The Tall Man (27 page)

The Police Union’s president took his watch off again and started fiddling with it, producing more high-pitched beeping that eluded the judge, perched high at the opposite end of the courtroom.

Next, the prosecution called a liver surgeon, Steven Lynch, who gave evidence that a “massive” force had killed Doomadgee. Dr Lynch said that he would not usually treat patients with similar injuries because they were fatal.

But the damage to the prosecution’s case had been done. Peter Davis had not realized how detrimental Lampe’s evidence would be to his argument. The jury had heard this doctor say that he, with all his training, thought Cameron had died in a fall. “If he’s a prosecution witness, I’m an astronaut,” said the police union’s media officer, Ross Musgrove, with glee.

The tightness around Hurley’s mouth was gone. He subtly moved his neck from side to side, stretching out the tension.

W
HILE THE COURT
heard from the police officers who’d been in the station when Cameron died, their colleagues kept a vigil outside. Around fifteen officers, some on duty, some supporting Hurley in their own time, stood in the hallway. They stared at passers-by in ways that made them wonder what their own crime was. Intimidation had become second nature. Anyone not a cop was regarded as suspicious. These officers, the police chaplain told me, had “mongrels” of jobs. Recently a young officer had been spat on by an Aboriginal offender “known to have hepatitis A, B, C, D”. It was a week before the officer’s wedding and he was warned not to kiss the bride. The chaplain said the police were trying to do all that was “good and true and lovely in the world. They are men trying to lead moral lives.”

I thought of the cell-surveillance video of Cameron dying. It was the next witness, Sergeant Michael Leafe, who had come in and kicked him. Leafe had been living on Palm Island for three months at that point. Sitting in the witness box in his pressed blue uniform and helmet of brown hair, Leafe’s manner was slightly robotic. He might have been nervous: he was testifying in front of the powerbrokers of the Queensland Police Service.

Sergeant Leafe recalled the fatal morning. He told the jury he’d heard Hurley call, “Oh shit, he’s hit me!” Leafe went to open a cell door. When he came back Hurley was standing over Cameron Doomadgee, who was on the floor inside the station door. Hurley was “trying to lift him up”. Doomadgee was “just lying there” limp. The two officers each grabbed Doomadgee by a wrist, Leafe said, and dragged him on his back into the cell.

I remembered TJ Yanner telling me about a night at the Burketown pub when a local, drunk and aggressive, tried to hit Chris Hurley, “to put the bomb on him”. Hurley, TJ alleged, “grabbed him by the scruff of the shirt and then he tripped him, and as he tripped him, and [the man] went down, he put his knee into his throat, sat on his chest, put his knee into his throat and still had him by the scruff of the shirt, pinned him down with his knee in his throat and held him there until he passed out. Yeah, and only took about five or ten seconds.” Noel Cannon’s “similar fact” evidence at the inquest had suggested that this squeezing to the neck, this use of the knee to subdue his prisoners, could have been Hurley’s modus operandi.

Sergeant Leafe, who had previously claimed he’d left Hurley alone with Cameron for ten seconds, now revised his assertion. It had been only six seconds.

Peter Davis was considering declaring the police “hostile witnesses”. Only if he followed this convention would he be able to cross-examine the officers with the same force Steve Zillman had the Palm Islanders. But he believed the inconsistencies in their testimony needed to be more glaring.

Leafe testified that later in the day on which Cameron died, he and Hurley discussed the death. He said Hurley told him “he’d fallen beside Cameron. He also—he also said that he had dirtied his knee or his trousers,” meaning he had landed on the floor. After Hurley was charged, Leafe wanted to swear an affidavit claiming he’d been mistaken, and that Hurley had never told him he’d landed to Cameron’s side, but it would not have been admissible in court.

Hurley was facing eight to ten years’ jail. He sat on the edge of his seat in the dock, then he sat right back. He twisted and shifted. It seemed hard to keep that body still. All that flesh and bone, all that weight and strength. In that suit, his body was a painful burden. It’s a mixed blessing, being so big. The strongman is a kind of freak. Hurley’s hands were flat on his knees, then balled to a fist in an instant. He rubbed his fingertips. He wiped at his nose, sniffing like a boxer, his nostrils flaring. The sniffing set off an involuntary facial twitch on his right cheek, the side turned to the jury, the side Cameron had hit, the side on which Cameron was bruised.

O
N THE THIRD
day of the trial, young Constable Kristopher Steadman testified. His trousers were pulled high and padded by his shirttails. He took deep breaths, and when he inhaled he appeared to be squeezed into his uniform. His stiff police cap sat upturned in front of him on the witness box. Steadman had arrived on Palm Island fresh from the Police Academy on November 18, 2004, the day before the death. Asked at the inquest if he’d received cultural-awareness training, he said he’d been told about the barbed wire surrounding the barracks.

The morning of November 19, Steadman had arrived at the police station as Hurley’s van was pulling in. He walked into the garage and stood waiting, unnoticed, in a dark corner. “I heard the van open and what sounded like a scuffle.” He saw the two men struggling towards the doorway. Chris Hurley was standing behind the prisoner, holding him by the shoulders. Then “one—or both of them—have tripped and they’ve fallen through the door … It was hard and it was loud. I heard them hit.”

Steadman was about a metre from the doorway, but he didn’t move. “All I could see after that was feet, two pairs of feet.” The feet were just inside the doorway: a pair in police-issue black boots and a pair of bare black feet. “The black boots were on top of the other feet.” He could not see the position of the bodies. Hurley was shouting something at Doomadgee, and these shouts “sounded angry”. Seconds later, the black boots disappeared. Five or more seconds later, the bare feet were gone too.

This was a world away from the Police Academy. The new constable waited in the garage until whatever was taking place inside was over. When Steadman finally walked in, Hurley was further down a corridor with Cameron, but, Steadman said, “I didn’t look down the hallway.” In his peripheral vision he saw “something”, and “there was blue in that, so that would go along with his uniform”. But he did not check to see if the struggle was continuing, if Hurley was winning the struggle, or if he needed help. Steadman had told the Crime and Misconduct Commission: “I didn’t see it as my business to stick my nose in.”

Hurley was yawning now, and scowling. His collar was irritating him. He sat forward, almost glaring at Steadman, and clearing his throat. Behind him sat his girlfriend, with whom he shared a house near Surfers Paradise. His girlfriend had a friend. The friend had a hole in her black pantyhose, and long, shining, dark hair. When the friend turned quickly, her mane flicked the face of the plainclothes officer sitting behind her. They both smiled. The two women sat behind Hurley chewing gum.

Constable Steadman was considered the defence’s most important witness because, they claimed, the two pairs of feet proved that Hurley had landed on top of Doomadgee.

Now Judge Peter Dutney made a crucial point. He sat back, casual in his red robes, his hands clasped. “I’d just ask you this, just to make it clear in my own mind, Mr Steadman. You told Mr Davis that Mr Hurley was holding Mulrunji by the shoulder?”

Kristopher Steadman: “Yes.”

Peter Dutney: “Was he going in frontwards or backwards?”

Steadman: “He was going forwards … they were facing forwards.”

Hurley’s lawyers glanced quickly at one another. Constable Steadman frowned, but his young brow barely creased. When he walked out he was followed by the union president. I followed too. Steadman was taken to a small room, where I saw him being spoken to by Wilkinson and their scowling solicitor. His testimony had raised a difficult question: if Cameron Doomadgee had been walking through the doorway facing forward, and Hurley was behind him, how could Hurley’s knee have landed in the middle of his prisoner’s abdomen?

BY THE FRIDAY
of the trial, day four, the courtroom was still divided like some disastrous wedding. The two strained families had been waiting nearly three years for this. And now time stood still; it bent and stretched and both sides waited for the seconds to pass.

Robert Mulholland had spent the morning arguing for the case to be thrown out. “If Your Honour pleases, on the evidence, no jury, no reasonable jury, properly instructed, could convict Mr Hurley of either charge.” Mulholland had in part been playing to his employer—the police union—and in the hour he took to fight the point, he seemed to have taken on their bullying tone. Peter Davis sat through it all slowly shaking his head. Judge Dutney finally said, “There must have been some contact, otherwise he’d still be alive.” He ordered that the senior sergeant had a prima facie case to answer.

The prosecution’s case now rested. It was the defence’s turn to call witnesses, and Mulholland made a shock announcement: he called Hurley. The ripple of surprise that runs through courtroom dramas ran through this court. Davis had assumed Hurley would not give evidence: how, under cross-examination, would he explain his early vehement denial of landing on Cameron?

“Through it all, Mr Hurley has remained silent,” Mulholland said, standing still with his arms by his side. “He has had to remain silent. Now, finally, he has his opportunity to give his side of things.” The barrister sounded like an impresario about to pull back the curtain. And it
was
dramatic. Hurley, the main act, sat in the dock staring straight ahead. Mulholland asked the jurors to listen to the senior sergeant’s evidence with “open hearts and open minds … Assess him, we invite you,” he pleaded almost tenderly. “Assess him.”

Hurley stood and walked to the witness box. He towered over the bailiff, a Bible raised high in his hand, swearing truth to “our sovereign lady the Queen”. Sitting, he gripped the seat, his knuckles white. His brow was in a permanent knot, his deep-set eyes looked as if it had been a while since sleep came easily, but his skin was remarkably smooth.

Thin, ruddy Steve Zillman had smoker’s gravel in his voice, but he spoke softly to the accused: “Now, is your name Christopher James Hurley?”

Hurley: “Yes, it is.”

Zillman: “And you are the accused man in these proceedings?”

Hurley: “I am.”

He spoke plainly, without flourish. He gave evidence in the precise, unemotional tone of an officer reporting to a superior: “Correct.” “Yes sir.”

The morning of November 19, 2004, had been “hectic”, Hurley testified. He’d visited the hospital, where the three Nugent sisters were in casualty, having just been beaten. “One of the sisters was to be medivaced out. She had a broken jaw.” The other two came to the station to be photographed, but Hurley decided the extent of their wounds would be more visible the next day. Gladys asked for a lift to pick up her medication. He refused because he had work to do. But Gladys said Roy Bramwell might beat her again and so he finally agreed. He had never seen Cameron Doomadgee before that morning in Dee Street when he heard him call “you fucking cunts”.

His supporters bristled. I could feel the electric charge of indignation shoot through the room.

Hurley said he drove towards Cameron and asked: “What’s your problem with the police?”

The plainclothes officers in the court, some of whom had been at the riot, some of whom were Hurley’s friends, were moved by this. The insult was not just to Hurley, but to all of them. They felt it and he knew it. His chin jutted.

Cain’s self-defence was “I am not my brother’s keeper.” For years Hurley had been playing the role of brother’s keeper, but now it seemed to me that this had been an act. His attitude suggested that, yes, Cameron had died on his watch, but it wasn’t his responsibility. And his real “brothers” were sitting in the courtroom wearing blue armbands, keeping
him
. They understood his existential moment, they’d been there.

Describing his efforts to get Doomadgee into the cage of the police van, Hurley was frank:

He didn’t initially want to go in, so I took hold of his left arm … basically somewhere around the biceps area. And I just led him around to the back of the car, using the car as, you know, support. And perhaps the cage was open when I got back there because all I had to do was put him into the back of the cage. And how I did it was I used my hip and I bumped him and he sat down on his backside in the car. And then I said, ‘Get in.’ And he still wouldn’t get in and I just upped his, upped his legs, the quickest way to get him into the car.

Hurley no longer fidgeted. He was now perfectly calm and strangely matter-of-fact. He went on to describe the arrival at the police station. When Cameron got out of the cage he struck Hurley “to the side of the face with a backhand fist”. “The effect was it surprised me,” Hurley said. “It shocked me. I don’t think I’d been assaulted over there in the two years.”

Zillman: “Well, what did you then do?”

Hurley: “Well, like I would have done anywhere else, I … I reached out to the neck or the collar area of the shirt and pulled him towards me fast … I didn’t want any other chances for him to assault me.”

Zillman: “And I want to know how strong he appeared to be?”

Hurley: “He was strong, he was actually surprisingly strong for a fellow of his size.”

Zillman: “Did you at any time jab him or hit him, strike him or punch him?”

Hurley: “No, I did not.”

The day before, the court had listened to an audiotape of Hurley’s police interview, made a few hours after Doomadgee’s death. If Hurley had been remorseful or traumatised that afternoon, he’d hid it well. He had spoken in a big, confident voice, the voice of his old life.