Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  Her first trial in the New South Wales District Court was aborted after just two days when she sacked her legal team.

  At her second trial, she represented herself, which led to many confusing moments for the jury and the very patient Judge Michael Finnane.

  It was highly uncomfortable watching this well-dressed and fragile-looking woman represent herself, and the handful of court watchers in the public gallery got up and left early on the third day of the trial.

  During one day of evidence, under questioning by Crown Prosecutor Lou Lungo, Angelia Liati was adamant she had not lied about who was driving Marcus Einfeld’s car. She said it was not a lie but ‘a story’ she had made up.

  When asked if she understood the meaning of a lie, Angela Liati replied, ‘There are two sorts of lies: intentional lies and unintentional lies.’

  The jurors were trying very hard not to laugh, but some couldn’t stop themselves.

  Another day the judge told Angela Liati he couldn’t understand what she was saying and not to yell at the prosecutor.

  Angela Liati told the court during her trial that lawyers had ‘manipulated’ her to allow her statement to be released to police. She claimed she had made a second, ‘more accurate’ statement but police and lawyers chose to ignore it. Ms Liati also accused the media of prejudicing police investigations into the matter.

  The trial ran for just over a week, and when the jurors retired to consider a verdict, they came back with guilty in less than three hours.7

  In later sentencing Angela Liati to 200 hours community service Judge Finnane conceded that hers was not ‘the world’s biggest case’ even though she might want to make it seem that way.

  The judge said what most people in court were thinking: that this woman had behaved in an annoying way and had wasted the time of many public officials.

  Outside court the day she was sentenced, Angela Liati was still defending Marcus Einfeld even though she had probably never formally met him.

  ‘I think he could be helping other . . . people, doing some sort of community work rather than sitting in a jail cell. I thought that jail was for people who were a threat to society.’8

  22

  The Sydney siege inquest

  The siege

  It was Monday 15 December 2014, just ten days before Christmas, when Man Haron Monis took eighteen hostages in the Lindt Café in Sydney’s CBD. The siege started around 10 a.m. on the Monday, when, wearing a baseball cap, he casually walked into the café with a sawn off shotgun in a plastic bag, sat down and ordered cake and tea. Workers from nearby buildings were in the café, along with Christmas shoppers. Monis took the gun out of the bag and called café manager Tori Johnson over and ordered him to lock the café doors. Monis then bluffed staff and customers into thinking he had a bomb in his backpack and forced them to hold an Islamic State flag up in the café windows. The chilling images were broadcast on television as the siege unfolded. The siege was declared an act of terrorism about an hour after it started, which triggered protocols to respond to terrorist acts, but it was a situation New South Wales Police had never before had to deal with. The gunman, who was acting alone, used the hostages as a human shield throughout the ordeal and forced them to phone media outlets, and to phone triple 0 to say that Australia was under attack and that there were three bombs planted across the city. Some hostages escaped by running from the building during the more than 16 hour ordeal that didn’t end until the early hours of the next day. Fearing that Monis had a bomb in his backpack, police, who had surrounded the building and tried to communicate with the gunman, didn’t enter the café until Tori Johnson, thirty-four, was shot in the back of the head early on the Tuesday morning. Hostage Katrina Dawson, thirty-eight, died after being hit by police bullet shrapnel; and Monis, fifty, was shot dead.

  The Lindt café in Martin Place was right near the main Law Courts Building in Queens Square and I often went past there on the way to court. It was also just across from the Channel Seven studios.

  During the siege, all the nearby buildings were evacuated and locked down. For the newsroom, it was a case of all hands on deck as the events unfolded in Martin Place and Sydney tried to make sense of what was happening.

  As with all breaking stories in a newsroom, there were the first-line responders — the reporters and the camera crews dispatched to the scene at Martin Place to report on what was happening and to get pictures and comments from witnesses and police. Back at Ultimo, the television studio crews and the radio and online editors and producers were putting it all together.

  To keep feeding the hungry twenty-four hour news cycle, the next day, other people started to be brought in for their stories. People such as those who had known the gunman or the hostages and the spokespeople for the various emergency services organisations who were providing briefings and updates on what had happened.

  I had taken leave early in December to travel home to spend time with my family. I was shocked when news of the siege broke as I had met Man Monis many years before during some of his first court appearances. I came back from my leave on the Tuesday morning to do radio crosses for The World Today and television crosses on the ABC News Channel and The Drum to provide commentary about his criminal history. Monis was new to the public but he wasn’t new to me.

  Abusive letter crimes

  My first encounter with Monis was on 10 November 2009 at the Downing Centre complex during one of his court appearances for his abusive letter crimes: using a postal service to harass the families of dead Australian soldiers.

  Looking back I misjudged him because I thought at the time he was very strange, but probably not violent. The way this man later plotted the death of his ex-wife and executed Lindt café manager Tory Johnson at point-blank range during the siege, shows how sometimes it’s hard to predict if and when people will snap.

  When I started covering his court cases Monis was using the name ‘Sheik Haron’ and there was concern in the newsroom about whether he should actually be called a ‘Sheik’ because he was not an official religious leader, so we dropped his self-given title.

  Between November 2007 and August 2009, Monis had posted letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers criticising Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan and calling the soldiers murderers. He was arrested by counter-terrorism police at his Croydon Park home in Sydney’s inner west. The offensive letters were posted to the families of several soldiers killed on the job and to the family of an Austrade official who had died in the 2009 Marriott Hotel bombing in Indonesia.

  One letter was sent to Bree Till, less than a fortnight after her husband, Sergeant Brett Till, died in Afghanistan. Outside the Downing Centre, on one occasion, she said Monis accused her husband of being a ‘child killer’ and even told her how to raise her own children. This poor woman was bewildered that anyone could send such abusive letters to families who had lost their loved ones.1

  Monis said he sent the letters to encourage the families to lobby the federal government to pull out of countries such as Afghanistan, but prosecutors argued that the letters were abusive and accused the soldiers of being criminals.

  On 10 November 2009 I was sitting up the back of a small Downing Centre court with only a few rows of public gallery seats, when Monis made a dramatic entrance into the room dressed in long, flowing robes and a white headdress. He stood right near me and seemed to be rocking back and forth on his feet — toe heel, toe heel. He then started to shift his weight from side to side and it was as if he found it hard to stand still.

  His lawyer told the magistrate that day that his client was ‘a peace activist’.2

  The court hearing that day was only a mention to try to progress the case. Monis did not enter a plea of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ and the case was adjourned until January 2010. Sometimes cases are listed for mention many times before they get to trial or are resolved in some other way.

  Monis had already been given bail soon after being charged but he wanted his ba
il conditions eased. The magistrate agreed that if he surrendered his passport he would only need to report to police once a week instead of three times a week.

  Monis seemed pleased with that and, speaking to reporters outside court, he described the tasteless letters he sent as ‘condolence letters’ and denied having done anything wrong by sending them.

  Outside court he put heavy, metal chains around his neck and chained himself to a railing near the Downing Centre holding a small Australian flag. He also held up a pen and said it was a ‘weapon’ he used to write his sick ‘condolence letters’ asking families to pressure the federal government to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Monis said he wanted safety for Australia and that John Howard had ‘made it unsafe’ because the Australian government had killed innocent Afghan civilians. He also said he wanted children’s group The Wiggles to stage a peace concert for children whose parents had been killed in Afghanistan.

  ‘I don’t want to lose our soldiers. I don’t want Australia to be unsafe,’ he told reporters.3

  It was a bizarre sight and he stayed there the entire day in front of the media, holding the flag in one hand and a sign above his head calling for Australian troops to be brought home. The camera crew got the pictures of him they needed and so moved on to other jobs.

  His case had been dealt with by mid-afternoon so after filing stories on it, I went back into the Downing Centre to get some documents from the court registry.

  When I came out of the building around 4 p.m. Monis was still there and told me he was prepared to stay chained to the railing all night. He was quietly spoken and polite as he answered all of my questions, clearly liking the attention of a journalist.

  A police van was parked nearby and I asked if that concerned him.

  ‘They are here for my protection,’ he answered, looking at me for a long time.

  The day after Monis faced court over his abusive letters, I went back to the Downing Centre for a different case and there he was chained up outside the building again.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said politely, as I walked past, and a few onlookers stopped to read the signs he was holding up.

  One man commented that it was highly inappropriate for Monis to be there with the disrespectful signs on Remembrance Day.

  I phoned the newsroom straightaway to let the desk know Monis was back in chains for a second day.

  As he wasn’t actually appearing in court again that day, we decided not to promote his solo protest by giving him any more media oxygen.4

  A few months went by before this man was back in court for his abusive letter charges and they were to linger around for years. At first he tried to fight them in various courts, annoyingly tying up people’s time and court resources. Monis argued that the offence of using a postal service to offend or harass was ‘unconstitutional’ because it infringed upon the Australian Constitution’s implied freedom of communication on government and political matters.

  In one High Court judgment in February 2013, a panel of six judges was divided, three–three in a decision. So they had to uphold an earlier New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal decision that the charges were in fact valid under the Constitution.5

  Rather than stand trial for the offences, Monis then pleaded guilty to all twelve charges of ‘using a carriage service to offend on the grounds of recklessness’. Although the judge who sentenced him described the letter offences as ‘deplorable’, Monis was lucky to escape the maximum two-year jail sentence he could have been given. Instead he was sentenced to 300 hours community service and put on a two-year good behaviour bond.

  Other charges

  By December 2014 Monis was appearing in various courts for far more serious matters. He was charged with being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife, who was set alight and violently stabbed in the stairwell of his Werrington unit block in Sydney’s west on 13 April 2013. A Penrith Local Court magistrate at the time, found that the police case against Monis and his girlfriend, Amirah Droudis, was weak, and after a brief period of custody he was granted bail.

  It would eventually emerge, however, that after radicalising Droudis and putting her up to the 2013 murder, Monis had lured his ex-wife to the unit block and was trying to seek ‘God’s vengeance’ for a family dispute.

  Droudis, who was given a minimum thirty-three year jail sentence for the murder, repeatedly stabbed the woman and set her on fire while wearing a black hijab and carrying petrol and matches.

  A neighbour who saw the attack testified that the murdered woman pleaded for her life crying and asking Droudis to stop.6

  It would also emerge that Monis went to elaborate lengths to distance himself from the crime, including faking a heart attack and a car crash on the day she died and also faking a robbery at his home.

  From January 2014 onwards, allegations also emerged that between 2000 and 2002 Monis had sexually assaulted women who answered advertisements he had placed in local western Sydney newspapers for ‘spiritual healing’ sessions, in which he professed to be able to ‘cleanse them of evil spirits’. He was charged with more than forty sexual assault offences and again released on bail.

  The bail was granted just a few days after more lenient bail laws in New South Wales came into effect, removing presumption against bail for certain crimes unless there were exceptional circumstances, but the laws were later repealed.7

  The sexual assault charge matters were due back in court in February 2015, two months after the siege, and so will never be resolved.

  Monis took the abusive letters matter back to the High Court on Friday 12 December 2014 when his lawyers asked the judges to reconsider the ‘constitution’ argument because of the three–three divide on the decision when it was heard in 2013.

  The High Court straightaway dismissed his application, throwing out his very last avenue of appeal.8

  That decision must have eaten away at him over the weekend because three days later, on Monday 15 December 2014, just metres away from the court building, he snapped and the Sydney siege began.

  The inquest

  The inquest into the siege was different from the many other inquests I’ve covered, because it ran for so long and because it started on 29 January 2015, very soon after the event itself. Usually inquests take a little longer to get off the ground due to the preparation time needed by all the parties involved.

  There was an elaborate security system in place for the media, and our newsrooms had to pre-register reporters who were covering the inquest. A daily sign-in process around the corner at the Downing Centre included being issued with a colour-coded armband and laminated tag identification system.

  A media room was especially set up for the inquest next to a court in the JMT building in Goulburn Street behind the Downing Centre, and it was full each day.

  Surprisingly, there weren’t big crowds of court watchers, perhaps partly because of the high security check-in process and perhaps partly because there had already been so much media coverage of the siege and a number of television interviews with the hostages.

  Some of the court staff worked on the inquest for its duration and became familiar faces as we signed in each day. It was as if they knew how difficult the inquest would be for everyone involved and they went out of their way to be helpful.

  On one occasion, however, there were a few tense hours when two reporters and a camera operator had their media accreditation temporarily cancelled and were marched outside by court officials to be warned about contempt of court charges. They had taken pictures of the screen set-up in the media room where the proceedings were being live-streamed from the court. The trio were spoken to by the New South Wales sheriff who then also reminded the rest of the media room about court rules that included no filming inside.

  After just over an hour of negotiations, all three had their accreditation reinstated and were allowed back in. Court staff then told us that photographers and camera crews were only allowed to take photos of the screens near the
court to help them identify witnesses when they got outside the building.

  The New South Wales Coroner Michael Barnes, started with an overview of what had happened in the Lindt café and of what he would be looking at as the inquest unfolded. The inquest then ran in instalments for almost two years and heard from 123 witnesses, with the findings handed down on 24 May 2017.

  The coroner went on to investigate the deaths of Tori Johnson, Katrina Dawson and Monis.

  Tori Johnson had been employed by the Lindt café since 2012 and Katrina Dawson was meeting her friend and work colleague Julie Taylor, who was nineteen-weeks pregnant, for a morning coffee when they were taken hostage. Julie Taylor escaped from the ordeal unharmed and later named the daughter she gave birth to after the siege, Emily Katrina as a tribute to Katrina Dawson.

  Coroner Michael Barnes described the inquest as one of the most complex in Australia and said it had implications for national security and public confidence in the police force. He looked at the events of the siege itself and the police response.

  During the first day of the coroner’s overview in January 2015, I’ll never forget the hush in the media room when some of the details were revealed for the first time about the final moments of the hostages Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson and how Monis forced Johnson to kneel before shooting him in the back of the head.

  Counsel Assisting Jeremy Gormly SC, said, as police moved into the café to end the more than sixteen-hour siege, Katrina Dawson was hit by police bullet fragments and later died.9

  As the inquest unfolded, the Johnson and Dawson families and the media fought to have the three top police officers give evidence, as at first they had only been required to provide written statements to the inquest.

  The former Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione, Deputy Commissioner Catherine Byrne and acting Deputy Commissioner Jeff Loy all argued that they only had to provide written statements because they did not give any orders or advice about the siege on the day.