A jury member has been discharged nearly a week into the four-week trial of a Northern Territory police officer charged with murder.
Soon after the seventh day of Constable Zachary Rolfe’s trial started in the Northern Territory supreme court on Tuesday, Justice John Burns closed the court to discuss a matter related to the jury.
About an hour later, Burns said a juror had been discharged, and one of the reserve jury members would be used.
“Both the accused and the Crown have accepted the assurances given by the remaining members of the jury that they are able to address the issues in this trial in an unbiased fashion,” he said.
“So on that basis the trial will proceed.”
No further information was given about the reason for the decision.
Rolfe, 30, is charged with murdering Kumanjayi Walker while trying to arrest him in the remote community of Yuendumu, 300km north-west of Alice Springs, on 9 November, 2019.
About 7.20pm, Rolfe and his colleague Constable Adam Eberl confronted Walker in a house in the community, the court has heard. Walker, a 19-year-old Warlpiri man, then stabbed Rolfe with a pair of surgical scissors shortly before being shot by Rolfe three times.
The second and third shots are subject to the murder charge. Rolfe has pleaded not guilty to murder and two alternate charges.
On Tuesday, the trial also heard for the first time from two other officers who were deployed from Alice Springs along with Rolfe on the day of the shooting.
Both officers, like Rolfe, had served in the defence force before joining the NT police, the court heard.
Constable James Kirstenfeldt gave evidence that he travelled with Rolfe from Alice Springs to Yuendumu on the afternoon of 9 November 2019. He said he had not seen an email sent by Sergeant Julie Frost, the officer in charge of Yuendumu station, about the operational plan for the Alice Springs officers once they arrived in the community.
According to that plan, which has been tendered in evidence, Frost requested assistance from the Immediate Response Team (IRT), a unit based in Alice Springs that had tactical capabilities, and from the police dog squad, to deal with multiple issues in the community in the context of insufficient local resources.
These issues included increased break-ins, including at the homes of local medical staff, which had prompted them to tell Frost they planned to evacuate from Yuendumu, and the need to arrest Walker, a fugitive who had threatened police with an axe three days earlier.
The email referred to a plan to arrest Walker on the morning of 10 November, the day after the officers arrived in Yuendumu.
But Kirstenfeldt gave evidence he had never seen the email, nor been shown a printout of it. He said a five-minute briefing that Frost conducted for the officers shortly before they left Yuendumu station mostly related to the IRT officers setting up the police radios at the station, and not on the detail of that email.
Frost told them she did not use the radios and could not connect them to a territory-wide system, Kirstenfeldt said, but the officers did not want to deploy into the field without them.
About 15 minutes after the IRT members left Yuendumu station, Walker had been shot dead.
Senior Constable Adam Donaldson, a trained dog handler who also travelled to Yuendumu on 9 November, arrived at the station before the IRT members.
He told the court Frost gave him a printout of the operational plan, and then discussed its contents with him.
Donaldson said it was clear to him the priority on 9 November was to assist with the unlawful entries at the nurses quarters, and then look for Walker early the next morning.
But he agreed with David Edwardson QC, for Rolfe, that the plan also referred to him and the IRT members not going on duty until 11pm – four hours after they were ready to deploy – and there was no intelligence about where Walker actually was, despite the reference to an operation to arrest him the following morning.
Senior Aboriginal community police officer Derek Williams also gave evidence on Tuesday that he had seen Walker earlier on 9 November 2019 attending a funeral of a family member – the first time the trial has heard evidence about where Walker was between threatening police on 6 November 2019 and being killed.
The court has previously heard family members believed Walker had escaped from an alcohol treatment centre in Alice Springs and removed an electronic monitoring device, breaching the conditions of his parole, because he wanted to attend the funeral.
It has also heard that police considered arresting Walker at the funeral but decided against it, and that police had told Walker’s family to urge him to hand himself in.
Williams and another police officer who had previously arrested Walker, Acting Sgt Felix Alefaio, both gave evidence that in their experience Walker was not violent towards police.
According to the plan, Alefaio was expected to be involved in the arrest of Walker so that he could help the IRT members identify him.
He said in his evidence that he was in Yuendumu station when the IRT members arrived from Alice Springs.
He recalled Frost telling Rolfe and Kirstenfeldt to do patrols in the community on the night of 9 November until midnight, before being relieved by the other IRT pair, and that Walker would be arrested the following morning after police met back up at the station about 5am.
The trial continues.
