ACT prosecutors have been forced to abandon charges against a man accused of a violent robbery because police officers incorrectly gathered the evidence used to identify him.
Key points:
- Jaiden Ashton Higgins was charged with robbing and bashing a man who was walking home from the Belconnen bus interchange
- But the ACT Supreme Court ruled police were “reckless” in the way they gathered evidence
- It caused the case to fall over just hours before Mr Higgins’s trial was due to begin
Jaiden Ashton Higgins, 20, was accused of robbing a man while he walked home from the Belconnen bus interchange in July last year.
Prosecutors had alleged he grabbed the man’s jacket and said: “Give me all your stuff”, before dragging him into a home and locking him in a bedroom.
The man’s phone, wallet and headphones were stolen before he fled the premises.
Mr Higgins was arrested that night and later charged with aggravated robbery and forcible confinement, to which he pleaded not guilty.
He pleaded guilty to a third charge of property damage.
The ACT Supreme Court heard police put together a gallery of photographs of different men – known as a “photo board” – about a month after Mr Higgins’s arrest, where the alleged victim identified Mr Higgins as the person responsible.
But defence barrister Travis Jackson said that breached evidence laws.
He said police should have offered Mr Higgins an “identification parade,” where an alleged victim picks out the alleged perpetrator from a line-up.
The officer in charge of the case told the court that “ideally” you should offer an identification parade, but he was ultimately “pretty happy” with how Mr Higgins had been identified.
“I believed it would not have been feasible to locate eight other similar-looking persons to conduct an identification parade,” his evidence said.
But Mr Jackson argued the officer’s conduct was “simply plain lazy”.
‘A high degree of recklessness’
Justice Chrissa Loukas-Karlsson agreed the police conduct was “far from ideal” and amounted to a “failure to comply with a clear legislative requirement”.
“The potential dangers of identification evidence are well known to the courts,” she said.
“I do not accept that the contravention was ‘slight.’ There was at least a high degree of recklessness.”
She ruled the lesser evidence of the photo board could not be used in the trial to protect the court from the “danger” of mistaken identity.
The decision meant prosecutors were forced to withdraw the two charges against Mr Higgins on Wednesday.
He will be sentenced on the third charge in the coming months.