not the motorcycle diaries

As a Melbourne Herald-Sun reader points out, the nature and outcome of the trial over the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee would have been much different had Snr Sgt Chris Hurley been the one that died.

But he wasn’t, and so the juridicial apparatus rehearses its colony-bound verdict; and the broader, brutal social context is excised from the picture (despite it being played out in the rest of the H-S reader’s comments). The justice question came down to where fists and knees were precisely placed and what their impact might have been, in a form reminiscent of the debates in the US Congress about what tactics might fall outside of the “cruel and unusual” category. This was bound to happen, for the reasons outlined by Michael Cope:

“The royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991 made over 100 recommendations - one of them that people shouldn’t be arrested simply for abusing police … had this recommendation been followed, this situation might not have arisen.”

And so, what can we say just now but, power to ya, Gracelyn Smallwood:

“Of course we wanted justice and we never got it … But we’ve had a win because the whole world is watching this country. We don’t want any violence, we want peace and we want everybody to be monitoring the police department.”