The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) NSW announced on 10 August that it was applying to the NSW Supreme Court to have a charge laid against a Corrective Services NSW (CSNSW) officer, who shot a Wiradjuri man in the back, upgraded from manslaughter to murder.
To charge a prison guard with the murder of a First Nations detainee is unprecedented in Australia. Indeed, charging the prison guard with manslaughter in relation to the death in February last year was already a first in itself.
The unidentified prison officer shot at 43-year-old Dwayne Johnstone three times on 15 March 2019, as the handcuffed and shackled remandee ran from him and a colleague in an attempt to escape out the front of Lismore Base Hospital. The third shot hit Johnstone in the back and proved fatal.
