The Prison Diary of Ciaron O’Reilly

The Imprisonment of Ciaron O’Reilly: A Miscarriage of Justice

By Ciaron O’Reilly
Woodford Correctional Centre, Queensland
9 October 2026

About five years ago, I remarked to a friend in London:

“The next time I get sentenced to jail, it will be for something I did not do.”

And thus it has come to pass.

This is not my first rodeo in terms of being targeted for a “miscarriage of justice“.

Queensland, 1978: A Marriage of Corruption and Repression

When I was a scrawny 17-year-old, on 4 March 1978, during my first week at university, I was bashed while participating in a banned street march.

My assailant was Detective John Frederick Johnston of the corrupt Consorting Squad of the very corrupt Queensland Police Force.

I was framed and convicted of assaulting a police officer twice my size.

Later that year, Johnston and Detective Terrence Edwards were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment after being convicted of extortion.

Edwards was later to surface in the Fitzgerald Inquiry, while Johnston moved to Sydney.

The main witness against them, Norm the doorman? Well, they never found his body.

That was Queensland in the 1970s: a marriage of corruption, denial of civil liberties and suppression of freedom of expression.

Has much changed?

The Catholic Worker Movement and Boggo Road Jail

In 1982, I co-founded the Australian branch of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement.

The movement was founded in New York City in 1933, during the Great Depression, and was based on the praxis of solidarity and service to the homeless, non-violent resistance to war and preparations for war, and the embodiment of a new economy based on peace and justice.

In Brisbane, we opened a house of hospitality for Aboriginal street kids and prisoners newly released from nearby Boggo Road Jail.

We also began to frequent Boggo Road Jail ourselves, as short-term prisoners for refusing to pay fines arising from arrests during our non-violent resistance to nuclear war preparations and restrictions on free speech.

In 1983, following the shooting of a prisoner at Boggo Road Jail and the subsequent riot by prisoners, our Catholic Worker house was raided by the Special Branch.

Armed with search warrants, police searched our typewriter and rubbish.

The Queensland government was claiming it had received a terrorist threat to release foot-and-mouth disease among the country’s cattle if certain demands concerning improvements to conditions at Boggo Road Jail were not met.

It quickly became obvious to me, following statements from members of the Queensland Cabinet, that they were setting me up to take the fall as the culprit behind this threat, real or imagined!

The fact that members of our Catholic Worker community were all vegetarians, opposed on principle to hurting cows or cattle, seemed to have escaped the Special Branch.

We launched a petition in which the Catholic Bishop of Brisbane and other prominent figures vouched for us as vegetarian pacifists who wouldn’t hurt cows or cattle.

A press conference was held, and the Special Branch backed off.

I regarded this attempted miscarriage of justice as a ploy to remove the appalling conditions in Boggo Road Jail from the front pages following the shooting and riot, replacing them with the sensational headline of a terrorist threat.

The B-52 Bomber and American Justice

In 1993, I was imprisoned in the United States for my role in disabling a B-52 bomber with hammers at Griffiss Air Force Base, near Rome in upstate New York, on 1 January 1991, on the cusp of the US-led Gulf War massacre in Iraq.

As my sentence was reaching its conclusion, I was transferred from a jail in Texas to a penitentiary in Louisiana.

At the end of my sentence, I was declared guilty of a crime involving “moral turpitude”, a term I had never heard before and have rarely encountered since.

This, of course, was a ploy to ban me from the United States for life.

The American authorities had used such measures effectively against the left-wing actor Charlie Chaplin.

Miscarriages of justice are often ploys to distract attention from larger crimes and to slander their victims.

In my present case, the false accusations of going armed in public and stalking have been made, I contend, to distract attention from the complainant’s live-in boyfriend, who threatened to kill me and burglarised my family home.

The boyfriend was homeless when I invited him, as a guest, to move into my family home, which has been in my family since 1960.

It quickly became obvious to me that he was a rampant alcoholic with a long criminal history of breaking and entering and drug dealing.

I evicted him after discovering him dealing drugs to two young men on my back patio.

By this stage, he had become involved with a woman living across the road from my home.

He moved in with her and, I allege, has used her home as a base from which to burglarise my house and continue his criminal activities in the neighbourhood.

It appears that his host and partner is willing to stand by her man, even to the extent of lying about me.

I maintain that these lies form the basis of the five charges against me and the denial of bail.

No Stranger to Injustice

I am not embarrassed by being in jail on such trumped-up charges.

I have met many good people who have been through this experience.

I accompanied Julian Assange for 14 long years through a torrent of slander and injustice visited upon him.

I lived and worked with Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, who were associated with the Harrisburg conspiracy trial.

I have met Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four and members of the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six, people who suffered grave miscarriages of justice.

Their experiences have helped me understand my own.

I have spent much of my life resisting war, defending civil liberties and standing alongside people targeted by the machinery of the state.

Now I find myself once again on the receiving end of that machinery.

The circumstances may change. The accusations may change. The institutions may change their names.

But the question remains:

Has much changed since Queensland in the 1970s?

Ciaron O’Reilly
Woodford Correctional Centre
9 October 2026

—

A Cri de Cœur

I have known Ciaron O’Reilly for nearly 50 years, and I am aware of difficulties that he has faced during that time, including his incarceration in Louisiana in the United States after his assault on a B52 bomber with a hammer.

The Ciaron O’Reilly who came back from that prison experience was not the same person as the one I knew when he left. For that reason, I am extremely critical of the notion that someone can recover or be rehabilitated in prison.

Having experienced imprisonment myself, my view is that prison is no place to rehabilitate someone suffering from mental health issues, alcoholism or drug abuse. That is simply my experience. Rehabilitation does not occur in prison. While on remand and on a sentence that was later overturned on appeal, I found that the authorities were particularly harsh on political prisoners putting us in confined spaces with murderers, rapists and people lacking in working class consciousness.

It is for that reason that I am glad that Ciaron has had some form of medical assessment. I do not know precisely what that assessment involved or what action, if any, has been taken as a result. Certainly, from the letters I have received from Ciaron, he does not appear to know either.

I have received three long and cogent letters from him during the period he has been held at Arthur Gorrie and Woodford correctional centres.

I know nothing of the particular facts that led to his recent arrest and the charges laid against him. I have not seen the police case in any form, including what is commonly referred to in Queensland as the QP9. I therefore make no comment on the present allegations or the evidence relating to them.

What I can speak about is my own experience of Ciaron over nearly five decades, including his participation in campaigns against war, in defence of Julian Assange, his work at Justice Products in West End, his memoir of East Timor and his campaign for free speech.

4 March 1978

Although I know nothing about the recent events described by the author in his article above I was physically present in the vicinity when Ciaron O’Reilly was assaulted and hospitalised by Detective John Frederick Johnston on 4 March 1978.

On 31 March 1978 I was subsequently arrested near Griffith University, where Ciaron was studying, and charged with conspiracy to commit an indictable offence in the nighttime — namely ‘burning a magistrate’s lawn‘.

The charges were based solely upon a police verbal which, I maintain, was fabricated by Detectives Charles Murton Butler and Barry Cornelius O’Brien. Through police interrogation I remained silent while Barry Cornelius O’Brien punched me in the guts. The only words that came from my mouth were “I wish to speak with my Solicitor Noel Nunan,” who unbeknown to me was standing outside the watchouse door asking to see me.

I was subsequently acquitted by a jury of these charges. The objective of my actions was to challenge what I regarded as a corrupt criminal justice system in Queensland. I have published a full account of what those actions were in another place.

My knowledge of these events affecting Ciaron O’Reilly is therefore not simply historical or second-hand. I was present at the time, became personally embroiled in subsequent criminal proceedings involving Ciaron O’Reilly and myself, and experienced firsthand the methods employed by Queensland police and judges during that period. I too was refused bail as Ciaron is now. I cannot see the sense in that particularly if he has an alternative place of residence and where he can seek counseling.

The events surrounding the street marches described by Ciaron O’Reilly are part of a history that I witnessed firsthand. They also raise questions about the relationship between policing, political dissent and the administration of justice that remain relevant today. This is why I have posted Ciaron’s cry for help.

Ian Curr
Editor, Workers BushTelegraph
9 October 2026

That incident led to a complex sequence of arrests, police verbals and, in my view, a conspiracy involving detectives and Acting Magistrate William Joseph Mackay to issue false warrants of arrest.