‘Five years missing from my life’: Terry Irving’s fight for justice

Imprisoned for a bank robbery he played no role in, an Aboriginal man from Townsville is demanding substantial change to Queensland’s justice system after suffering for years behind bars in hellish conditions.

Terry Irving was wrongfully convicted of a crime he never did. Now, 30 years after he first went behind bars, he wants to ensure it never happens to anyone else ever again.

Thirty years on from his time in hell, Terry Irving can still remember the sounds of screaming that surrounded him during his time behind bars.

He lost five years of his life to a wrongful conviction and malicious prosecution that left him stranded behind bars, blamed for a crime he didn’t commit.

Even now, he’s still coming to terms with the cost of the justice system’s failings.

“There’s five years missing out of my life. The pain and suffering that I experienced with other people out at Stuart here, where I saw people get raped, people get bashed, people hanging themselves,” Terry said.

For 1671 days in total, he was torn away from his family, his community and his children, fighting just to be heard.

Terry Irving in Stuart Jail 1995. Townsville man Terry Irving spent almost five years in Stuart prison for a bank robbery he didn’t commit. The High Court of Australia said he was falsely convicted of a 1993 Cairns robbery and freed him.

“They call it a lived experience, but really, you’re surrounded by dead people. It’s almost an oxymoron, it’s just a deadening experience. The biggest thing you see inside is the apathy. There’s people banging their hands against the wall saying ‘this is wrong, I haven’t done anything’,” Terry said.

Now he’s fighting to ensure that no one else ever experiences the same injustice.

It’s a battle that started in March 1993, when he, an Aboriginal man, was wrongfully identified by police as the perpetrator of an armed bank robbery in Cairns.

Terry Irving in Cairns in 1999. Picture: Steve Brennan.

“My car had been seen in the vicinity of the bank at the time of the robbery, which brought the police’s attention to me. I’d loaned the car out that day,” Terry said.

“I was arrested for being an accessory after the fact to the robbery. I was held in custody and from that point on, I wasn’t released until the High Court overturned the conviction in 1997.”

Throughout that time, Terry not only witnessed serious miscarriages of justice in his own case, but in how others around him were treated.

“You’re lying in a cell, you can’t sleep, you’re freezing cold and all about you, all you can hear is screaming and crying and you just think ‘this is hell’.

Terry Irving and lawyer Michael O’Keeffe stand outside Community Legal Services in Townsville.

“I was there for about five weeks and then I was sent to Lotus Glen while I was still on remand, and that’s no better.

“A lot of the times, you’ll see people who say they can’t remember what happened, or that they were drunk and they’ll get a duty solicitor who just says ‘well, if you plead guilty, I can get you a fine that’s under $500 that goes on SPER, so you can go home this morning. Ninety per cent of people will just say ‘okay, great’.

“If a lawyer from a firm comes down, they might do 20 cases in a day and it doesn’t really cover the cost of what’s required to adequately or properly defend somebody or to investigate the circumstances of their arrest.

“At Lotus Glen, the solicitor that I ended up seeing would wait until they had about 10 or so people to see, because it’s over an hour’s drive from Cairns. If you had an emergency come up, or you needed to apply for bail or something, there was no guarantee it would get done in the permitted time frame.”

Despite maintaining his innocence throughout the initial few months of his incarceration Terry was eventually tried and convicted – over the course of a single day – for armed robbery.

“The trial was supposed to start on a Wednesday. The day of the trial, a new bloke comes in and said ‘I’m your barrister’. I said ‘no, you’re not’. He said my barrister was unavailable and that this was how we were going to run the defence.

Townsville man Terry Irving back in 2009.

“I hadn’t given him instructions, we hadn’t discussed the case. I didn’t have time to shower or to change. I’m pissed off. They take me through the foyer and I’m handcuffed, hair down, in between two cops and I’m going ‘there’s no f--king justice in Queensland’.

“They call for the panel of jury members and it’s all the people I’ve just been walked past. Three-day trial. It was over in a day.”

Eventually, with the aid of pro-bono lawyers from Townsville including Michael O’Keefe, Terry was able to have his trial overturned by the Australian High Court in December 1997, where the chief justice, Sir Gerard Brennan said they held ‘the gravest misgivings about the circumstances of this case’.

“Everyone’s entitled to a fair trial, and after five years, they told me I’d never had one and they’d known all along. When I walked out of prison, a couple of blokes said I didn’t seem happy. What was there to be happy about? I’d spent five years in prison for something I hadn’t done, and I was only being released on bail to be retrialled for it.”

Terry Irving was wrongfully convicted of a crime he never did. Now, 30 years on from when he first went behind bars, he wants to ensure it never happens to anyone else ever again.

A year later, in October 1998, a nolle prosequi was handed down and all charges were dropped, leaving Terry a free man, but still deeply wounded by the fact there were still no answers, apologies or recognition of his suffering.

“It was a bit of a bitter pill to swallow. In a sense it was a continuation of the injustice and unfairness of that Queensland legal system,” Terry said.

“It’s the time that I mourn the loss of.

“In those 30 years. I tried to reduce things down to a point where I could fit them into a box that I could try and live with.”

“There’s a definite need for a permanent, independent body to look at these issues and people who have been wrongfully imprisoned.”

In December of 2021, the Queensland Court of Appeal established that the initial accessory charge brought against Terry was a malicious prosecution that had no reasonable grounds.

“I was talking to a solicitor once and he said to me, ‘look, Terry, probably the best thing we do is try and get on with your life and put it behind you’. This was back in 1996. He said, you’re up against the whole legal system. He said you’ve got $20 in your back pocket and you are fighting the entire system.

“He told me I’d be crushed, and he was pretty accurate, but thankfully I’ve got the truth shielding me.”

Michael O’ Keefe formally acted for Mr Irving as his pro bono lawyer until his retirement in 2012, at which time Maurice Blackburn pro bono lawyers of Brisbane have continued to act for Mr Irving in his quest for justice.

Terry Irving and Michael O’Keefe will both appear on SBS’ Insight to talk about their ongoing fight for justice on July 11 and July 18.

Originally published as ‘Five years missing from my life’: Terry Irving’s fight for justice