ACT Bar Association dismiss misconduct accusations against Lehrmann trial prosecutor Shane Drumgold

Shane Drumgold has had complaints of misconduct dismissed by the ACT Bar Association. He said he ‘always maintained that [his] conduct has been proper and appropriate’. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/The Guardian

Complaints of misconduct raised against Shane Drumgold, who headed the 2022 prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann, have been dismissed by the ACT Bar Association.

Drumgold was the ACT’s director of public prosecutions during the criminal trial of Lehrmann, who was accused of raping his colleague Brittany Higgins in 2019 in Parliament House.

That trial was abandoned due to juror misconduct, and Drumgold decided against a retrial because of concerns over Higgins’ mental health.

In December last year, the ACT Bar Association’s council made a complaint alleging Drumgold had “engaged in professional misconduct or unsatisfactory professional conduct” on 11 grounds. After a year-long investigation by senior counsel briefed by the association, one of the grounds was withdrawn and the rest were dismissed on the basis there was “no reasonable likelihood” he would be found guilty.

Drumgold said in a statement he had “always maintained that [his] conduct has been proper and appropriate”.

“The ACT Bar Association has found there is no evidence to support a finding that I engaged in either professional misconduct or unsatisfactory professional conduct in relation to any conduct surrounding the prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann,” he said.

The complaint included accusations Drumgold misled the ACT supreme court in the Lehrmann case over a conversation he had with journalist Lisa Wilkinson about her planned Logies speech; that he procured a “false or misleading affidavit from a junior member of staff” in the office of the director of public prosecutions, which was relied on in the Lehrmann case; and that he told a journalist about a letter he had written to ACT police chief Neil Gaughan, then released that letter under freedom of information laws.

In that letter, Drumgold complained police officers pressured him not to prosecute Lehrmann after Higgins’ alleged rape, and called for a public inquiry to look at political and police conduct in the rape.

He later said he had no evidence for those concerns.

That in turn sparked the Sofronoff inquiry, headed by Walter Sofronoff KC. That inquiry made adverse findings against Drumgold including that he “at times … lost objectivity and did not act with fairness and detachment”.

Drumgold applied for a judicial review, which then found there was a “reasonable apprehension of bias” in the Sofronoff inquiry because of Sofronoff’s communication with a columnist at The Australian (Janet Albrechtsen), and that one of the findings was “legally unreasonable”.

The ACT Bar Association’s counsel was able to examine the evidence given in the Sofronoff inquiry.

The organisation resolved to dismiss grounds one to 10 “on the basis that there is no reasonable likelihood that the practitioner will be found guilty of either unsatisfactory professional conduct or professional misconduct”, and withdrew an accusation that he had provided false evidence in a witness statement about the letter to Gaughan.

The ACT Bar Association declined to comment.