NT Police officer was wrongly ordered to destroy porn collection, Supreme Court rules

AN NT police officer has won an appeal to the Supreme Court allowing him to keep the huge stash of homemade porn he had previously been ordered to destroy

An NT Police officer went to the Supreme Court to overturn a domestic violence order which required he delete a huge stash of homemade porn

AN NT police officer has won an appeal to the Supreme Court allowing him to keep the huge stash of homemade porn he had previously been ordered to destroy.

The police officer, whose name is suppressed, was in 2017 ordered to destroy more than 600 “sexy movies” and photos of his estranged wife from his computer, phone, and any storage device or online photo accounts he had.

The officer’s marriage broke down amid allegations of drunkenness and abuse, and an incident in which he left a pen camera clipped to the pocket of his police uniform hanging in the bathroom while his stepdaughter was showering, an incident which Justice Stephen Southwood said “legitimately caused (the stepdaughter) some concern”.

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The officer’s stepdaughter also alleged she would often come home from school during the day to find her stepfather drunk and watching pornography in the living room, sometimes featuring teenage girls, and sometimes fell asleep naked at night in front of the TV, but Justice Southwood said the stepdaughter’s evidence was “internally inconsistent” and couldn’t be relied on.

Justice Southwood found that the stepdaughter’s evidence did not amount to grounds for a domestic violence order.

Justice Southwood said the girl’s concerns about her stepfather filming her in the shower should have been “overcome” by his explanation that he planned to use the camera pen to film a meeting with a police force HR officer, who he believed “had formed an unfairly adverse view of him”.

A police search of the officer’s electronic devices found no child pornography.

In a police interview, the officer’s estranged wife said after the two got married “I refused to have the sexy photograph taken, he still did it without my consent”, but later said she was drunk when the photos were taken and a Local Court judge found she was “neither candid nor truthful in her evidence”.

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Justice Southwood accepted the man had a “fundamental common law right” to the porn stash, which the Local Court had no power to interfere with.

Justice Southwood said if the officer ever shared the homemade porn with other people – as the woman feared – he could be dealt with under the Territory’s revenge porn laws.