Deaths in Custody

Northern Territory Youth Detention Royal Commissioners Mick Gooda and Margaret White
(The Australian)

Young people’s voices are all but invisible in the Don Dale royal commission’s interim report
By Thalia Anthony
Associate Professor in Law, University of Technology Sydney
6 April 2017

There is one group in society so powerless, that its voice has not been heard. The abuses its members experienced should make all of those arguing about rights, morality, power, and the separation of Church and State, in the debate on stem cell research, sit up and take notice. Its members are the victims of the lack of church and state separation in past medical experimentation in this country. They are the children who lived in child welfare institutions and were used as real life “lab rats” in the pursuit of medical breakthroughs.

The NSW 'Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research' tells us that the rise in Indigenous imprisonment in NSW is due to a combination of higher rates of arrest resulting in conviction, a greater likelihood of imprisonment given conviction and a higher rate of bail refusal.
 
We already know this, it's not rocket science, so why do the politicians refuse to do anything about it?

June 2016 marked 35 years since the death of Eddie Murray in police custody. Eddie’s passing still causes reverberations today – it was in part the efforts of his father, Arthur Murray, which led to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. EMMA PURDY* reports.

Mr Scott's death was one of the 99 cases examined by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1989. Mrs Scott were shown photographs of Mr Scott hanging in his cell by two lawyers assisting the Commission in the Northern Territory. Mrs Scott said the photographs showed him suspended inches from a grate in the nine-foot-high ceiling with his feet dangling two to three feet from the floor, the noose around his neck made from a plain and tightly twisted sheet that was neatly tied in multiple knots which were tight and close together. She did not believe her husband made the noose.