The Truth Hurts is an unflinching exploration of the fault lines in our justice system by an outsider who found his way in.
Thought-provoking and at times brutal, barrister Andrew Boe spares no one, including himself, in questioning the notion of truth in our courts of law.
Drawing on his experiences as a child of Burmese migrants, and his evolution from a naive law clerk to a lawyer whose willingness to speak truth to power riled many within the legal establishment, Boe delves into cases that he was unable to leave behind. He takes us from a suicide in the Gibson Desert to deaths in custody on Palm Island and in Yuendumu, places where race relations are stalled in a colonial time warp; to an isolated rural home, and the question of what is self-defence for women after decades of domestic abuse; and into courthouses around the country where he defended serial killers, rapists, child sex offenders, murderers as well as the odd politician - holding fast to the premise that either every one of us is entitled to the presumption of innocence or none of us are.