Five years ago thousands of Australians defied Covid restrictions to pour on to the streets of our cities and towns as part of the global Black Lives Matter movement.

The protests here highlighted the appalling rates of Aboriginal people dying in police and prison custody. One death in particular became a rallying point: that of David Dungay Jr, who died while being restrained, pleading that he could not breathe, in similar circumstances to George Floyd in the US.

The 26-year-old Dunghutti man, who had diabetes and schizophrenia, was in Long Bay jail hospital in November 2015 when five guards stormed his cell after he refused to stop eating a packet of biscuits.

Dungay, known to his family as Junior, was dragged to another cell, held face down and injected with a sedative. In harrowing footage later shown to the coroner and partly released to the public, Junior said 12 times that he couldn’t breathe before losing consciousness and dying.

Junior’s family – especially his mum, Leetona, and nephew Paul Silva – have since been catapulted into representing a movement whose ranks are continuously swelled by more grieving Aboriginal families, all of them forced to deal with alienating and opaque processes of police “investigation”, and coronial inquests that take years to get to court, more years to decide what happened to their loved ones, and then all the years after which nothing appears to change.

In Junior’s case, the coroner heard that medical staff at Long Bay had failed for periods of up to eight minutes to perform basic CPR. They had then forgotten to remove the safety cap from resuscitation equipment, which came off in Junior’s........

© The Guardian