Good.
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.
Put his blood on his clothing the day after the alleged a toime.
On a shallow 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 pulled 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.
You know, one hundred and twenty pounds, so can were.
And it just builds from there, It builds from there, and so they get me to to a point that I feel.
Like I'm so helpless, you know.
And and for me, that point came because with the officers coming in and out the room.
It happened about three times.
The third time is when the officer who's actually asking me the questions where he just flips tid bangs on the table and he reaches for me. And at that point, I feel like I'm not gonna make it off the priests.
I feel like I'm gonna die, right. And at that same moment, a detective who comes in the room sitting in the back, stops him, you know, starts yelling at him, cursing at him, what they're doing, you crazy, get out the room, kicks him out the room, and at that moment, I feel like he saved my life.
Right, And he sits there, he goes, may man, you a good kid.
I know you ain't doing this, but she got these guys in the other priests and they say you did it.
I need your help. And I'm like, so, what the hell.
Am I gonna tell this dude, because I don't know, I don't know the facts. I wasn't there, I didn't see. But what he does is he gives me a lifeline. He pulls out a picture of Kevin Richardson, he lays it on the table and he says, you see this kid, right, here.
Do you know him?
I say no, And he said, what is this Kevin? You see the scratch on his face that came from the jag of fighting them.
Move Now.
We know he going to jail, but I don't want you to go to jail, so I need you to help me out, give me something.
And then he just sits back. He just looks at me and just waits. Man. And at that moment, as a thought to your kid, what are you doing.
We're trying to figure out a lot to tell something just to stop the pressure from overcoming.
That was the real Raymond Santana, a member of the Central Park Five who were wrongly accused and forced to confess to a crime they didn't commit. There you heard Raymond talking about part of the interrogation process that resulted in his false confession and how the police obtains that, and you would have heard, just like Kevin, the police
went in the room, went out of the room. The police used threats of various kinds, and it was different for each member of the Central Park Five, and pushed and pushed and pushed for hours, including threats of violence and actual violence to extract those confessions. The Central Park Five story has been made into a popular drama series for Netflix that's now been seen by millions around the world.
In a moment, we're going to discuss that case. But what you'll hear as well for the first time ever on kurtin the podcast is why we've been away for the last few months and why we haven't been able to bring updates in Kevin Henry's case. And it's related to something that's a very big similarity between the case of the Central Park five and Curtin Kevin Henry. But first we'll start with Amy. Have you found the reaction in Australia to when they see us and the Central Park five story in general?
It's very interesting, Martin, because we've all often said, in the case of the Curtain podcast, how similar it is to so many cases over in the US, and yet Australian audiences still seem to cite cases over seas rather
than look at their own backyard. And I think we've seen that in the reception to this case, because as ourisoners are going to hear, there are so many similarities in relation to Central Park five and also Kevin Henry's case, and in fact we've also mentioned the Central Park five case on the podcast before, and yet it seems that Australians are less likely to believe particularly Aboriginal witnesses, and they're less likely to interrogate the fact that this is
happening over here and it's a system that they themselves are complicit in, and their silence in a sense is also you know, quite a violent thing, as was shown so brilliantly in the docu series. You know, the impact act of not being believed, the impact of being slandered as a rapist can have on a person, particularly when
it's over years and years. So I think it's interesting to see how resistant Australia still is to the fact this is happening in our own backyard compared to them being entertained in relation to drama series like this one. But Martin, you know this case in depth. What was your sort of taking or response to it when you actually saw it.
I think it was a very important and really good portrayal of what happened. There's obviously been a number of documentaries that have been run and made, including Ken and Sarah Burns is very good documentary. I think what this series shows though, was the very human side of a case like these the suffering not only of the wrongly accused and the young boys, but their families, their friends, their communities, and what it does and the way it
tears people apart. I also think the fact that you see the way they're not believed and the way they battle with the fact that they're accused of something they clearly didn't do. And part of the reaction in Australia, as you mentioned, is so often, as we see now, that the person isn't believed, and that Aboriginal witnesses and
Aboriginal people in particular aren't believed. And that's not only by the police but by the broader community and as we've seen by the media who refuse to make the links between this huge, high profile case that's become a Netflix series and the cases like Kevins that are occurring right now. And it's part of the damage that that causes the not believing people, the refusal to see the truth.
And we see that with the Central Park five, that two of the men end up leaving New York, the struggles they go through when they're released and being accepted back into the community, that even once your innocence is proven, that you're still not fully believed by people and that that continues to tarnish who you are. But obviously one of the most interesting things is the links to Curtain and the similarities, and that's something that we're going to
explore today. I mean, what was the first I guess similarity to Kevin's case that jumped out to you.
The first was definitely the timeline. So the miniseries shows the internal sort of discussions that were happening between the police and even the prosecutor at the time around the timeline, and there were so many inconsistencies in the timeline around Central Park and this really horrendous rape that had just occurred, and it showed that these five boys who had been picked up were nowhere near in the vicinity, and so what had to happen was they had to move around
events and they had to play with the timeline to even make it made it fit. And as I watched that, I immediately thought of Curdin, because we've shown again that there is a real problem with the timeline of the night that Curdin was alleged to have committed this crime. In fact, we've shown that he had an alibi at the time, he had a very small window of opportunity in which he could have done this, and in fact,
there was no witnesses at all to it. And we've shown also the problems with the tides and the positions of the body. So to me, that was really amazing to look at it, particularly looking at the police and how quickly they made up their minds, or at least in the miniseries, how determined they were once they'd got the kids they wanted to tire this with. It was never about the truth.
It was about.
Finding people they were going to blame this crime on in order to get a conviction. So it automatically became these are the five ones we've got, and so we're going to just build a case against them rather than actually look at the truth. And I think we've shown that with Kevin's case that once they extracted a confession, which is another similarity that we'll go into, they just
closed all other avenues. So there was never you know, the really sad thing is, you know, the actual perpetrator went on to commit other really horrendous crimes and so that actually affected the safety of women in New York anyway. So it really showed just how I guess damaging those assumptions were, and they were obviously based on race as well.
So I think that was the first similarity that sort of got me up and thinking, God almighty, you know this happened around a similar time as well to Kevin, only a couple of years before, and it was happening over in Australia. And yet you know, no one's ever looked at this case in depth until we were actually
able to do this podcast. Martin, what did you think of that or what were your first I know you've known this case before, but when you were watching it, what sort of jumped out to you in relation to Curtain's case.
Well, I think the thing that I always look at is the police behavior, because the police are the ones that are going to determine very quickly whether the case is solved or in a case like Kevin or the Central Park five, whether they not only get the wrong people, but force confession and tain evidence to his timelines and not only result in accusing and getting a conviction of the wrong person, but ensure that the real perpetrator goes free.
And so I think what was most interesting for me watching this was how quick the police make those deliberate errors and deliberate tactics to accuse the wrong people. And we know that in Kevin's case they did that immediately, and they did that the same with the Central Park five.
The targeting of young boys, just grabbing anyone a willingness to Just as the police targeted anybody who was at Tanuba House that night, the police targeted anybody who was in Central Park that night who fit the description they were after, which was someone who was black. That's all they were interested in. And as we know, a lawyer approached the police in Kevin's case and told them they had not only the wrong person, but told them they knew who'd done it. And the police response was, we've
got a black for a plaque. And to me, that is the similarity in the Central Park five. Obviously the victim wasn't black, but the target of their investigation, before they knew anything about the crime, was to arrest young black men, and that happened with Kevin, and it happened with the Central Park five, and from there everything else spirals out of control.
And Martin, when you talk about that about another potential suspect, there was also talk of white vigilantes who would often turn up to Tanuba House, and the detectives on trial in Kevin's case actually were questioned about that under cross examination, and they admitted that they'd never gone down that line of investigation or even thought thought to do it. They
just brushed it off as if it was nothing. So it shows just how narrow their focus was, and their focus was in relation to the aboriginality of the alleged perpetrator. They never sought to look at whether there were non Indigenous people around that night who would actually been shown to be preying on young Aboriginal girls at the time.
Yeah, that's right, and I think not only had these white men been around, they'd made very specific threats that they were going to rape Aboriginal women, and they'd used racist and derogatory language towards Aboriginal women. They'd come many
times to the camp and threatened violence. They'd had to be chased away at certain points, and this was put not only to the police on the stand, but it had been raised in a number of the witness statements by Aboriginal people telling the police that this had gone on and that these white vigilantes had actually been there at Tanuba House making threats of rape the night before Linda was killed, and yet on the stand, the lead investigator admitted he made not a single effort to follow
up on that, didn't even attempt to find out the names of these people, made no effort whatsoever. And we also know that there was other perpetrators or potential perpetrators' names raised in witness statements, and the same lead investigator admitted on the stand that he made no attempt to even question these individuals. He knew their names directly and
did not even approach them. Now, I think that's clear in both Kevin's case and the Central Park five that immediately they'd made up their mind and it didn't matter what evidence came forward, they weren't to change it.
Martin, what else did you see when you were watching the miniseries, as in similarities to Kevin's.
Case, very key issues that you see in the Central Park five drama series is the way that the boys are isolated. We see that some of them had their parents there, some didn't. In Raymond's case, he had his
grandmother there who was then nushed out of the room. So, like all of the witnesses in Kevin's case, they didn't have legal help they didn't have anyone there to support them, and they're under a huge amount of stress because they're being alleged to commit a crime that they know nothing about.
This is one of the most stressful situations someone can be put in, that they are being accused of a violent and serious crime that carries a very long prison sentence, and yet they have no information to give the police, and this puts people in a very difficult situation. Now, the police can either choose to believe that or they can force the issue. And this is where the Reed
technique that we've discussed before comes into play. Now, whether the individual officers know what the Reed technique is or not, and we see in the Central Park five drama series that one of the officers denies knowing what it is. Offices around them have been trained in the technique and this is what they're taught and how they learn to interrogate.
And so rather than see that they have a witness in front of them that cannot answer for any of their questions, they start to force the issue and they start to ramp up the pressure and make accusations, and when that doesn't work, they go to one of the techniques that's used in reed, which is to claim that other individuals who were there, so other members of the Central Park five have made claims against the person they're interviewing, and we saw that exactly the same in Kevin's case,
that when they couldn't get answers out of people, when no one would confess because the people they were interviewing, including Kevin, had not committed the crime, they started to allege that other people had said they had. And we saw in particular the effect that that had, particularly on the youngest member, Tron, but also Cory Wise, because he'd only been asked to come down to be with his friend Yusef, and so his level of understanding of this
was less than anyone else's. We also know the other issues that Corey was dealing with that will get into and so then it just becomes a matter of grinding the person down, and whether it's through threats of violence has occurred in Kevin's case, or both the violence that was used against Corey, but also the sheer amount of time the young boys were interrogated for it becomes quite easy to break a person down with these threats over hours and hours on end.
One of the things that really stood out to me Martin, particularly with Corey, but in all of the boys' cases, they were obviously so confused, in a state of confusion. I mean, I thought it was really interesting how she started it with from really from their perspectives, they had no idea that a crime had even really taken place, and so just this confusion about what was happening. But particularly in relation to Corey wise, it was interesting how it was similar to Brendan Ducie and that he just
thought he could say whatever and he'd go home. And he thought, oh, well, if I give them what they want, we can go home now. I'll be able to go home understanding or no comprehension that this is actually going
to affect his life. And I think that was very similar to Kevin, because I think Kevin just went in there thinking he was going to give a statement the day that he gave his alleged confession, and he didn't seem to realize at the time what he was going to be charged with, what the police were angling for. Did you get that sense as well, or did you have any feeling or thoughts around that.
Yeah, look, I think that's absolutely right that in all these situations and It's something that studies have shown across thousands of cases that young people, people who have experienced trauma in their lives, people with learning difficulties, people from black communities who have been victimized so often by the police, do often give statements believing that if they just cooperate, if they just say what the policemen say they need
to say. It's basically the yes model that if they be polite and do what they're told, they'll get to go home. And I think in Brendan's case, in Corey's case, in Cavin's case, all three knew nothing of what they were being accused of, because, as we know, all three are innocent, and they all cooperated under the false assumption that they would be able to go home. And what all three also have in the common is that none
of them were afforded a lawyer. Now there's different reasons as to why there was no lawyer present in each case, but any time someone is being accused of murder, there
should be a lawyer present. Now we know that in all three cases, basically the similarity is that all three were tricked into not having a lawyer there or threatened that a lawyer shouldn't be present, and the lawyer plays the role of not only the legal advocate understanding what will happen if you confess to something you know nothing about, that you clearly didn't do. But that lawyer is not under the stress that that person like Kevan or Brendan
or Cory is under. They can be the calming influence. They can also stand up to the police and tell them to stop and speak to their client and explain very clearly that not only do you not have to say anything, but that what you are saying because you're being forced to say it by the police, knowing yourself that it's not true, but that you're just trying to get home, that you won't go home, you'll go to
jail and potentially for the rest of your life. That is absolutely why the police made sure lawyers weren't present. If the police knew very confidently that all three had committed these crimes, they would have no problem with having a lawyer present as his standard practice and as he's required. If they had the evidence that all three had committed these crimes, they wouldn't have needed a statement from them
in the first place. All three could have maintained their silence, and the police would have had enough evidence to convict them if they'd actually done the crime. But as we know, all three didn't commit these crimes, and all the police could do to get a conviction was to force a false confession. And I think that's the most disturbing and disgusting in part, is that in all three cases we
have a female victim. In all three cases, that female victim and her family deserve justice, and yet from the very start, the police in all three cases in Manitouac County in New York and in Rockhampton and Queensland had no concern about getting justice for the victim and their family. They knew they had the wrong people, and yet they were determined to get a conviction otherwise. And this is something that people are going to have to grapple with.
This is the issue I think that goes to the heart of why the Australian media don't cover these cases, probably is a refusal to believe the police will act in this manner.
Now madin the very I mean, the most hurrowing episode really for me was the last one where it actually showed what had happened to Corey Wise, who was placed in the adult jail and was just subjected to torture and abuse continually. And I guess the reason it's about to me he was particularly when he came up for parole, because I had so many similarities to Kevin's case and where we currently stand now, we're just going to play a quick clip of the actor who plays Corey Wise.
Thank you for seeing me.
I've never been in trouble in my whole life ever, and when I get out, I don't plan on starting no trouble.
Good.
I'm a good person and I know our feelings for anybody or the situation.
I just won't go home.
Are you prepared to take full responsibility and admit to the crimes in which you've been found guilty? Mister Wise. Until you are ready to take the responsibility for the crimes in which you've been convicted, this process cannot go further.
So, Martin, when you saw that, did it draw similarities with Kevin's case and where we currently are now with parole for Kevin?
Yeah, And I think for people who have seen the Central Park five series or have watched the documentaries in the past, they understand that the reason that Corey spent more time in prison than anyone else. Was that he refused to admit his guilt in front of the parole board. And I think there's two very clear reasons Corey refused to do it. A is the most obvious, he did not commit the crime. And the second is the abuse that he suffered in prison, both at the hands of
other inmates and guards and the system in general. And that once he had found the ability to empower himself in some way that he felt remain and survive, he wasn't simply going to admit to something he never did to get out of there. He was going to hold that single truce until the day he died, because all that he had left of who he was was the fact he did not commit that crime. He was innocent.
And what we can reveal for the first time in curtin the podcast is that Kevin Henry's situation is identical. Kevin has been up for parole a number of times, but a constant issue is the desire in both the Central Park five in Corey's case in particular to admit guil and the requirement in Queensland for a person in
Kevin's situation to admit gil. And now, while Kevin is willing to cooperate on all other issues and has done so, while Kevin has volunteered to go through all the programs that are necessary to do the work that he's required to be released, to appear willingly before the parole board to answer any and all questions. The one thing Kevin shares absolutely with Corey is he will not admit to
a crime he did not do. And I think it's unconscionable to ask a person who has served so long in prison for something they did not do, where all the evidence shows they did not do it, and where that has become increasingly obvious to all involved. To simply require someone admit to something they didn't do says that we would rather you lie to us than tell us the truth. We would rather you add a fabrication on this totally fabricated case to set you free, rather than
tell the truth. And I think what Corey and Kevin also share is an absolute integrity, an absolute commitment to honesty and the truth that there is a willingness to suffer further rather than ever admit to something they didn't do. And I think it comes out very clearly in the series about the Central Park five and very well portrayed by the young man who played Corey Wise, that there is a steely determination that both men share that they just will not buckle and ever confess again to something
they didn't do. And for me, that's the most emotional part. So how was that aiming to see played out for you? You knowing that this is the same situation Kevin finds himself in.
Yeah, it was really amazing. I mean even to watch the sort of as Corey Wise starts to learn more about the system and see him suddenly use that as an act of resistance against the system and take control of that. And it was really interesting to me because it marries so much of Kevin's own story, and Kevin
is very culturally strong. I think this may be a point of difference in that Kevin grew up with culture, he grew up on country, he grew up learning from several strong, original people in his hometown of Worabinda, And I think that strength is that core strength is really what keeps him going, and it's what gives him that drive and that resistance and that ability to keep surviving in the face of everything that's been thrown at him. And yet you know, it's very interesting to know that
you know this. It's very interesting to note that you know, the Central Park five are now being their stories have finally been told, and Kevin's story is still there waiting to be told in its entirety. So I think that's what was sad for me as well, to think that all up, Corey spent served the longest sentence, which was
twelve years, which is way too long. One day in prison for an innocent person is too long anyway, But Kevin's been in there for twenty eight years, and he's been serving time over his sentence for the past ten years. So it really stood out to me the fact that something needs to happen soon, I think.
And so as we've both explained that this is the situation Kevin finds himself in, is that we're currently going through the parole process. We absolutely hoped that Kevin will be released very soon. We're doing all we can to work with the parole board to provide the information they require to be satisfied in releasing Kevin. But the number one issue remains that Kevin, like Corey, will not admit
to a crime he did not commit. And as Amy has explained very clearly that Kevin has a strength in who he is and his culture that allows him to maintain his resistance absolutely after nearly three decades in prison
for a crime he didn't commit. And I think this is something the Australian media should be exploring, should be investigating, and should be highlighting because, as we've also discussed in kurtin the podcast, how many other Aboriginal prisoners are in the exact same situation and not receiving the attention they deserve. And these are all issues will continue to explore as we go forward. But I hope that explains why we haven't been able to provide much information over the last
few months. And now you understand, as you will have seen Corey in a dramatized series refuse to admit his guilt. That's what's happening inside a prison in Queensland for Kevin Henry