Death-in-custody woman ‘didn’t deserve to be in jail’

A 22-YEAR-OLD Aboriginal woman who died in a Pilbara lockup was never convicted of any crime worthy of imprisonment.

A  22-YEAR-OLD Aboriginal woman who died in a Pilbara lockup was never convicted of any crime worthy of imprisonment, her full court record shows.

On the few occasions that Miss Dhu faced court during her short life, it involved run-ins with police, almost all of them for minor offences.

The Australian can reveal that when Miss Dhu died in custody in South Hedland on August 4, she was “cutting out” a fine for a skirmish with a police officer that had taken place 4½ years earlier, when she was 18 years old. A magistrate who heard the facts of the case found she did not deserve jail.

But because Miss Dhu did not pay the $1000 fine the magistrate imposed, she was required to serve four days in the South Hedland lockup in August this year. She died on her third day in the lockup. Deaths in Custody Watch Committee secretary Marc Newhouse said the revelation should sadden all Australians. “This girl was no hardened criminal — no judge ever said to her ‘You need to be imprisoned’, yet look where she ended up,” he said.

Miss Dhu’s criminal record was released after The Australian formally applied to WA Chief Magistrate Steven Heath. It shows she was convicted of seven charges during her life, three of them when she was a juvenile. The document shows that in March 2010, Miss Dhu hit the police officer and obstructed police during the same incident then breached her bail conditions. Shortly before that she was convicted of disorderly conduct. A year earlier, when she was 17, she was found to have failed to comply with a request from police to give personal details, disorderly behaviour and a bail breach.

The court record shows Miss Dhu was fined for all of the offences and never received a custodial sentence. Her total court fines amounted to $2150. In Western Australia unpaid fines are served out by the defaulter at a rate of $250 a day, although it costs $345 a day to keep an adult in jail.

Two witnesses in the cell next to Miss Dhu during her last days have told The Australian she was in agony before she died, begging to be taken to hospital. Police took her from the lockup to the Hedland Health Campus three times. Twice she was deemed fit to return to her cell. When police took her to the hospital for a third time, both witnesses claim she was not moving and officers dragged her across the floor of the watchhouse.

In a letter to Miss Dhu’s family, the director of the region’s medical service, Phil Montgomery, said that on that final ­occasion she arrived at hospital with no pulse. Despite efforts to resuscitate her, she was pronounced dead within an hour.

There has been renewed focus on the large numbers of West Australians, especially ­Aboriginal ones, locked up for unpaid fines. Since tougher conditions for fine-defaulters were introduced in 2009, the number of people in WA jails for fine-defaulting has increased sixfold. In WA last year, one in three women sent to jail was there for unpaid fines. For all Aboriginal prisoners, the figure was one in six.

Lawyers contacted yesterday about Miss Dhu’s conviction for assaulting a police officer said the fine could be interpreted as court acknowledgment that the incident was relatively minor.

Yesterday Miss Dhu’s partner, Dion Ruffin, said she had explained to him what happened on the day she was charged with assaulting the police officer.

“She told me that a female officer had tried to grab her and she just reacted and shrugged her off hard and hit her,” Mr Ruffin said.