Former NSW police officer Glen Coleman is serving a minimum two-year prison term after he was found guilty of twice sexually touching a 19-year-old.
The 58-year-old first met the teenager in 2022 after she went into the station to make a complaint that her cousin had threatened to share naked images of her online.
The married detective asked to see the woman's breasts and then touched them at an interview room at Windsor police station, northwest of Sydney and also at a local park.
He asked for sexual favours in exchange for money, attended a strip club to see her dance, and, on one occasion, placed $70 on the interview room table before they had sex.
A NSW District Court jury found Coleman guilty of two sexual touching offences, while acquitting him of a further four, and three counts of sexual intercourse without consent.
Coleman always denied he had touched the woman without her consent or free will.
His barrister David Randle told an appeal court on Friday the nine charges stemmed from three separate incidents including at the park and the police station interview room.
The jury's findings and determination of consent from these incidents was inconsistent, with conflicting verdicts being returned for offences that occurred moments apart, Mr Randle argued.
"It's logically and rationally inconceivable that a jury would accept that consent could just materialise seconds later for acts of sexual intercourse," he said.
He encouraged the three NSW Court of Criminal Appeal judges to also consider the consistency of the teenager's account.
The jury did not accept the entirety of her evidence from any of the three occasions where offending took place, as evident in their dismissal of charges in each instance, he said.
In assessing his application to overturn the two counts of sexually touching, Mr Randle told the judges to view the evidence before them holistically.
"There isn't sufficient justification in light of the totality of the evidence," he said.
But crown prosecutor Carl Young argued the jury's verdicts were consistent with their acquittals.
The jury confronted difficult issues in determining the teenager's ability to consent and Coleman's knowledge of consent, he said.
"The acquittals do not necessarily mean that the jury rejected (the teenager) as a witness or her evidence," Mr Young said on Friday.
Mr Young said the jury did not pick one of the lesser counts from each incident when determining their verdicts and instead based their findings on the supporting evidence for each count.
Coleman is eligible for release in July 2026.
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