Justice for Ms Dhu
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917734415 |
| Author | Karen Crawley,Pauline Klippmark |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2018, Vol. 27(6) 695–715
Justice for Ms Dhu:
ª The Author(s) 2017
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Accounting for Indigenous
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663917734415
Deaths in Custody
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in Australia
Pauline Klippmark and Karen Crawley
Griffith University, Australia
Abstract
Ms Dhu, an Aboriginal woman belonging to the Yamatji nation, died in police custody in
South Hedland, Western Australia, in 2014 within 48 hours of being incarcerated for
failing to pay fines. The coroner’s report found that both the police force and medical
institution failed to discharge the duty of care owed to Ms Dhu, as their behaviour fell
below what was expected of someone in their position. However, the coronial inquiry
was unable to account for the ways in which state power and possessive sovereignty is
invested in the deaths of Indigenous peoples. This article connects Ms Dhu’s life and
death to forms of gendered, institutional and structural racism endemic to the Australian
settler state. We then turn to examine the possibilities of justice for Ms Dhu through
aesthetic attempts to memorialize her in public spaces of the city of Perth, which carry a
promise of justice through their ability to challenge the settler-colonial logic that made
possible Ms Dhu’s invisible suffering and the lack of accountability for her death.
Keywords
Aboriginal Australia, incarceration, Indigenous women, informal justice, institutional
racism, police violence, settler colonialism
Corresponding author:
Karen Crawley, Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Parklands, Drive, Southport, 4215 Queensland, Australia.
Email: k.crawley@griffith.edu.au
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Social & Legal Studies 27(6)
Introduction
Ms Dhu was 22 years old when she died in police custody in Port Hedland, Western
Australia, on 4 August 2014. Like many other Aboriginal women who have died in
custody, her death occurred at the intersection of poverty, racism and violence. Already
ill with pneumonia and septicaemia caused by a broken rib inflicted by her partner 2
months earlier, she was arrested for unpaid fines and kept in custody to ‘work off’ the
fine. On her first day in custody, she was taken to hospital but sent back to her cell after
having her pain attributed to ‘behavioural issues’ or ‘drug withdrawals’ by two different
doctors. When she was sobbing, vomiting and begging for help in her cell, the police
officers on duty at the lockup ignored her and belittled her as an addict. The second time
she was taken to hospital, already in the advanced stages of septicaemia, the doctors and
nurses failed to even take her temperature (WA State Coroner, Inquest 11020-14, 2016:
107, 110, 221, 320).1 When her condition continued to deteriorate in lockup, the officers,
instead of calling an ambulance, handcuffed her unconscious body and dragged her by
her arms from her cell into the back of a police van ‘like a dead kangaroo’ (The
Guardian, 2015a). By the time the police arrived at the hospital and proceeded to
nonchalantly unload her into a wheelchair, she was in cardiac arrest. Despite extensive
efforts to resuscitate her, she was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.
The coronial report released in December 2016, nearly 2 years after her death, found
that the police officers had acted inhumanely and unprofessionally (2016: 493, 546,
596, 731, 880), without regard for Ms Dhu’s suffering, or indeed for the fact that she
was a human being (465, 493). This was deduced from the officers’ persistent disbelief,
indifference, belittling and refusal to listen to or actually see Ms Dhu as she commu-
nicated her pain through moans and pleas for help (2016: 67, 108, 118, 127, 468, 635,
640, 643, 652, 659, 678). Despite condemning the police for their inhumane and
unprofessional behaviour (2016: 264, 546, 596, 731, 880) that ‘reflected badly upon
the Western Australian Police Service’ (496, 546, 597), and finding that Ms Dhu’s
medical treatment was considered ‘below the standards that should ordinarily be
expected of a public hospital’ (265, 299, 304, 411, 434, 437), the coroner remained
unable to account for why the people responsible for the care of Ms Dhu failed so
miserably in exercising their duty of care.
The coroner did not recommend any criminal prosecutions. None of the police offi-
cers had their employment terminated. The only measures taken were police internal
processes back in 2014 under which four officers were sanctioned for unprofessional
conduct, breaching regulations and failing in their duties, and seven other officers were
found to have breached policy and procedures (SBS News, 2017c). Two of the officers
involved promoted (New Matilda, 2016). The Western Australian Premier receiving the
coroner’s report indicated that he would not implement her recommendation to legislate
against detention for fine defaulters (ABC News, 2016a), nor institute a mandatory
notification service for when indigenous people are taken into custody, as in NSW and
the ACT (Sovereign Union, 2016a); as of writing, the 2017 incoming Labor government
has pledged to set up the notification service (SBS News, 2017a), but this has not yet
occurred. In this sense, the inquest’s findings and the tepid political response have failed
to achieve the justice sought by Ms Dhu’s family, whose struggle to hold the state
Klippmark and Crawley
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accountable for their relative’s death continues: they have now lodged a claim of
misconduct leading to death in the Supreme Court of Western Australia (ABC News,
2017a).
Ms Dhu died 6 years after Aboriginal Elder Mr Ward was ‘cooked to death’ in a van
while being transported between prisons in Western Australia, and at a time when the
mistreatment of Aboriginal people at the hands of police, prison guards and the criminal
justice system has emerged as a key topic in public debate, largely because of media
reporting and the circulation of footage such as the CCTV footage released in July 2016
showing the torture of Aboriginal boy Dylan Voller in Don Dale Detention Centre in the
Northern Territory, which provoked international outrage (New York Times, 2016;
Washington Post, 2016). Ms Dhu’s death also occurred against the background of an
increased international interest in, and condemnation of, Australia’s poor treatment of
other vulnerable detained populations, including children and refugees in offshore deten-
tion (ABC News, 2016b). Media reporting on Ms Dhu’s death sparked public protests at
her treatment (ABC News, 2015; SBS News, 2015) and an online campaign for the
coroner to publicly release the CCTV footage taken during her final days in custody,
which was shown in the courtroom as evidence during the inquest (Wahlquist, 2015).
Initially declining to release the footage in deference to indigenous protocol, the coroner
eventually bowed to Ms Dhu’s family and the #releasethecctv campaign and made
public 3 minutes of footage alongside her report, which circulated online and was picked
up by international media (Al Jazeera, 2016; BBC News, 2016; Policy Mic, 2016).
Shortly after its release, Felix Riebl of Cat Empire released a protest song naming Ms
Dhu’s criminalization and resulting death as itself a crime, accompanied by a video
situating her death within the history of Australian colonial governance and police
violence towards Aboriginal people (ABC News, 2017b). Ms Dhu’s photograph and
excerpts of the footage have circulated online alongside the phrases #BlackLivesMatter,
#IdleNoMore and #SayHerName, in a ‘call and response’ between local allies and
international activists that connect the Australian struggle for justice for indigenous
people to North American and global movements against militarized policing, state
violence and neglect (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Carney, 2016; Richardson, 2016).
Ms Dhu’s death is the 240th Indigenous death in custody since the Royal Commission
into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) in 1992. The RCIADIC found that
Aboriginal peoples were more likely to die in custody because they were significantly
over-represented in custody (RCIADIC, 1991) and made 339 recommendations aimed at
reducing Indigenous over-incarceration. Many of these recommendations have not been
implemented, and indeed, indigenous imprisonment rates have doubled in the wake of its
conclusion (Dodson, 2016: 24). As of 2017, indigenous people made up 28% of the
Australian adult penal population, but only 2% of Australia’s general population (Aus-
tralian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). One in five people who die in custody are indigenous
(The Guardian, 2016c). If some of the most vital recommendations made by the RCIA-
DIC – to use imprisonment as a mode of last resort and to avoid incarceration for fine
defaulters who cannot afford to pay – had been implemented, they would likely have
saved Ms Dhu’s life.
This article examines Ms Dhu’s death and both formal and informal attempts to hold
state agencies accountable for their violence against indigenous peoples. As in other
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Social & Legal Studies 27(6)
settler states such as Canada, the legal and political authority of Australian sovereignty is
predicated on the dispossession, over-incarceration and biopolitical management of its
Indigenous peoples. In part 1, we adopt an intersectional analysis to explain how Ms
Dhu’s life and death were marked by violence linked to both her race and her gender,
exemplifying the workings of the Australian ‘colonial patriarchy’ at the intersection of
its health and criminal justice apparatus (Baldry and Cunneen, 2014). In part...
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