Ian Gray had worked in the law for 40 years, so high-profile cases were nothing new. But never in his career were so many eyes on him as on 28 September 2015, when he was serving as the Victorian coroner.
He was about to deliver his findings into the death of 11-year-old Luke Batty, a horrific case of filicide that shocked Australia and forced governments to seriously rethink their approach to tackling family violence. “It was very intense,” Gray says. “While many cases are moving, Luke’s was a particularly moving case.”
Luke was killed in February 2014 when his father, Greg Anderson, hit him with a cricket bat and stabbed him in public view on a field in Tyabb, south of Melbourne, before stabbing himself and being shot dead by police.
Reporters from around the country gathered to hear Gray’s recommendations after his investigation into the death. Luke’s mother, Rosie Batty, sat in the front row. Next to her, on an empty witness stand, sat a photograph of her with Luke.
The articulate and open comments Batty made in the immediate aftermath of her son’s death helped to propel the issue of family violence to become one of national significance, and led to her being named the 2015 Australian of the Year.
Behind her in the court, family violence survivors and advocates waited expectantly, hoping Gray would recognise the lack of support, funding and coordination in the system they had been trying to highlight for years, and more importantly, suggest what could be done about it.
It was one of the last cases of Gray’s career, and the one he acknowledges was the most scrutinised. He retired this year at the age of 66 after four decades of legal work across Victoria, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Timor-Leste. He is widely respected by the highest echelons of the court and by both sides of politics for his considered and fair treatment of some of the most complex justice issues. There was an understated and measured approach to the way he ran a courtroom. He expertly moved witnesses past tense moments while also displaying compassion, and was well-liked by his colleagues.
His home in St Kilda is a quirky contrast to the structured nature of the court. It has become, over the years, a kind of art gallery, an eclectic mix of mostly Aboriginal pieces on display. They were collected over the decades by his wife, the feminist playwright Suzanne Spunner. Even in the kitchen, barely a piece of wall remains uncovered.
One of Spunner’s most well-received plays, the award-winning Dragged Screaming to Paradise, was based on the culture shock of moving with Gray to the Northern Territory with their two young children in tow in 1987. Gray had accepted a job as principal legal adviser to the Northern Territory Land Council, an experience he said gave him an invaluable understanding of Aboriginal customs, art and culture. Thankfully, Spunner grew to love the territory, and the pair decided to stay.
In 1992 Gray was made chief magistrate of the Northern Territory. He moved back to Victoria in 1997 to serve a record 11 years as chief magistrate there before becoming a judge in the county court and then state coroner.
He took on many landmark cases throughout his career but it was the Batty case, spanning his last two years as coroner, that was perhaps the most intense. “I was very conscious of the importance of the case and, more importantly than anything, the need to make useful recommendations,” he said. “You get used to it, but coroners are human and as anyone would expect that they have a range of reactions to the cases they deal with.”
A coroner’s role is not to apportion blame or to sentence offenders. Rather, a coroner investigates a death to determine the cause, and to recommend what, if anything, could be done differently in future to prevent similar deaths. Despite the non-adversarial nature of the coroner’s court, Gray says there are moments of despair and intensity.
“It was an emotional inquest because it was held quite soon after Luke’s death,” Gray says. “Sometimes it can be too soon. I don’t think it was too soon in this case, because Rosie Batty wanted it, and I felt there was public interest in it being held as quickly as possible. But it was very intense, and the in-court intensity remained throughout.
“There were a couple of moments where Rosie Batty was really upset and expressed profound frustration and despair, crying out, explaining how she had done everything she could to keep Luke safe. It was very legitimate and came from the most profound place of loss and despair. You do feel struck, sometimes, by the pathos in court.”
But as coroner, it was Gray’s job to allow the moment, acknowledge the evidence, and then to move on from it so the inquest could continue without “having to adjourn at each moment of hyper-intensity”. “You can’t be so emotionally affected that you lose your concentration or ability to control the case or run the court,” he says.
After considering the evidence Gray found that though Luke’s death was a “premeditated act of filicide,” no one could have predicted Anderson would kill Luke. He made 29 recommendations, a lot for an inquest, after weeks of evidence from police, court officers, Batty, child protection services and others.
Gray found that opportunities were missed by courts, doctors and police to refer Anderson for psychiatric assessment; that delays in the court system and a lack of coordination between police meant Anderson never faced charges against him in the court; and that there was a lack of consistent risk-assessment tools to help determine Anderson’s risk of harming others.
In a rare move, Gray directed his recommendations to the premier, Daniel Andrews. Last month Andrews announced that all of Gray’s recommendations would be adopted.
“Directing findings at a government doesn’t happen often, I hadn’t done it before and I didn’t do it again,” Gray said. “But this case covered and involved a range of government departments and activities, and because the Victorian government was extremely focused on addressing family violence, I directed the findings at the premier. And I’m pleased they’ve been accepted.”
His recommendations were also acknowledged and supported in the findings of Australia’s first royal commission into family violence, handed down in March.
It was one of many horrific cases of violence against women and children handled by Gray. He investigated the 2012 murder of Jill Meagher, and delivered findings into the murder of Kelly Thompson, who was brutally murdered by her ex-partner, Wayne Wood, in 2014.
Gray has handled the pressure and task of constantly dealing with death by attempting to keep sensible work hours, going for long walks, singing once a week with his community choir, sailing and doing yoga.
He says he has always had a strong sense of social justice, and a firm belief courts should strike a balance between keeping the community safe and ensuring justice for victims, while also reducing the chance of someone reoffending. He believes magistrates should have the flexibility to use their wisdom in dealing with offenders.
This was a belief that came under attack during his final years as chief magistrate in Darwin. Many governments have bowed to pressure to “get tough” on crime, often in response to media campaigns that distort the true risk of a crime or the characteristics of those responsible for them.
In 1997 the then chief minister of the Northern Territory for the Country Liberal party, Shane Stone, introduced a mandatory sentencing regime for juvenile offenders charged with property theft or damage. Stone was, by his own admission, someone who ran “a very high-level law-and-order government”.
It was for this reason that, after five and a half years as chief magistrate, Gray resigned from the role. He publicly criticised Stone’s amendments to the Northern Territory sentencing and juvenile justice acts, saying the changes jeopardised the integrity of the court. Despite voicing his concerns to the attorney general, Gray could not stop the laws from being introduced.
“The inevitable target, intended or not, was Indigenous youth,” Gray says. “You sentence an enormous number of Aboriginal offenders in the Northern Territory, and you want and need the options for how you might sentence them.” He also believed the move would lead to an increase in Aboriginal deaths in custody.
The first case Gray heard under the changes was that of a 17-year-old Caucasian man who got drunk one night and smashed the rearview mirror of a car. The boy had no criminal history and was doing well at school, but Gray had no choice but to sentence him to the mandatory 14 days in jail. Under the changes, a second property offence carried a mandatory sentence of three months and a third offence of one year. The jail time applied whether the offence was damaging a valuable item or stealing a packet of biscuits.
While Gray believes in punitive, harsh justice for violent offenders, he was and remains deeply concerned by mandatory sentencing, saying it removes a magistrate’s ability to use their experience to make wise and just decisions. “For me it was untenable to continue in the position given the prospect of locking people up for minor offences,” he says. “I was also ready to move back to Victoria with my family, so the timing was right, but certainly the reforms were a key reason for me moving on from that position when I did.”
Gray still cares about the treatment of young offenders. It was “absurd”, he says, to issue young people with fines that they would never be able to pay and that might ultimately land them in detention.
Youth offending remains under scrutiny today in the Northern Territory, where a royal commission is under way into the failure of the detention system to protect youth. “The techniques used in Don Dale were excessively harsh, and the continuing explosion in the rates of incarceration of young Australians in parts of the country is a national shame,” Gray says.
He is a staunch believer in transparency and openness in the justice system, including allowing journalists and the public access, where ethical, to as much information about cases as possible.
As Victoria’s chief magistrate, he was involved in court open days, school presentations and community outreach sessions. In 2007 he agreed to let Channel Nine film inside the magistrates court for its reality television show The Code: Crime and Justice.
In 2008 he was involved in introducing a scheme that saw duty barristers rostered on in courts to represent unrepresented litigants pro bono. Today that program is entrenched in the court system.
He also worked in his magistrate and coroner roles to reduce delays in the court system, which he admits to being “obsessive about”, saying delays in justice erode public confidence. “It’s the greatest eroder of public confidence in justice, people sitting around waiting to be heard, or waiting forever for decisions to be made,” he says.
In a career that included serving as head of the land and property unit with the United Nations transitional administration in Timor-Leste, where he helped to resolve land disputes in the newly independent country, Gray says it is difficult to pinpoint a highlight.
But he says he did not retire because he had grown tired of the job. “I was still thoroughly enjoying my role as coroner it and completely into it,” he says. “But stopping work and how you go about it is a complex challenge, and I thought I should stop while I was still enjoying it and while I still have time to do other things.”
His first move post-retirement was to spend a couple of months walking the Camino Francés, a pilgrimage route to Santiago in Spain. Since returning he has joined the board of a local legal service in his home suburb of St Kilda called First Step.
It tries to help people addicted to alcohol and other drugs who have also committed crimes. For vulnerable people with health issues, he says, courts needed more flexible ways of implementing justice and more options than just prison sentences or fines.
“Offenders are taken by a lawyer though the magistrates court where, under the court’s watchful eye, they can work with clinicians to reduce their addiction and dependency and to become healthy and employed,” Gray says. “It’s a very credible and intelligent way of reducing the risk of reoffending, so it is beneficial to both the individual and society.”
Gray is also adjunct professor in the college of law and justice at Victoria University, and is working closely with it on issues relating to Timor-Leste.
He hopes he can apply what he has learned through his decades in the courts to do good on the outside. His career had exposed him to “the great parade of humanity in all of its beauty and tragedy”.
“You should come out of it all with a real balanced sense of what people are forced to endure and what people go through.”
