EDITORIAL: We told you when we started this that those in positions of power were not going to be happy with our reporting, and we expected them to lash out when held accountable to the public for their actions.

First, it was the former chief minister who ran from this publication at a press conference before banning us because he didn’t like our questions that went to the heart of accountability in government. Then the new Chief Minister inexplicably kept the ban in place.

And now it’s the deeply unpopular Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker taking issue with our existence and showing how frustrated he is that we keep finding and reporting things he appeared to hide from the public.

The latest attack occurred at yesterday’s coronial inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker, where Chalker’s taxpayer-funded lawyer Ian Freckleton went on a rant about the editorial we ran a few days ago reaffirming our position that we would not be intimidated by Chalker’s bully-boy antics and would continue to report on the things he does not want reported.

The rant was a doozy, with all the best words a man working for this Police Commissioner could produce to lash out at the fourth estate: “sensational, appalling, disgraceful” is how he described our editorial before throwing in the classic “gutter journalism” zinger to make sure we all understood how frustrated he and Chalker are with our reporting.

The editorial that caused their ire ran on Tuesday. For some reason it took Freckleton an extra day to process it and he aired his grievances about its content on Thursday morning ahead of witness testimony.

His spray was not unexpected – the timing was no coincidence and it wasn’t because he’s a slow reader.

Sixteen hours before his attack on this publication and his extraordinary calls for the Coroner to hold the NT Independent in contempt of court for reporting facts – which could have seen the latest story blocked from publication – Jamie Chalker received 13 questions from this publication relating to his involvement in using potentially tainted evidence at the murder trial of Zach Rolfe.

The draft report at the centre of the controversy, prepared in part by respected Superintendent Scott Pollock, found that investigators forced police witnesses to provide statements with threats of disciplinary action if they didn’t participate in the criminal investigation, found the crown’s use-of-force witness was biased and didn’t understand the law, and also found that a supposedly independent report prepared by an American use-of-force “expert” had been “edited” at the request of investigators.

It also found that the two use-of-force “experts” used to secure the murder trial were not provided with all the evidence before making their findings.

Chalker, his senior executive team and Crown prosecutor Philip Strickland were in possession of this report before the murder trial commenced in February. And while they decided not to use the American expert at trial, they did rely on his $100,000 report at the committal hearing to send Rolfe to the Supreme Court charged with murder.

Strickland too, needs to explain his actions in this sordid ordeal, but refused to comment when sent questions this week.

As the Rule of Law Institute’s Chris Merritt pointed out in yesterday’s story: “If the matters outlined in the draft report are accurate, they suggest unknown parties associated with the investigation may have attempted to tilt the scales of justice and mislead the Supreme Court”.

We can think of nothing more serious than that in the lead up to a murder trial and there has been no claims by Chalker or his lawyer that the findings are untrue.

Instead of answering for his actions, Chalker had Freckleton attack this newspaper for its reporting and ultimately sought to prevent us from reporting the most recent story about the compromised evidence with unfounded claims we had breached a non-publication order.

It sounds familiar. Back in June 2021, when he was trying to explain why he had not made the defence team aware of the so-called Pollock report that refuted police witness testimony, Chalker had the audacity to attempt to have the court suppress the media from reporting on his alleged actions to bury the evidence.

The latest revelations go to the heart of our justice system and the report’s findings are deeply unsettling for Territorians who believe in a fair justice process.

If NT Police officers thought their commissioner did not have their backs over the charging of one of their own with murder, what could they possibly take away from the report’s findings that the executive knew about potentially tainted evidence and proceeded regardless?

That’s a question Chalker does not want anyone contemplating and instead chose to use the inquest to attack rather than explain his actions. We have given him every opportunity to explain to his members and the general public why he did what he did but he continually refuses and chooses to cast aspersions on simple facts after they are reported.

Better to accuse the NT Independent of breaching a non-publication order than accept responsibility.

Let’s make this clear, once again, for our learned friend and the Commissioner.

We did not breach a non-publication order and further, the source report we relied on is not specifically listed in the annexure of material currently under a non-publication ban.

The other issue here is that the Coroner is not expected to review how the NT Police managed their potentially corrupted murder investigation against Zach Rolfe, which means this issue is very live at the moment and the worst part is nobody appears to be in a position to investigate it.

Would there be an urgency to investigate what this draft report has exposed if a man was in jail for a crime he didn’t commit and was sent there by people who were manipulating evidence and coercing witnesses?

That’s what appears almost happened here and the fact they have so far escaped accountability for trying to do it casts an ongoing chill over the entire Northern Territory’s justice system.