Just before nine o'clock last night, the jury returned guilty verdicts against all three defendants. It was absolutely shambles, to tell you the truth, just absolutely really. Honoans blood on his clothing the day after the alleged a top.
Selle mud bank and it fits.
Through a river.
Basically, I think most of the people are used to me are good people.
I think a really important question we need to ask is how many Indigenous prisoners in Australia are innocent.
This is Curtain, a podcast where we pull back the blinds to shine a light on the darkest parts of our justice system and ask who are the victims. I'm Amy Maguire and.
I'm Martin Hodgson, a senior advocate for the Foreign Prisoner Support Service. And a warning this series contains the names of deceased peoples and has distressing content that might upset some listeners.
Welcome back to kurtin the podcast for yet another year, and I'd like to start by thanking you our listeners for chuning in yet again and also hope that you had a good holiday period with your family and friends. It was a bittersweet one for us because Curtain, Kevin Henry has spent twenty six Christmases and twenty six New
Years behind bars for a crime he didn't do. And so even as we celebrated with our friends and family, I couldn't help thinking about the facts that Kevin is still locked up, and that we've been investigating this case for two years and you've been listening for a year and a half, and yet he's still there, still serving time for a crime that we've shown he did not do.
To bring you up to date with where we finished the year off, you'll remember that we had an alibi for Kevin Henry that we were able to show all the forensic evidence shows Kevin Henry is innocent, that there's witness statements, including eyewitnesses, those who spoke of the people who really committed the crime, and no link whatsoever to
Kevin Henry in the murder of Linda. But despite all the evidence that exists, and you can go back through previous episodes and pick those out you want to refresh your memory on, Kevin remains behind bars. And the most frustrating part is that Kevin is quite clearly innocent, and yet despite the changes we've talked about in Queensland with the parole board being changed and being made more professional because the Queensland government themselves could see just how wrong
things were going. This has not helped Kevin, and it hasn't helped Aboriginal prisoners. What we do know since things have changed last June is that people are getting out and people are getting the chance to move from the prison environment into the community environment. But that hasn't occurred for Kevin. And it really is frustrating given that all this information that we've exposed is on the public record, But that just means twenty eighteen is an even more
important year for us. Kevin cannot spend another Christmas behind bars. An innocent man shouldn't spend another day behind bars. But we're going to do everything in our power this year to make sure that Kevin has spent his last Christmas in New Years in Capricornia Prison near Rockhampton.
But we can't do that without help. Late last year, we launched a Patreon page aimed at crowdfunding some resources in order to help Kevin Henry's legal fight. If you believe in Kevin's innocence, and if you've listened to this podcast over the past year and a half and you're concerned about what is happening in this country to Aboriginal people as a whole. Please consider going onto that page page and just supporting us in any way you can.
Even the smallest bit will help and will add up to help us actually work towards that outcome to get Kevin out and to pursue justice for him and Flinda. And we'll have details of that Patreon page on our Facebook page and also on our website www. Dot kirtanthepodcast dot com. But Martin, I mean, you've worked on cases all around the world, and you do it pretty much on the smell of an oily rag. But what is needed in order to fund cases like Kevin's and where would this money actually go towards.
Yeah, it's a really good question, and I think, as you said, the work I do, we run cases with virtually no money whatsoever. But where people will know that innocent people, men and women are being released and being exonerated is in the United States, primarily for two reasons, because of the work of the Innocence Project and excellent law groups right around the country, and also because of
the fighting fund that organizations like the NAACP have. They literally have millions of dollars at their disposal, all donated by men and women in the public, like those who listen to Curtin. And what that allows those organizations to do is act very quickly when new leads come up and new evidence is found as to a person's innocence.
For us, that's really difficult because we don't have the funds, and so where that money goes to is things like hiring experts, so whether it be psychiatrists for witnesses, forensic experts to analyze new material evidence or re examine old evidence, traveling to interview witnesses and take affidavits. We of course have a large amount of court processes we need to
go through. So in the last year we've, of course, as you would have heard, litigated some of the refusals and issues Kevin has faced along this journey, and we've been successful in that. But everything we do costs money, and there is no fighting fund like so many groups have access in the United States. And I'm sure people have seen on Facebook and social media tweets and posts and YouTube videos about exoneries walking free and seeing those faces of men and women walk out of jail after
spending decades in prison. For crimes they didn't commit. People just like Kevin Henry and other Aboriginal people in Australia and jails. But you don't get to that moment without fighting the fight to free these people, and you cannot do it without the funds. And so as hard as we work, we need that money and that support that you the public can provide to make this justice possible.
And it's very interesting you mentioned the Innocence Project, Martin, because over the past few months I've been following their social media and their cases very closely, and they actually just this week had their two hundredth eggonery and that was largely due to you all of the support that they have received, and that actually was a white woman. They're two hundredth person exonerated with the help of Innocence Project. But only just recently there was another man who was
very similar to Kevin's case. He was only twenty two when he was wrongfully convicted, who just had hurt his murder conviction overturned as well. So over in America that you know, this is actually a huge movement. There's actually a lot of community support and awareness that this is a problem and a deep seat of law in our
justice system. And I think we have to get to a stage in Australia where you know, it's not just little pockets of people actually supporting these sort of cases and these people who've been so sorely let down by the justice system. It's a whole community awareness of what's happening in a whole community support to try and reverse the enormous damage that this system has caused, predominantly to Aboriginal people.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, And everything you spoke about is really what I think we want to replicate in Australia, but driven by the Aboriginal community for the Aboriginal community. And so we see in America there's been a number of cases over the Christmas period where small legal organizations have helped not only Zoner eight people, but there was a number of cases where African American men and women over the Christmas period were found not guilty
in cases where the police had committed serious corruption. And what enabled the lawyers to do such good work was access to those fighting funds that communities right across the United States, whether they're donating to big groups like the NAACP or the Innocence Project or the small organizations that exist all over America. It allows lawyers to hit the ground running straight away. And what we don't want to see is another Derek Bromley, another Kevin Henry, Aboriginal people
spending decades in prison for crimes they didn't do. We hear continuously from the community right around Australia because they listened to Curtin and they want to raise these issues. And what we want to be able to do is not just help those in prison, but help those who
are facing similar fights in their very early stages. We want to be able to do what the NAACP did in the worst times, which is rolling to town with lawyers, barristers, with social workers, with media, with support people, and ensure that when things go wrong, when someone is falsely accused, when something terrible happens, like the murder and killing of young Elijah or misdue in Western Australia, that we can
be there to get justice and support the families. Otherwise, Ooriginal people continue to suffer in silence, and quite frankly, two hundred plus years later, it's no longer good enough. It's very easy to make small donations, to make small contributions and we can put an end to this. We see it happening in America, we see it happening right around the world. Now we have to do in Australia in twenty eighteen has to be the year.
And Martin, you just mentioned some of the outrages that we've heard of recently and which have finally created some sort of media attention around these sort of issues. But we're constantly being approached as well by other Aboriginal families around the country who have cases similar to Kevin, or similar to other cases that have created that have drawn widespread attention, and yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of the ground swell or support available to them.
So I think as well, what we've shown in this podcast is that the issues that have affected Kevin and have resulted in this massive injustice or replicated all across the country. And that's what this podcast is for as well.
We want to keep doing this and with your support, with the listeners support and wider Australia, hopefully in the future their support, we hope to continue this journey and to continue helping a lot of Aberaginal family who you may not have heard of and whose cases are less wider known and who are just crying out for some sort of justice and for really just to be heard as well.
And one thing I just want to add lastly on that issue is one of the saddest things making curtain and working on Kevin's case for me has been hearing from Aboriginal families whose loved ones. And we've also heard from former prisoners who have been in the exact same position as Kevin and have served their full sentence, having never committed the crime, but no one ever came to help them. And one of the reasons they support Kevin so strongly is because they know exactly what it feels like,
they know the suffering. So this is why we want to work so hard. We shouldn't have to hear from people whose lives have been totally ruined by the justice system. It's supposed to deliver justice. It's not supposed to be
ruining lives. And I think we know so many families who we've come to hear from, Individuals we've come to hear from and speak to who know exactly what Kevin's gone through and he's going through because they've experienced it too, and so we want to help them and we want to make sure that those people don't exist in the future, and there's only one way we can do that, and that's with your support.
So mardin. With that in mind, what do you expect we'll be looking at this year or what are the first plans of attack in relation to Kevin's case more specifically, Yeah, I think.
With Kevin's case, the idea is that we continue to push down the pardon process and that we continue to put the evidence in front of the governor and the hope is that soon will be able to start making headway. But again, we need people to be spreading the word because for a pardon to take place, you need not only the evidence, you need the public support. We're talking about something that's never been achieved before, and we can't just do that to people fighting for one man. We
need the entire community to rally around. And what we've seen is the Rockhampton community has been incredible and that people in Wuabinda not just signing petitions but coming forward and telling their stories, telling us what they know, telling us the history, and that takes a lot of courage to do. So going forward, what we really need to see is people in high profile places making a stand on this issue. So if you're listening to this and you know someone who works on radio or in the media,
get them informed, get them listening to Curtin. That's something you can actively do. Try and push for this stuff to get a bigger voice. The other thing we're going to be doing is we have more evidence that we can expose to the public and reveal to the public.
We're also working to try and get Kevin paroled in the meantime, because one of the best ways we can prove Kevin's innocence is to have Kevin on the outside and so that he can tell his story and people can see him telling his story, and I think that's the best way for people to understand exactly what went
wrong in his case. And one thing that's really important to us in twenty eighteen is for you to know a little bit more about Linda and to understand what happens when a family loses someone in this way and justice isn't done. And sadly, one thing we do know is that a great, many number of Indigenous people, particularly Indigenous women and children, are murdered, and not only is
there no conviction or the wrong person is imprisoned. The family never finds out exactly what happened, and they live forever with that trauma and experience of losing a mother, a daughter, a son and not knowing where they even might be. All they get told by the police is they're dead, and often the excuse is that they've gone walk about. And we know in cases that have since been resolved and since been examined by coroners that that
excuse by the police is a blatant lie. In a number of murder cases, police tried to maintain that for months, sometimes years, and then a body was found. So these are things we're going to be exposing coming in twenty eighteen. There's many more cases we want to focus on, but again we need your help to do it, and we need more people listening and more people spreading the word.
And that's one of the reasons why Linda's family have told us that they always had concerns and reservations and believe now believe that Kevin Henry is innocent because in South Australia there have been numerous cases of abrushnal women who, as Martin has said, gone missing or being murdered, and
there has been no conviction. One of the most high profile was the case of Karen Williams in nineteen ninety who was never found and she disappeared in kuber Peed in the late nineties, actually the year before Linda died. So you start to realize that in South Australia where Linda was from, and in rock Hampden where she tragically lost her life, you know, these issues are very similar all across this country.
So that's going to be our twenty eighteen freeing Kevin Henry, finally getting justice and answers for Linda and her family, exposing the endless number of cases of Aboriginal men and women who are in prison in Australia who are innocent, Highlighting the number of Aboriginal women and young children in particular who have gone missing and been killed, who have never had justice, whose families have never had answers, And
we can only do this with your support. In twenty eighteen, we want you to become more involved, to join this journey with us. We have to make this the year we deliver justice for all Aboriginal people who are suffering in this way and who have experienced this trauma. So please log on to curtinthepodcast dot com. Like the Facebook page Curtain the Podcast, follow us on Twitter, Curtain the Podcast,
and spread the word. And finally, please support with what you can at our Patreon website, which will have links
to on all our social media and our website. Any small amount makes a massive difference, and encouraging others to support us helps us do all those things we want to focus on in twenty eighteen, freeing Kevin, justice for Linda, justice for all Aboriginal people in the justice system, and bringing closure and truth to those Aboriginal women and children who have been missing and murdered and never had any answers for them and their family relies heavily on you
and your contribution in twenty eighteen. That was Curtain the Podcast