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An ACT Policing deputy commissioner warned her police offers against speaking with former Coalition staffer Bruce Lehrmann’s barristers less than two weeks before a senior investigator allegedly told defence lawyer Steven Whybrow he would resign if the jury found him guilty.
Documentation tendered to a public inquiry into the abandoned rape trial showed Commander Joanne Cameron emailed Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold SC on October 12, 2022, to say she held concerns about Lehrmann’s defence approaching potential police witnesses while the trial was under way.
Bruce Lehrmann and his lawyer Steven Whybrow outside the ACT Supreme Court in October last year.Credit: Rhett Wyman
“I hold a view that such approaches are at the very least inappropriate from the perspective of effecting the prosecution of the matter and an attempt to influence the giving of any future evidence by my members, and even the sheer fact of the perception generated by the fact that Defence counsel and police are communicating, is not acceptable,” Cameron told Drumgold.
“I have advised my staff that all potential, currently nominated or otherwise, witnesses avoid any communication with Defence counsel prior to the giving of their evidence in court or preferably, until the conclusion of the matter at court generally.”
The ACT government probe into the conduct of authorities in the trial was announced after a public breakdown in the relationship between police and the prosecutor’s office after the case was discontinued in December last year.
Lehrmann pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting his former colleague Brittany Higgins in the parliamentary office of former Coalition government minister Linda Reynolds – for whom the pair both worked – after a night drinking with colleagues in March 2019.
The trial was aborted in October 2022 due to juror misconduct, and a retrial was abandoned due to Drumgold’s fears for Higgins’ mental health.
ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold said he complained to the territory’s head of police about investigators liaising with Lehrmann’s defence team.Credit: Rhett Wyman
In a statement tendered to the inquiry, Whybrow said ACT police Detective Inspector Marcus Boorman told him during a secret meeting in a Canberra backstreet near the court complex on October 24, while the jury was deliberating on his verdict, that his client was innocent.
“DI Boorman indicated to me that he was quite distressed about this prosecution,” Whybrow said in his statement. “He made several other comments along these lines and I recall words to the effect ‘if the jury comes back with a guilty verdict, I’m resigning’.”
Cameron had emailed Drumgold after he had written to the ACT Chief Police Officer Neil Gaughan, complaining that he perceived investigators were interfering with the trial.
Drumgold said from the witness box during his third day of giving evidence to the public inquiry on Wednesday that he was concerned one of the officers was going to “great lengths to feed inaccurate … information in the hope of derailing the case”.
Challenging him, inquiry head Walter Sofronoff, said, “so what? His views are inadmissible”.
“How can it upset the trial? Because defence can’t do anything except that is which ethically and legally permitted,” he said.
Drumgold responded: “There had been so much unusual stuff in this trial, I was trying to quarantine it and at least keep it sterile.”
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