Former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann has called for a forensic expert to examine the phone of a woman he is accused of raping due to claimed discrepancies in prosecution evidence.
Lehrmann, 30, has been committed to face trial in Queensland district court on two counts of rape but has filed an application to permanently halt the matter.
A second download of the alleged victim’s phone produced a report that did not match the first, Lehmann’s solicitor Zali Burrows told Judge Dennis Lynch on Monday.
“Between the first extraction and the second extraction there are some key words missing that were on the statement of facts,” Burrows said.
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The second extraction of data from the alleged victim’s phone was required as the first copy was lost when a detective’s hard drive malfunctioned, the court heard.
Lehrmann, who is on bail and yet to formally enter a plea, is accused of raping a woman twice during the morning of 10 October 2021.
They met during the previous night at a strip club in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane.
Lehrmann previously indicated he would contest the charges.
Burrows said she had applied before another judge to force police to provide an “unredacted” second report, but she had been told there was a problem with accessing the original encrypted data.
“If this data is lost all over again we would like to address it in our stay application,” she said.
“We would like our own, independent forensic IT expert to have an opportunity to do a brand-new extraction of the phone, which would obviously be monitored and supervised by police.”
A copy of the phone data would be obtained on Monday and should be provided before the end of the week, prosecutor Caroline Marco said.
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“Unfortunately the delay was that our investigating officer was on leave,” Marco said.
She said prosecutors would resist an application for an independent expert to download data from the alleged victim’s phone.
Lynch said he would wait for the second report on the phone before considering any such application.
Lehrmann’s bail was continued and the case was adjourned until 17 November.
