The state’s top prosecutor says her office has discontinued prosecutions involving Indigenous complainants because existing trial processes are not culturally safe.
The state’s top prosecutor has warned that the criminal justice system is failing First Nations victims of crime and her office frequently terminates prosecutions involving Indigenous complainants because existing trial processes are not culturally safe.
Those communication styles were “underpinned by cultural norms of courtesy and respect”, Dowling said, but “it can be, in fact, regarded as the opposite of what non-Aboriginal people expect from an honest witness”.Nick Moir Under legislative changes that took effect in NSW last year, judges in many sexual assault trials must give a direction to jurorsDowling said those reforms provided a “good model” for a direction to “counter incorrect or stereotypical assumptions” that might affect jurors’ assessment of the evidence of First Nations witnesses. This would not remove judicial discretion and directions were “not required in every case or for every First Nations witness”, she said.
The directions could “be as simple as highlighting to the jury that in many First Nations communities it’s considered polite to avoid eye contact or that a silent pause is an important part of Aboriginal communication,” she said. “Leah noted that both she and her mother were storytellers, and that there is significant cultural value and power in storytelling for First Nations people,” a DPP case note said.
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