Celebrity crocodile wrangler Matt Wright has been ordered to pay the Northern Territory Police Commissioner’s court costs after claiming a warrant to bug his home “might have been a forgery”.
The 46-year-old is currently serving a five-month stint in Darwin’s Holtze Prison after he was found guilty by a Supreme Court jury last year of two counts of attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Wright outside court with his wife Kaia during his trial. (ABC News: Dane Hirst)
The charges related to Wright’s efforts to frustrate an investigation into a fatal helicopter crash that killed his friend and Netflix co-star Chris “Willow” Wilson in 2022.
Prison conditions for Matt Wright revealed
Wright was acquitted on a third charge — prosecutors alleged a listening device placed in his Queensland home had recorded him instructing a friend to “burn” or “torch” records relating to the crash.
But his legal team had earlier launched a bid to have the recordings thrown out after commissioning an expert report relating to the warrant authorising police to place the bug.
“That report tended to suggest that the document relied on by the police as authority for the installation of listening devices might have been a forgery created by electronically altering an earlier document,” Justice Alan Blow said in his costs decision.
But Justice Blow said it later emerged that the judge who issued the warrant had kept a copy and it was established that “both documents were identical”.
Justice Alan Blow awarded costs against Wright (ABC News: Maren Preuss)
“All questions of authenticity were resolved when arrangements were made to compare the retained copy with the document produced by the commissioner,” he said.
However, before that occurred, Wright’s solicitors issued the commissioner with two subpoenas “for the production of warrants and related documents for the purpose of investigating their authenticity”.
“It was only after the second of [two] directions hearings that practical steps were taken to resolve the forgery question by making arrangements to inspect the issuing judge’s copy of the surveillance device warrant,” Justice Blow said.
“Following that inspection, the allegations of forgery were not pursued.”
The court documents reveal the commissioner’s lawyers argued those subpoenas were “unnecessary and inappropriate” and Justice Blow said he accepted the question could have been resolved without them.
Justice Blow also awarded costs against Wright for another subpoena seeking Mr Robinson’s mother’s telephone records after ruling it served “no legitimate forensic purpose”.
Wright’s legal team tried to have the recordings thrown out claiming a warrant to bug his home “might have been a forgery” (ABC News: Tiffany Parker)
“I accept that ordinarily an accused person should not have to compensate investigative and prosecutorial authorities financially for loss or expense incurred in the process of pre-trial disclosure,” he said.
“However, the course taken by the legal representatives of the respondent in issuing the three subpoenas to the commissioner resulted in substantial costs being incurred by him when those costs would not have been incurred if the disclosure of documents had been pursued only through the ordinary channel of requests to the [Director of Public Prosecutions], and if the inspection of the judge’s copy of the surveillance warrant had been arranged sooner rather than later.”
Wright is due to be released from prison in May to serve the rest of his 10-month sentence in the community.