Footy player confronts the cop who LIED during sexual assault case that almost ended his career
Legal counsel for the police officer, who can only be referred to as Officer A due to a suppression order, argued in the Wollongong District Court that their client should be spared jail.
Mr De Belin and Callan Sinclair - who was his co-accused during the sexual assault trial - were also in attendance for the hearing, with the officer now set to return to court for sentencing on September 12.
Officer A had pleaded guilty to one count of perjury after he gave false evidence under oath during a pre-trial hearing in relation to the proceedings against the St George Illawarra player and his friend Sinclair.
The charge relates to his handling of legally privileged text messages that were found on De Belin's mobile phone, which was seized as part of police investigations in 2019.
De Belin and Sinclair were accused of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman in December 2018. The Director of Public Prosecutions later dropped the charges against both men.
De Belin and Sinclair have maintained their innocence throughout, stating any sexual contact was consensual.
Police had accessed 203 text messages on De Belin's phone as part of their investigations, with prosecutor Ciro Triscari telling the court on Tuesday that 190 of those messages contained 'privileged communications between Mr De Belin and his lawyer', Craig Osborne.
Osborne, who is also a director at St George Illawarra Dragons, was labelled in De Belin's phone as 'Craig Lawyer' and had been representing him during the proceedings.
During a pre-trial hearing in February 2020, counsel for De Belin and Sinclair argued that accessing this information on the seized mobile phone breached their clients' right to a fair trial. They subsequently issued a stay application for proceedings, which was rejected.
The pair first appeared in the NSW District Court in 2020, but the trial ended without a verdict. A second trial took place in 2021, but the jury again failed to reach a verdict, with the charges against them eventually dropped.
Officer A had been the subject of an internal three-year investigation by the NSW Police Professional Standards Command and was later charged with perjury relating to the evidence he gave at the pre-trial hearing.
He had told the court that the correspondence on De Belin's phone with 'Craig Lawyer' related only to 'Dragons business'.
But the police officer also admitted to knowing Mr Osborne was working for RMB Lawyers - the firm which was representing De Belin during the proceedings.
Officer A has since pleaded guilty to perjuring himself by falsely claiming that the information in the messages pertained only to 'Dragons business'.
Prosecutor Triscari told the court on Tuesday that Officer A had 'deliberately misled the court' when making that statement.
The prosecutor said: 'This represents a serious example of perjury when one considers the position occupied by the offender in question.
'The proceedings are serious criminal proceedings where the liberty of individuals was at stake.'
Officer A's barrister Peggy Dwyer SC told the court that her client had been suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depressive illnesses after being subjected to 'gruesome and disturbing incidents' during his employment as a police officer.
'There can be no doubt he was suffering from PTSD in February and that it impacted his capacity to give evidence,' Dwyer told the court.
She argued that the perjury was 'an innocent mistake' that had been 'made in a moment of panic' and said Officer A was a 'man of great character'.
Dwyer argued that the actions of Officer A had not impacted the eventual trial of De Belin or Sinclair.
'This was not a case where anything [Officer A] did or didn't do changed whether or not they were charged,' Dwyer said.
Counsel for Officer A then urged the court not to impose a jail term on their client. Instead, Dwyer told the court that any custodial sentence that potentially might be handed down should be served in the community as part of an Intensive Corrective Order.
Dwyer told the court that any jail term could be 'catastrophic' for Officer A's well-being.
The police officer had been stood down from his role in August 2023 on medical grounds.
Meanwhile, De Belin was sidelined from playing for the Dragons for three years under the NRL's no-fault stand-down rule while the legal proceedings took place.
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