The Northern Territory Government says it will not scrap its paperless arrest laws, despite a coroner finding the laws would cause more Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Coroner Greg Cavanagh was investigating the death of Kumanjayi Langon and on Friday recommended the laws be repealed.

"We will not be repealing the paperless arrest scheme," NT Attorney-General John Elferink said after Mr Cavanagh delivered his findings at the inquest.

"The matter, of course is up for adjudication in the High Court."

Mr Elferink defended the laws, brought into force by the Government in December, which allow police to hold people for four hours without charge or doing the normal paperwork that would otherwise be required.

The laws have not changed the experience for offenders, only reduced paperwork for the police, Mr Elferink said.

"When a person is brought into custody and they are held in a cell if they are charged with an offence then they are still subject to a determination of bail, whether bail should be granted, when that bail should be granted, or whether that bail should be refused," he said.

Mr Langdon, 59, from Yuendumu in Central Australia, died of heart failure in the Darwin Police Watch House on May 21, three hours after being taken into custody after a paperless arrest.

He was arrested on suspicion of drinking alcohol in Darwin city centre in a prohibited area.

Mr Cavanagh said the laws were "manifestly unfair" because they disproportionately targeted Indigenous people, and were "irreconcilable" with the 1991 royal commission findings that arrest should be used as a last resort to prevent deaths in custody.

"It is no coincidence that the first man to die under the laws is an Aboriginal man," Mr Cavanagh said.

He said the law "in my view perpetuates and entrenches Indigenous disadvantage".

The coroner recommended the repeal of the law "to prevent the risk of an increase in deaths like Kumanjayi Langdon's".

"In my view Kumanjayi Langdon had the right to die as a free man," Mr Cavanagh said.

Mr Cavanagh also said he viewed it as unfair that Aboriginal people who were quietly drinking and not causing a disturbance in the public parks of Darwin's CBD were being targeted for arrest under a policy direction from the Government's paperless arrest law, and under orders from NT Police management, through a blitz operation named Askari.

He said this clashed with the situation of non-Indigenous people being allowed to drink to excess beside them in the alfresco drinking establishments of the CBD — which Indigenous people from the homeless or long grass community would not be allowed to enter because of their state of dress.

Arrest was designed for criminals, the coroner said.

"A civilised society does not subject its citizens to that mortification unless there are no other options," he said.

Mr Cavanagh said police who arrested Mr Langdon had followed the direction of policy makers and police management, and although there were some shortcomings in his care in the watch house, these had not contributed to his death.

Call for inquiry into responses to alcohol abuse

The coroner also recommended that the NT Government should commission an independent expert inquiry into responses to alcohol misuse.

He said that should form the basis for a plan to be developed by the Government working with stakeholders, including Aboriginal people, communities and organisations to find solutions.

Mr Elferink played down the possibility of holding such an inquiry.

"We have to call on Aboriginal people themselves to fix their own lives," he said.

Mr Elferink has three months to either implement the coroner's recommendations or provide a report explaining why the Government will not act on them.

Reacting to the findings, Mr Langdon's cultural brother and the family's spokesman at the inquest, Rex Granites, said it was a relief that the coroner had found no-one was to blame for the death because of their care and treatment of his relative.

Lawyer Jonathon Hunyor (L) speaks with Kumanjayi Langdon's cultural brother Rex Granites. ( ABC: Jane Bardon )

"This shows, with our family, that nobody is to blame. It was the finding that it was the health of my brother that [caused him to] pass," Mr Granites said.

Mr Granites said he was impressed by the coroner's findings that the paperless arrest laws had targeted Indigenous people.

He said, as a former drinker himself who no longer took liquor, he wanted the Government to involve Indigenous people in finding better solutions to alcohol problems.

"At the moment on these communities everybody wants to drink," Mr Granites said.

"The Government has all their meetings [about this] in closed doors. Not where everybody can be speaking out on these issues and can be listened to.

"The Government talks to their buddies, their friends, not the people who really want to help."

He said in the past Indigenous people had often not had the opportunity to speak at forums like the inquest and he was "so happy" to be able to take part, along with members of the NT Police and health staff.

Mr Granite's lawyer at the inquest, Jonathon Hunyor from the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA), welcomed the coroner's findings on the paperless arrest law, and on the need for an alcohol inquiry.

"We think that second step is critical," Mr Hunyor said.

"Punitive, policing approaches to a serious social problem like the Territory's drinking problem, just aren't the way to go.

"There is no evidence to support that they work, and they need approaches based on evidence and working with Aboriginal people to find solutions."