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Neil Ford - Source: ONE News
Closing arguments have been delivered in the trial of a policeman charged with perjury in the High Court in Dunedin.
Central Otago senior constable Neil Robert Ford, 56, is defending allegations he lied under oath over his account of a car crash in July 2005.
Ford took the stand yesterday and Crown evidence in the case was completed yesterday afternoon.
Defence counsel Nic Soper called Ford as a witness, after telling the 11 jurors there was "a big difference between giving a version of events, believing it to be accurate but it turning out to be wrong, and giving a version you know is wrong".
Ford was driving a police car that was hit by 17-year-old Shane Cribb when the officer pulled out in front of Cribb on a rural road near Alexandra.
Ford claimed he had been in the middle of the road turning, and in 2006 the teenager was found guilty of causing the accident and convicted of careless driving causing injury.
But persistence by a supporter of Cribb, Steve Potter, saw the case go back to court and Cribb cleared of the charge in 2008, after new evidence became available. That evidence included reports from specialist road-crash analysts, who showed the accident could not have happened the way Ford had claimed.
Experts and witnesses said Ford did a u-turn without looking and that made it impossible for Cribb to avoid him.
The Crown prosecutor said Ford knowingly misled the court to avoid the consequences of the truth about the accident coming out.
The judge will sum up in the morning before the jury is asked to retire and consider its verdict.
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