A former police officer has been awarded $2.3m after a car accident during a cannabis clearing operation that led to the amputation of her arm and the “complete destruction” of her earning capacity.
In a district court decision handed down in Sydney on Friday, acting judge Leonard Levy SC found the state of New South Wales had breached its duty of care to the former officer Jillian Oliver, and that its negligence had resulted in the accident, her injuries, and her “catastrophic” physical and psychological situation.
The medically retired senior constable sustained multiple physical injuries to her head, neck, right shoulder and wrist in the crash on the NSW mid-north coast in November 2010.
Oliver, who was 34 at the time, had been with a colleague collecting cannabis plants from an illegal plantation in Dingo Tops state forest.
Oliver was driving a 4x4 ute containing what she estimated to be 740 uprooted cannabis plants, the court heard. The officers had been instructed to load the culled cannabis plants on to the vehicle and take them to a designated mustering location for identification and destruction.
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On the return journey, the heavily loaded Ford Ranger 4WD – which was not fitted with off-road tyres – lost traction on a corner, fishtailed and veered off the dirt road before it “bounced” down a steep embankment and came to a rest in dense forest 175 metres below the track. Oliver was rescued from the crash site with the help of a helicopter.
As well as her extensive physical injuries, she also incurred psychological injuries and developed intractable complex regional pain syndrome, which led to the amputation of her right arm below the elbow.
In her workplace injury damages claim filed in March 2024, Oliver alleged the car was overloaded and that her employer had failed to provide warnings and training about its safe loading. She was unable to weigh the loaded plants and did not know what the load limits of the vehicle were.
Levy found the negligence of NSW police had resulted in the accident, injuries and development of a “complex regional pain syndrome, unremitting pain, surgical amputation of her right arm below the elbow, and the resultant major depressive disorder that has blighted her life and has prevented her from working”.
He awarded Oliver $2.3m, which included $1.12m for lost future earning capacity, plus costs.
“Plainly, she leads a stressful existence … She feels that she is not living a life, and she is just existing,” Levy wrote in his judgment.
“I find that the aftermath of the accident and the plaintiff’s disabilities … has been the complete destruction of her capacity for any form of meaningful remunerative work.”
During the proceedings, counsel for the state of NSW, the respondent in the case,took issue with Oliver’s lawyers’ claims about the weight, size and number of culled cannabis plants in the vehicle.
They also alleged contributory negligence against Oliver, claiming she had been driving too fast, unsafely and not in accordance with her training at the time of the accident.
But Levy rejected those claims, saying Oliver had no reasonable way of knowing the likely total weight of the load and that it was the employer’s responsibility to manage potential risks, “such as by at least providing some scales that could be used to measure culled cannabis plant weights whilst working in the field”.
The plants were “lost to recovery” after the accident – their retrieval was “understandably, a lesser police priority”, Levy wrote – and so could not have been subsequently weighed.
There had been seven similar rollover incidents in the NSW police force in the 15 months before the accident, sparking safety concerns that led to industrial action over the vehicle’s use, according to the judgment.
“In my view, the risk of potential vehicle instability and uncontrollability leading to an accident foreseeably arose,” he wrote.
He said it was “plain that the risk assessment undertaken by the police force did not sufficiently address the material risks inherent in the system of work” for the implementation of its cannabis eradication program.
