Queensland police acted maliciously in wrongful jailing of Indigenous man, court finds

A Queensland court has ruled an Aboriginal man was maliciously prosecuted by police when he was wrongly jailed for a bank robbery almost three decades ago.

The court of appeal ruled on Tuesday that Terry Irving had wrongly spent 1671 days in prison for an armed bank robbery he did not commit.

On 19 March 1993, a robber armed with a sawn-off shotgun and wearing a beret, dark glasses and a scarf partially covering his face entered the Cairns ANZ branch and stole about $6,000 cash.

Irving was charged less than two months after the robbery, and spent more than four and a half years in prison. He was released in December 1997 after the director of public prosecutions conceded during a high court hearing that he had not been given a fair trial, and the court quashed his convictions.

He had firstly been charged with being an accessory after the fact to the robbery, and was investigated while he was in custody for the first charge. It was the accessory prosecution which the court agreed was malicious.

Irving had sued the detective who investigated the robbery and the state of Queensland.

Melissa Meyers, a senior associate at Maurice Blackburn, said in a statement that it should not have taken so long for Irving to achieve justice.