After listening to almost two weeks of evidence and reading hundreds of pages of text messages, a jury has found a Northern Territory police officer not guilty of raping a young woman.
Senior Sergeant Patrick Carson spent nearly a fortnight in the dock, after pleading not guilty to two charges of sexual intercourse without consent.
Prosecutors had accused him of twice raping a young woman he befriended through a shared interest in 2020.
"There are no winners in a case like this," Mr Carson said on the steps of the Supreme Court after the verdict.
Holding his wife's hand and surrounded by friends and family, Mr Carson thanked the men and women of the jury for "reaffirming [his] innocence."
"I'd like to acknowledge and thank my wife, my family and my friends for their unwavering support across the past 21 months," Mr Carson said.
"I look forward to putting this painful period behind us."
Court heard of 'hundreds' of messages between complainant and cop
The Senior Sergeant has been suspended from the NT Police force on pay since charges were laid.
Much of the jury trial was closed to the public and media, as the complainant gave evidence to the court over several days.
The two charges related to alleged incidents in 2020; the first during a massage Mr Carson gave the complainant and the second on a couch in a house in Darwin's northern suburbs.
Mr Carson's barrister, Mary Chalmers SC, told the jury on the first day of the trial there was "no dispute" the pair were alone together on the two dates in question, but that there had been "no sexual intercourse of any description".
Jurors were provided with more than 800 pages of social media messages between the complainant and Mr Carson, which prosecutors alleged were equivalent to a "chronicle of how to groom and take advantage of someone."
Jurors took about 40 minutes to come to a unanimous decision.
The court heard Mr Carson and the complainant engaged in "secret" chats, which the crown argued were to keep his "worried" wife "at arm's length" and suggested the young woman was made to "feel special" by Mr Carson.
But defence barrister Mary Chalmers SC argued the complainant was at times a "barefaced liar" who had become infatuated with Mr Carson throughout the course of their friendship.
"Others could clearly see she had some kind of infatuation with him … leaning on him, snuggling up to him … it's plain as day how she felt about Mr Carson," Ms Chalmers SC said in her closing address to jurors.
Ms Chalmers SC said the pair may have been "on the cusp of an affair" but refuted all accusations Mr Carson had assaulted her.
"We're all grown-ups in this room, we know that … these dalliances happen from time to time. And some of you might not approve of people having those dalliances with that particular age gap or those particular relationships, for example with a married man," Ms Chalmers SC said.
The court heard the complainant texted a friend on the day of the first alleged incident saying, "we really nearly stuffed things up", a message Ms Chalmers SC said indicated both she and Mr Carson had been involved in something.
“It is very easy for a young woman like [the complainant] to make an allegation against a married man when there's only two of them there on the occasion in question," Ms Chalmers SC said.
"It is very easy for her to make that allegation and very hard to disprove."
