn’t have a clue. I tried to think as a juror might. If Hurley had done violence to Cameron Doomadgee, it wasn’t the only violence done that day on Palm Island. Going by the courts, perhaps it was manslaughter, but might I not think, as a juror, that frontier justice had its own laws?

A few weeks earlier, I’d met a young white man, John. He showed me photos taken several years back: photos of his body covered in a crisscross pattern of bruises that he said had been made with a police baton. John and two friends had set out on a fishing and hunting trip to a small Gulf Country town. They bought a case of beer in Mount Isa and drove in a beaten old ute along rough dirt roads.

Along the way they stopped at a pub, leaving their pit bull terrier tied to the ute. Some contract workers were drinking in the pub and the two groups took a dislike to each other. The pit bull somehow got loose and came into the hotel, where the workers had a blue heeler. The two dogs started fighting. Then the men started fighting. It turned into a full-scale brawl, with the publican crawling behind the bar and the barmaid dodging a flying bar stool. John and his friends decided it was time to go.

The publican put a radio call through to police, and soon John came to a roadblock. The police van’s headlights blazed through the dark and the cops stood waiting, their shotguns drawn. John pulled up beside them; one of the officers held a gun through the open window and screamed at him to switch off the engine. But John needed a screwdriver to start the ute, and he had to stall to switch it off. A second officer popped the hood and ripped a wire to kill the motor.

“By this stage [the officer holding the shotgun] is telling me to get out of the car, and he’s opened the door. And then he started going off, saying, ‘I’m going to shoot your dog, I’m going to shoot your fucking dog.’”

John stepped out of the ute and “when I done that I had the shotgun in my face. And that’s when they all grabbed me and just,
whoosh
, pinned me into the ground. And [the second officer’s] got on top with the baton. [He’s] on top of me and he just starts cutting sick with the baton.”

One of John’s friends called out: “Oh, stop, man! That’s enough! Stop!”

The officer looked up from beating John and answered, “You’re next!” After locking John in the van, he went back for his friend. The man lay in the foetal position while the officer beat him with his baton.

Later, the town’s nurse treated the men but refused to photograph their wounds. The policeman was her friend. And these types had got what they deserved. John asked someone else to take the photos.

“I had good welts all over me, man, he got me everywhere,” John said. But this was the way of the world, the way of the frontier. He didn’t report the incident. “You’re not going to win against police,” he told me—meaning, not even if you’re white. The Tall Man comes in many guises, people say. He can change shape. But when he has got you down, black or white, the terror is the same.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Wednesday, the judge addressed the jury, stressing that this case was not about any previous deaths in custody, it was not about the police, it was not about Indigenous issues. These twelve men and women had to decide, beyond reasonable doubt, whether Christopher Hurley had killed Cameron Doomadgee.

The jury went out to deliberate. The sergeant overseeing security told me the verdict would “depend on the jury’s values”. A female court guard, who’d written a children’s book titled
Do as You’re Told
, said people from outside Townsville didn’t know what it was like living alongside blacks. The jury took three hours, during which time they ate lunch. When the call came that they’d reached a decision, the players reassembled.

Andrew Boe sat at the back of the court once more. I turned to him as Hurley walked to the dock. “Not guilty,” Boe mouthed. When the foreman made the news official, a howling cry of pain came from Cameron’s sisters in the balcony, while Hurley’s supporters erupted in jubilation. For the first time, we saw Hurley smile. Tough men wiped tears from their eyes. His friends, his mother, his girlfriend were crying. He leaned down, hugging them, while others patted him on the back.

Outside the courthouse, Gary Wilkinson of the Police Union stood next to Hurley and made a brief announcement. The senior sergeant would not be speaking. He wanted time alone with his family. Groups of riot squad police in plainclothes waited nearby, all of them wearing belt bags with guns inside. Up close, Hurley’s face looked fleshier, as if it had suddenly come unsprung. I had a glimpse of what he would look like when older. He tried to maintain that straight-ahead stare, the focus on the middle distance that had kept him upright and unflinching throughout the trial. Rocking through his head, I imagined, were the words
I did not do it. I did not do it. It was not me.