One fateful night and a really bad newspaper story
Apr 26th, 2008 by Rebecca
This morning’s headline story in the Canberra Times concerned the announcement by ACT Attorney-General Corbell of reforms aimed at encouraging the use of jury trials over a judge sitting alone in the Supreme Court and discouraging venue shopping. It’s not a bad idea, and would help to fix some of the ways in which the criminal justice system is badly flawed. What I found irritating, however, was the example in which the newspaper decided to illustrate the situation. “Tears for a father lost, but no answers”, the headline says.
For Patricia Gaete, the pain never stops. The pain of losing her fiance, Nato David Seuala, who was fatally stabbed in Civic almost two years ago, the pain of knowing that his killer walks free.
The actual story? Early one morning two years ago, a group of large, angry drunken men arrived outside Canberra’s only gay club with the explicit intention of beating them up some queers. I think just about every queer person in this city knew the story long ago, but it’s on the public record now, and the paper did cover the core details. They were denied entry by the bouncer; they then declared that they would stand outside and bash up anyone who came out of the club. The owner then came out. The details of what happened next are not exactly clear; according to the paper, the owner (who’s also brown) made a racist slur in telling them to piss off, and was then attacked by the entire group, and badly beaten himself. In the ensuing melee, he stabbed one of the men twice, who subsequently died. He may have the potential to be quite an ass at times, but I have little doubt that had it not been for his actions that night, god knows what would have happened.
There are many miscarriages of justice under this system, and the paper names a couple more inside. This case, however, was not one of them. The fiancee of the man who died may well be grieving, but in the circumstances of that night, he was always going to plead self-defence, and he was always going to get acquitted on those grounds. The allegation in this morning’s paper that he’d have been likely to be convicted in a jury trial is a joke; this is the most liberal, queer-friendly city in the country, and I doubt any jury here would have much sympathy for the would-be gay basher of a dead man in the circumstances.
This murder trial took up two years of that club owner’s life, and he’s had his day in court and been unsurprisingly acquitted. Yet that didn’t stop the Canberra Times practically defaming him in this morning’s paper because it makes for an easy tear-jerking grab of a story. As I mentioned above, this city is not short of cases where actual miscarriages of justices have occurred; perhaps the paper might have done well to be a little less slack in their reporting. There was no need to defame someone who was never going to be convicted under either system, and who has been through enough from the damned legal system already.