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NT police officer acted 'for a defensive purpose' when he shot Kumanjayi Walker, lawyer says

<span>Photograph: Chloe Erlich/AAP</span>
Photograph: Chloe Erlich/AAP

The Northern Territory police officer Zachary Rolfe followed his training “wholeheartedly” and acted “for a defensive purpose” when he shot dead the Yuendumu teenager Kumanjayi Walker, his lawyers have argued.

At Rolfe’s committal hearing in Alice Springs on Friday, his barrister, David Edwardson QC, urged the Northern Territory supreme court to dismiss the murder charge against his client on the basis that he acted with reasonable force under the circumstances.

Rolfe shot Walker three times on 9 November last year during an arrest attempt, days after Walker had threatened two Yuendumu officers with an axe when they sought to arrest him for returning to the remote central Australian community in breach of a court order.

Edwardson told the court Walker could be “extremely violent, dangerous, and had the potential to arm himself if confronted by police” and was regarded as a high-risk offender. He said his client “acted lawfully for a defensive purpose”.

Related: Second volley of shots Constable Zachary Rolfe fired at Kumanjayi Walker ‘excessive’, court hears

The court previously heard that when Constable Rolfe and Constable Adam Eberl went to a house in Yuendumu to look for Walker, he produced a pair of scissors, and while grappling with the officers stabbed Rolfe in the shoulder before he was shot.

“It is their training when confronted with an edged weapon that their response is to draw a firearm,” Edwardson told the court.

“My client was stabbed in his shoulder, which is only a short distance from his carotid artery. If Kumanjayi Walker had severed his carotid artery, Zachary Rolfe would be dead.”

He said that “NT police are trained to fire as many shots as necessary … and to keep firing until the threat has ceased … There is no evidence that Zachary Rolfe did anything other than comply wholeheartedly with the training NT police gave him.”

Edwardson told Judge John Birch that he had to “look at what evidence was capable of proving beyond reasonable doubt … what was in my client’s state of mind and what he could see in that extraordinary volatile situation that was over in a matter of seconds”.

“Arrests are frequently made in circumstances of excitement, turmoil and panic, and it’s altogether unfair to police as a whole to sit back in the calm and leisurely atmosphere of a courtroom … and assess what they might or might not have done,” Edwardson said.

But the prosecutor, Philip Strickland, rejected these arguments, saying “the active part of the inquiry is whether what the accused did was in fact a reasonable response, rather than what the accused believed was a reasonable response”.

He said Rolfe had viewed body-worn video footage of “the axe incident” on several occasions over the three days leading up to Walker’s attempted arrest, and viewed his files on the police database.

“A jury could consider [that this] would lead him to approach with great caution and planning in order to avoid using lethal force. But that lesson does not appear to have been learned … rather the opposite, he was prepared to use lethal force in the first instance when confronted by the deceased with a weapon,” Strickland said.

Edwardson said that after being shot, Walker said to the officers, “I’m going to kill you mob”.

The shooting was “plainly a case of justifiable defensive conduct and no properly instructed jury could exclude this defence,” Edwardson said.

But Strickland said that when Rolfe entered the house, he disengaged a retention device which indicated he was preparing to use his firearm, and told the occupant of the house that he and Eberl were there to arrest Walker.

“Those officers put themselves into a potentially very dangerous situation … [Rolfe] failed to comply, wholeheartedly, with his training in any respect.”

Judgment was reserved until 26 October.