BY BOB AIKEN
SYDNEY, Australia - On July 5, 1985, Letty Scott's husband, Doug, was found hanging in a cell in Berrimah Prison, near Darwin, Australia. Doug Scott, an Aborigine, was 26 at the time.

The Northern Territory authorities ruled that a suicide had taken place. But Letty Scott believes that four prison officers -seen by other Aboriginal prisoners entering the cell on the night of Doug's death, armed with long batons - were responsible for his murder.

"My main aim is to get these perpetrators behind bars for what they've done," Letty Scott said in an interview conducted in here late last year. Scott was visiting Sydney to build support for her fight. "If we allow killers in uniform, be it police or prison officers, to continuously get away with murders of Aboriginal people, or any other Australian regardless of color or creed, the murders aren't going to stop." Scott said. "People have to stand up to put a stop to this sort of thing."

In the 11 years since her husband's death Scott has refused to give up her fight for justice, despite intimidation by the Northern Territory police, and advice from successive lawyers to accept "a lot of money and get on with your life," as she put it.

In October 1996 Scott filed the case with the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, and she has instructed her lawyers to proceed with a civil case for murder against the four prison officers.

Brutality against Aborigines
Doug Scott's death was one of 99 cases investigated by the 1987-1990 Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The commission, which looked at Aboriginal deaths in custody from Jan. 1, 1980, through May 31, 1989, found no foul play in any of the cases, but came up with 339 recommendations on how such deaths could be prevented in the future.

A report issued by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission November 25, however, outlined that in the seven years since the Royal Commission's hearings 96 more Aborigines had died in custody or in police pursuits - an increase in the rate of deaths.

The incarceration of Aborigines had increased by 61 percent between 1988 and 1995 the report found, compared to an 38 percent rise for the general population. Aborigines, who make up about 1.5 per cent of Australia's population, accounted for 16.4 percent of inmates in 1993, and one third of the people held in police lock-ups in 1992.

They are also 17.3 times more likely than non-Aborigines to be arrested, and 19 times more likely to die in custody.

The Royal Commission hadn't "filed charges on any single person whatsoever," Scott said. "It was nothing but a lawyer's picnic and a cover-up."

Suppressing damning evidence
When the Royal Commission looked at her husband's case "they suppressed a lot of evidence," she said, and "put it down to self-inflicted hanging, death avoidable - negligence on the part of the prison officers."

Scott's legal team has put together an 83-page brief outlining why the case should be reopened.

Their evidence has been ignored by both the Federal and Northern Territory governments.

The evidence of other prisoners, who witnessed the beating and were ordered to clean up the blood in the cell the following day, was not dealt with by the Royal Commission. Nor were the many contradictions in the statements of police and prison officers dealt with by the Royal Commission.

Photographs of the hanging body shown to Scott at the time of the Royal Commission's inquiry in March 1989 were completely different from photographs -the official record of evidence in the case -furnished to her lawyers in August 1993, leading her to believe that her husband's body had been "hung twice" for a second set of photos.

The pictures Scott saw in 1989 and that "I can still see in my mind's eye" showed a very tight noose that had "about six slipknots," Scott explained. "I looked at that and knew straight away that they had murdered Doug because he wouldn't have made that noose."

The photographs given to her in 1993 showed a different noose, and the body and cell furnishings in different positions. Even these photographs show markings on the throat that warrant further investigation, Scott said.

"The man had not committed any serious crimes," Robert Dow, who is also fighting the case, explained. At the time of his death Scott was being held unlawfully in prison on remand awaiting trial on an assault charge.

Northern Territory law gave magistrates the power to remand a prisoner in custody for up to 15 days without the inmate's consent. But Doug Scott had been remanded in custody for a period of 55 days, "which he did not survive," Dow said.

"Doug worked all his life as a knifehand at the meatworks around the country," especially in Townsville, Queensland, where he came from, Scott said. At the time of his arrest he was working as a construction laborer in Darwin. His cousin, Kelvin Condren, was "locked up for seven years" in Queensland "for a murder he never committed," Scott said, before being pardoned in 1990.

`This case will not go away'
Letty Scott's family has come under ongoing harassment as a result of her fight against the cover-up. In one instance, prison officers stood "straight across from my house, standing" with their arms folded "for about two hours," she said.

In another, her son, then three-years-old, was kidnapped by unknown persons in the middle of the night. He was then dumped outside her house the following morning, with minor cuts to his hands and feet.

Scott hopes that taking her case to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva "will put pressure to bear on Australia to deal justly with this case. And not only with my case, but other cases regardless of color or creed.

"This case is gaining momentum and it's not going to go away," she concluded.  
 
 
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