SA Police Officer Acquitted of Indecent Assault Despite Court Finding Deliberate Touching

A South Australian police officer has walked free from charges of indecent assault, even though the magistrate who heard his trial found he had deliberately touched a woman's buttock without permission. The peculiar outcome hinges not on what happened, but on how the case was charged and prosecuted.

The 62-year-old officer was accused of aggravated indecent assault for what the court described as "tickling" the woman's bottom over her clothing. She was holding a door open for him in 2022 when she felt the contact—a deliberate movement she found invasive enough to report to police. Security footage confirmed the officer's fingers were curled in a tickling motion. The magistrate, reviewing both the video and her testimony, found her credible and reliable. He was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the touching had occurred exactly as she described it.

Yet the officer was acquitted. The magistrate's reasoning, as later explained by Supreme Court Justice Laura Stein, was straightforward: the law requires proof of indecency for an aggravated indecent assault conviction, and the magistrate could not be satisfied that element had been established. There was no flirtation, no sexual comment, no behaviour suggesting the officer sought sexual gratification or intended to humiliate the woman sexually. The touching, the court concluded, was just as likely a crude joke or a thoughtless gesture.

Here is where the case turns on a procedural failure. The prosecutor did not charge common assault as an alternative offence. Had that charge been available to the magistrate, the outcome might have been different—Justice Stein's ruling explicitly noted the officer could have been found guilty of common assault. But because the prosecution structured the case around indecent assault alone, and did not argue for a lesser conviction if indecency could not be proved, the magistrate had no legal pathway to convict on a different charge.

The Police Commissioner appealed the acquittal to the Supreme Court, but Justice Stein upheld the original verdict. She found the magistrate had correctly applied the law and was not obliged to convict on an assault charge that had never been formally charged or argued. The principles of double jeopardy—the protection against being tried twice for the same conduct—also weighed against allowing a conviction on a different charge after acquittal.

The woman, who described the incident as making her angry and violating her consent, saw the officer cleared despite the court's acknowledgment that she should never have been subjected to unwanted touching. The magistrate's own words, preserved in the judgment, called the behaviour "harassing, unacceptable, inappropriate and should not have occurred." But those findings of fact did not translate into a criminal conviction.

South Australia Police said it maintains robust internal investigation procedures that are independently overseen, but declined to comment further on the case or its outcome. The judgment stands as a record of what the courts found to be true—deliberate, unwanted contact—alongside what the law, as applied through the charging decision, would not punish.