DARWIN — After more than a decade of legal proceedings, on August 18 Letty Scott withdrew criminal charges she had brought against four Berrimah prison officers she had accused of murdering her husband, Douglas Scott.

The prison officers claimed that Douglas Scott was found hanging by a bed sheet in his prison cell in July 1985. A coronial inquiry, as well as the 1989 Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, determined he had hanged himself.

New evidence that Scott was murdered came to light in a civil compensation case heard in the Northern Territory Supreme Court earlier this year. However, announcing the decision to drop the private criminal charges, Letty Scott's legal representative, Daniel Taylor, said she did not have sufficient funds to pursue the case.

Kathy Newnam

From Green Left Weekly, August 24, 2005.
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