Drop the Charges Against Lex Wotton!

(Partisan Defence Committee statement)

We reprint below a 5 June Partisan Defence Committee statement in defence of Palm Island Aboriginal community activist Lex Wotton. Wotton, who is currently due to go to trial in October, continues to face racist state persecution for protesting the killing of Aboriginal Mulrunji Doomadgee in 2004.

Adding insult to injury it has recently been reported that Queensland policeman Chris Hurley—acquitted in a whitewash trial for the killing of Doomadgee—was outrageously awarded a confidential $100,000 payout for the alleged loss of belongings when a fire burnt down the Palm Island police station, watchhouse and officer-in-charge residences following protests by Palm Islanders against Doomadgee’s heinous and brutal killing.

As with the case of black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal (see articles pages 1 and 4) Wotton’s case demonstrates that workers and the oppressed face a system of capitalist injustice. What is necessary is class-struggle defence based on the understanding that capitalist society is divided into two hostile classes and that the capitalist state and its courts are organs of repression against the working people and the oppressed. We need mass trade union-centred actions, on the streets to demand: Drop the charges against Lex Wotton now! Down with racist state terror! For union/minority/black mobilisations to defend Aboriginal people!

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5 June 2008

Office of the Director of the Department of Public Prosecutions, Queensland

The Partisan Defence Committee protests the ongoing persecution of Palm Island Aboriginal man, Lex Wotton. Mr Wotton has been charged with “riot causing destruction of buildings” in relation to protests that erupted on the island following a coroner’s report supporting police claims that the brutal death of Mulrunji Doomadgee in the Palm Island police station on 19 November 2004 was an accident. Mr Doomadgee was beaten so savagely his liver was almost cleaved in two. Lex Wotton has been charged under Section 65 of the Queensland Criminal Code, an archaic provision enacted in 1899 which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. We demand that the charges against him be dropped immediately!

The prosecution of this Baha’i man is particularly vindictive. Early on 27 November 2004, over 50 police, with dogs, surrounded Mr Wotton at his house. When he refused to kneel, he was outrageously tasered with 50,000 volts. Wotton feared for the safety of his partner and children who watched in horror. His mother and his sister were also charged. These charges were later dropped. The treatment of Lex Wotton stands in stark contrast with that of the police officer Chris Hurley. Despite his admission in court that he must have caused Mulrunji’s fatal injuries, Hurley was acquitted of “manslaughter” by an all white jury in a whitewash “trial” in Townsville.

The Partisan Defence Committee stands in solidarity with the struggles of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples against racist state terror and oppression. Lex Wotton is a well-respected member of his community; he has been a founder and/or member of social programs on the island, including drug and alcohol rehabilitation councils, initiating the island’s first literacy survey and fighting to get a library established, and seeking a better, community-run shop on the island. Lex Wotton has been charged and persecuted because he is an articulate and resolute Aboriginal man. We demand that all charges against him be dropped immediately!