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Gomeroi, Dunghutti and Biripi woman and protest organiser Tameeka Tighe says every time she hears of another death she worries it s someone close to her. It makes me wonder if it s my brother, it makes me wonder what my connection is to that person and it makes me wonder how many more until this government takes it seriously, she told AAP. Do we have to see another 30 years and another 400 deaths? What is that we need to be an emergency?
More than 470 Indigenous people have died in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody published its final report on 15 April, 1991.
The NSW deaths only came to light after Greens MLC David Shoebridge asked Corrective Services Commissioner Peter Severin at a NSW budget estimates on March 9.
Severin defended authorities’ silence saying that it was “not appropriate” to advise the public of deaths without any detail and “cause a lot of anger, a lot of angst and a lot of grief”.
Karly Warner, spokesperson for the Aboriginal Legal Service NSW/ACT (ALS), called for government accountability. “While identification of people who die in custody must be up to families, the government should be more transparent and timely in the information they share with the public,” she said on March 9.
By the time he was seven, both his parents were gone.
At fourteen, he was paying for food by stealing computers and phones.
After years spent in and out of the juvenile detention system and the prison system, Keenan began to turn his life around.
He fell in love and married his wife Carly, an aboriginal woman with a Master s degree in Criminology.
Three years ago, they co-founded Deadly Connections, a not-for-profit organisation designed to help indigenous kids trapped in a cycle of poverty and neglect
Keenan has since spoken at the United Nations in support of raising the age of criminal responsibility in Australia from 10 to 14.
Youtube streaming of NT police officer Zachary Rolfe s murder trial raised as concern in court
TueTuesday 23
Constable Zachary Rolfe has been charged with the murder of Kumanjayi Walker.
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The murder trial of Constable Zachary Rolfe could be streamed on YouTube to Alice Springs and the remote community of Yuendumu, where 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker died in November 2019.
Key points:
The trial will be heard in Darwin and will run for five weeks from July 2021
Constable Rolfe s defence lawyer raised concerns about a proposal to stream the proceedings via YouTube
Lawyers want to make sure trial witnesses are not able to access the stream.
“They took my baby away … I hurt very much every day … I am not forgetting,” Williams said.
Fisher died of his injuries after falling from the 13th floor of the Joseph Banks tower block after four officers had kicked in the unit door. The police had two outstanding warrants for him.
White, Fisher’s mother-in-law, said: “Carly White, the mother of Patrick’s children, lives in pain and trauma every day. The children are living in pain. It is so unfair the police get away with it. They need to be held accountable to what they did to Patrick.
“This family is shattered. We want a proper inquiry in to what happened; we want the truth. The coroner needs to look deeper because Patrick was a human being, a father, not a statistic.”