Two police officers found guilty of assaulting a teenager after threatening to search him for "being a smartarse" have launched a second bid to have their verdicts quashed.
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Senior Constable Matthew McVicar and Constable James Head were nearing the end of a shift on Australia Day in 2017 when they pulled over a teenager for driving through the Canberra city bus interchange.
The driver didn't immediately pull over and instead drove the short distance into the Mooseheads car park, because there was a taxi rank immediately to his left on London Circuit.
Once the officers pulled over the car, Head immediately began aggressively questioning the driver.
The front passenger filmed the altercation on her phone and captured the moment Head says he would search the back seat passenger for "being a smartarse" before swearing at him to "get the f--k out of the car".
The video shows a scuffle and the ACT Court of Appeal on Friday heard the officers pulled the 19-year-old from the car, before forcing him to the ground on his stomach and handcuffing him.
The officers are heard to say on the video that they've arrested the passenger for resisting arrest.
McVicar and Head were in April 2018 found guilty of assaulting the passenger. They later appealed the verdicts in the ACT Supreme Court, but Justice David Mossop threw the appeal out on account of "the dramatic disproportion between the officers' conduct and the situation with which they were dealing".
"[The video] shows highly aggressive, loud and ill-mannered police officers interrogating the driver of a motor vehicle who had accidentally driven through the Civic bus interchange and taken longer than the police would have liked to pull over," Justice Mossop said in 2019.
Lawyers for McVicar and Head on Friday said Justice Mossop didn't consider all the evidence before the ACT Supreme Court.
They said he ignored accounts of a conversation preceding the video, in which the constables warned the passenger several times he would be arrested for hinder if he continued to interrupt them.
The lawyers said the conversation could have justified the passenger's arrest, which Justice Mossop determined was "unlawful". They asked that McVicar and Head's common assault matters be remitted to the ACT Magistrates Court and reheard there to determine a new verdict.
"His Honour [Justice Mossop] characterised what he saw on the video by completely ignoring the evidence of my client," McVicar's barrister Ken Archer said.
Court of Appeal judges questioned McVicar and Head's lawyers about whether Justice Mossop was within his rights to deem the constables' evidence irrelevant, as he chose to do.
The prosecution played a second video to the court, which showed the passenger sitting on the ground in handcuffs after being pulled from the car.
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In the video, he asks the officers: "What rules have I broken?"
The officers say he has been arrested for resisting arrest and refusing to follow their directions among other things, but they don't say he has been arrested for hindering their investigation.
"If you guys have a reason to do this to me, I'll accept it," the passenger says in the video.
"If you told me to get out the car, I would have [gotten] out of the car."
The officers previously said in court the passenger had tried to stay in the car by moving his legs.
The appeal judges reserved their decision.