Word: hurley
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...Doomadgee was arrested for allegedly swearing at police officers. Some 40 minutes later, he lay dead in a cell with a black eye, bruising to his head, body and hands, four broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein and a split liver. The only suspect was Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, whom Queensland's Deputy State Coroner found responsible for the death but who was acquitted of manslaughter at trial. Melbourne-based Hooper, 34, takes us through every stage in an observant, acute and compassionate narration...
...would have been easy for Hooper to make The Tall Man a simple story of apparent injustice, to portray Doomadgee - with whose lawyers and family she spent a great deal of time - as a wholly likable victim and Hurley as a thug. Always, however, she favors nuance over cliché, context over judgment. The book's title is partly a reference to Hurley, a 2-m-tall career cop who had been decorated for bravery and eschewed comfortable postings for trouble spots like Palm Island, a former open-air Aboriginal jail where "the heat attacks like a swarm of insects...
...Hurley's version of events was untidy. He and the drunken Doomadgee had wrestled as they approached the police station and fallen as they entered it. Hurley initially denied landing on top of Doomadgee, but later testified that he must have - this could be the only explanation for the Aborigine's fatal wounds. A drunken detainee in the station at the time, Roy Bramwell, told investigators he'd later had a partial view of Hurley pummeling Doomadgee. In his summing up at the trial in Townsville, prosecutor Peter Davis scoffed at the idea that a man could land on another...
...best to empathize with the police, hers is not a book cops are likely to give as a present. For many readers, it will be hard to construct a prism through which police conduct in this story appears anything but deplorable. Two of the men dispatched to investigate Hurley were friends of his and dined with him the night after he was interviewed. Through their union, police exhibited little interest in the pursuit of truth, more a blind and vociferous loyalty to a colleague in strife. Between the inquest and the trial, Hooper observed their righteous fury at a Brisbane...
...Hooper reports that the prosecutor's summing-up rattled Hurley and his defense team. But it did not sway the jury, which took just three hours (including lunch) to acquit him. Racism - sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle - casts its shadow over every corner of this tragic tale. Grappling with the verdict and the celebrations it triggered, Hooper writes that it was as if Hurley had been "not so much acquitted as forgiven. And in forgiving him, people forgave themselves." For many who read The Tall Man, all that forgiveness may be hard to understand...