03/11/2023
It was an absolute pleasure to work with Jack, and his cousin Latrell and represent them in court. And it was incredibly satisfying to be able to defeat criminal charges the basis of which had been invented by the police.
Two aboriginal men were falsely accused by a team of nine police officers. Jack and Latrell were fortunate enough to have the support of their National Rugby League clubs and have a good lawyers, like me, spend 10 months piece together the evidence of the lies.
In the words of barrister Jack Pappas:
“This case, your Honour, is about power. It is about the power of police to act arbitrarily, oppressively and violently because they are, as Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody would say, 'Fat, with money and muscle', and as those same
people might have expressed it, 'How power and privilege can not move a people who know where they are and stand in the law', and my client is standing in the law. He is, in the idiom of that popular song, in a position where he finds that he must make a stand about what happened to him and happened to his good friend and his cousin, his co-accused, on the night in question. “
