Criminal justice systems have not been designed to seek the truth. In places like Australia, it remains an adversarial blood sport often distracted by smoke and mirrors. Navigating through it is difficult and uncertain for any one of us but more so if you are poor, not white - or not white enough - not a straight male or have no formal education.
Drawing on his experiences as a child of Burmese migrants fleeing a military junta and his evolution from a naive law clerk, too shy to speak, into a lawyer whose pony-tailed flamboyance and unbridled willingness to speak truth to power riled many within the legal establishment, Andrew Boe delves into cases that he found unable to leave behind. These cases have shaped who he has become. Taking us from a suicide in the Gibson Desert to a death on Palm Island, places where race relations are often stalled in a colonial time warp; to an isolated rural home, and the question of what is self-defence after a woman’s decades of domestic abuse; to meet children abandoned, ‘stolen’ and then fought over; and into prison interview rooms and courthouses around the country where he defended serial killers, rapists, child sex offenders, murderers as well as the odd politician - holding fast to the premise that either every one of us is entitled to the presumption of innocence or none of us are.
The Truth Hurts is an unflinching exploration of the fault-lines in our justice system by an outsider who found his way in. With forthright and uncompromising focus, Boe, now a barrister, spares no one, including himself, in this thought-provoking and at times brutal account. He argues that to give each other ‘a fair go’, we should all first acknowledge the flaws in the system, address our collective weaknesses and contribute to a real conversation about the human cost of not getting to the truth.
