The case against Canberra Raiders star Josh Papalii will not continue after the ACT Magistrates Court placed a permanent stay on the charges.
Josh Papalii was facing two charges of intimidating a police officer and refusing to leave a premises after an alleged incident at the Raiders club in Gunghalin in September last year.
He was to have faced a hearing earlier this year.
But his lawyers applied for a stay on the charges after discovering police had been discussing the case in a group chat on the encrypted messaging service Signal, which deleted the messages.
The court found there was an irremediable abuse of the process, given that the evidence could not be retrieved.
Group chat ‘totally unprofessional’
The court previously heard the group chat included 12 officers, including one officer who was an alleged victim and others who were investigators on Papalii’s case.
The chat, which began in 2022, was set to auto-delete, so no messages were kept.
The existence of the chat was not disclosed, but emerged from an email where an officer made a remark that when the other officers received the CCTV footage of the incident, they should let him know “via Signal”.
Papalii’s lawyer, Steve Boland, told the court at the time that the chat was “totally unprofessional”.
“It raised the spectre that this is being used as a deliberate back-channel to communicate,” Mr Boland said.
In applying to have the charges halted, Mr Boland raised the fact that law enforcement officers in other jurisdictions were banned from using technology like Signal.
But prosecutor Marcus Dyason said that was not the case in the ACT, and suggested cross-examination could manage any potential concerns about what may have been said in the group chat.
The officers involved in the group chat gave statements to the court, but none could remember specifics of any discussion in the chat about the incident involving Papalii.
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