A taxi driver who gave a lift to a corrections officer on the day Wayne Fella Morrison was rushed to hospital from Yatala Labour Prison has told the South Australian coroner he overheard guards talking about potentially tampering with evidence.
A surprise witness, Paul MacPherson came forward earlier this year after picking up corrections officer Michael Chapman from his home on the day Morrison was restrained and rushed to hospital.
Though prison guards had been asked by management to stay, Chapman left the prison at the end of his shift. He took a taxi after being asked to return about 7.30pm with the uniform he had worn that day to give to police as evidence.
At a hearing on Thursday, MacPherson said he overheard conversations between Chapman and other guards .
At one point, MacPherson said he overheard another guard tell Chapman that placing his uniform in a plastic bag would “destroy DNA” evidence.
Lawyers for the guards questioned MacPherson about whether he could have misunderstood.
MacPherson, however, insisted the words had “stuck in his mind” over the past five years and that he read the conversation as a direction.
He also said that when Chapman had asked another guard about the physical status of Morrison after he had learned he was hospitalised, his tone lacked empathy.
In a statement given to police earlier this month partially read out in the inquest, MacPherson had recalled that Chapman had asked, “he’s not dead is he?” and said the comment “seemed to be said in frustration of the scrutiny and paperwork that a fatality would bring”.
“There was some sense of frustration… when he first got in the taxi that, ‘oh, I’ve got to go back to Yatala’. That’s where I got that frustration from. That was the tone. He’d actually said why he was going back,” MacPherson said on Thursday.
MacPherson said he had not told anyone about what occurred since but it had “played on his mind” until he felt compelled to contact the coroner’s office directly in February after seeing a news report on NITV about Deaths in Custody matters.
“Those words, you know, ‘he’s not dead is he’, just the lack of empathy which was said. That’s what plays on my mind,” MacPherson said. “Just the casualness of how it was said.”
When Chapman was told about the evidence and given the chance to respond, he repeatedly told the coroner he “did not recall” any conversation he had that day.
He said he could neither confirm or deny what he had said to any single person, even after being shown CCTV video, and could not recall where he had placed his clothes or who he had handed them too.
In other evidence given on Thursday, Matthew Staples, who was security manager at the prison on the day of the incident, said he had been surprised to learn that officers had not followed standard operating procedure by refusing to fill out incident reports.
“That has never happened before,” he said.
Staples also said that officers had been allowed to leave the prison and when police asked to speak to those involved, he had called the officers to ask them to return. One officer said he had had “too much to drink” that night and needed to get a taxi.
“That one stood out in my mind,” Staples said.
Morrison – a 29-year-old Wiradjuri, Kokatha and Wirangu man – had not been convicted of any crime and was being held on remand at the time of his death on 26 September 2016 at the Royal Adelaide hospital.
In the lead up to his death, Morrison had been restrained by the wrists, ankles, placed in a spit hood and positioned face down in the back of a transport van with five officers – Trent Hall, Darren Shillabeer, Liam Mail, Martin Crowe and Jean-Guy Townsend.
On Tuesday the court heard how there was no CCTV footage of what occurred inside the van as Hall’s head obstructed the camera during transit as he would have been in the process of physically holding Morrison down.
On Wednesday, corrections officer Derek Kay appeared at the inquest.
Kay, who was involved with the initial restraint of Morrison and had driven the prison transport van, was expected to give full answers to questions, but he told the coroner he had changed his mind over the weekend on the basis of legal advice.
Kay frequently attempted to claim a legal protection known as “penalty privilege” – where a witness to an coronial inquiry can refuse to answer questions where the answer may expose them to civil or criminal liability – or answered that he “could not recall”.
At one point, the coroner said that the “robust” reliance on legal privilege was at risk of obstructing the inquest.
“In the extreme application of these privileges, we’re fast reaching the point at where this inquiry is being obstructed,” coroner Jayne Basheer said. “I don’t say that lightly but it’s virtually impossible for me to establish even the most basic of facts because the manner in which the privilege being asserted is so robust that even the most innocuous question attracts it, even though the purpose is to understand why this witness gave statements.”
