A Northern Territory police officer is suing the territory government for malicious prosecution after being acquitted of raping a young woman five years ago.
Sergeant Patrick Carson was found not guilty of two counts of rape by an NT Supreme Court jury in 2022, following the encounters with the woman two years earlier.
It took jurors less than an hour to return an acquittal after his barrister, Mary Chalmers SC, told the court the woman was a “barefaced liar” who “had some kind of infatuation with him”.
The civil action claims prosecutors continued to pursue the case despite “material totally undermining the credibility of the complainant”. (ABC News: Che Chorley )
In a civil action filed with the court earlier this year, Sergeant Carson claims prosecutors either “did not honestly believe in the case” or “did not have an objectively sufficient basis, or reasonable grounds, for such a belief”.
He says he was arrested by members of the elite Territory Response Group in September 2020 while visiting a McDonald’s restaurant in Ludmilla with his children, before facing trial in June 2022.
Before the trial began, Sergeant Carson says Director of Public Prosecutions Lloyd Babb SC — who is also named as a defendant — rejected an application by Ms Chalmers to withdraw the case.
He claims that was despite the fact trial prosecutor Marty Aust SC “agreed with the plaintiff’s counsel … that there was no reasonable prospect of the prosecution succeeding”.
Patrick Carson says the charges against him were taken to trial “for the dominant purpose of simply getting a result”. (ABC News: Melissa Mackay)
He claims “malice may be inferred from the lack of an honest belief by the prosecutors” in the case against him.
However, the “particulars of absence of reasonable and probable cause” are almost entirely redacted from the documents released by the court.
“The institution and maintenance of the criminal proceeding, in light of the material totally undermining the credibility of the complainant, was high-handed and in contumelious disregard of the proper purpose in bringing criminal proceedings,” the statement of claim reads.
“The conduct of the defendants requires the denunciation of this court via substantial lawful exemplary damages.”
Sergeant Carson is also seeking aggravated damages as well as compensation for legal costs, reputational loss and “distress, embarrassment and humiliation”, which he says was exacerbated by his public arrest.
The lawsuit claims prosecutors “did not want to be seen as protecting one of their own”. (ABC News: Pete Garnish)
“The criminal proceeding was instituted and maintained by the prosecutors for the dominant purpose of simply getting a result, as opposed to bringing a person guilty of a crime to justice,” the document reads.
“[It] was instituted and maintained by the prosecutors because the plaintiff was a serving police officer and the prosecuting authorities did not want to be seen as protecting one of their own by not prosecuting the allegations.”
In its response, the NT government broadly denies the claims and argues some fall outside the relevant limitation period and that prosecutors were acting in good faith.
Mary Chalmers told the jury the complainant was a woman who “lies when she’s under an obligation to tell the truth”. (ABC News: Jason Walls)
In her closing address to the jury during the trial, Ms Chalmers said the woman had “all the hallmarks of the most unreliable witness”.
“This is a woman who lies, she lies when she’s under an obligation to tell the truth and when she’s confronted with her own lie, she reverts to ‘oh well I just can’t recall’,” she said.
“It is very easy for a young woman like [the complainant] to make an allegation against a married man when there’s only two of them there on the occasion in question.
“It is very easy for her to make that allegation and very hard to disprove.”
