Kristian White told his boss he ‘needed to’ Taser 95-year-old Clare Nowland: court

A senior police officer has told a court she was “comfortable” with her subordinate’s decision to Taser a 95-year-old woman in a nursing home.

Clare Nowland died of injuries sustained when Senior Constable Kristian White discharged his Taser at her chest in Yallambee Lodge nursing home in Cooma on May 17.

The police officer is standing trial in the NSW Supreme Court after pleading not guilty to manslaughter over the great-grandmother’s death.

The Crown alleges he breached his duty of care to Mrs Nowland and caused her unlawful death by either criminal negligence or a dangerous act.

The 34-year-old does not dispute that he discharged the weapon that caused Mrs Nowland’s death, but his lawyers argue it was a proportionate reaction to the risk she posed by holding a knife.

On Friday, Sergeant Jarrod Dawson told the jury that he was on duty when Constable White returned to Cooma Police Station about 7.15am on May 17.

He looked at Constable White’s incident report and asked him about uploading the footage from his body-worn camera.

The police officer replied it hadn’t yet uploaded but he had “tagged it as priority, knowing it would need to be reviewed”.

“He said: ‘I’ve had a look and supposedly we aren’t meant to tase elderly people, but in the circumstances I needed to. Maybe this will be my first critical incident’,” Sergeant Dawson recalled.

“I said: ‘Maybe’.”

On Thursday, the jury was told Constable White’s supervising officer then-Acting Sergeant Jessica Pank said in a statement that she thought they had “done the best we could in the situation”.

She was asked if she, as a supervisor and with the training she had, thought it was appropriate that Constable White discharged his Taser at Ms Nowland.

“I was comfortable with the situation,” Constable Pank said in the statement, but added she wasn’t happy about it.

She told the court she was “scared for her physical safety” when she was trying to get the knife out of Mrs Nowland’s hands because “it looked really sharp and her eyes were dark”.

“When I got close, it was this wave of darkness that went over her face which did put a little bit of fear in me of being close to her to see that, yes a wave of fear,” Constable Pank said.

However, she agreed she was easily able to step backwards out of harm’s way because of Mrs Nowland’s slow movements and mobility issues.

In body-worn camera footage shown to the court, Constable White asks Mrs Nowland repeatedly to put down the knife.

When she didn’t comply, he activated his Taser’s audio and visual warning signals and warned her: “You keep coming, you’re going to get tased.”

The great-grandmother continued to proceed with both hands on her walking frame and Constable White said “Stop, just … Nah, bugger it” and discharged the weapon.

The court was told Mrs Nowland found it difficult to follow instructions and became uncharacteristically aggressive in the months leading up to her death, which a geriatrician attributed to her undiagnosed dementia.

Nursing home staff, paramedics, and police can be seen searching for Clare Nowland, 95, in the minutes before she was fatally tasered by Senior Constable Kristian White on May 17, 2023.

She was seen carrying two knives as she relied on her four-wheeled walking frame to wander around the nursing home in the hours before she was fatally tasered.

The 95-year-old threw one of the knives at nursing assistant Mamta Rai, but it fell on the floor.

The incident prompted nurse Rosaline Baker to call triple-0 for assistance, as Mrs Nowland was “very aggressive”, the court was told.

An ambulance was dispatched and police were notified due to the involvement of knives.

Constable White’s trial continues on Friday before Justice Ian Harrison.