The Toronto police officer convicted of beating G20 protester Adam Nobody with his baton was acquitted of a second G20-related assault charge Wednesday morning.

Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani was charged with striking Torontoist blogger Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy on June 26, 2010 during a Queen’s Park protest, leaving a nasty bruise on her right hip.

Unlike Nobody’s case, which relied on a video of the assault uploaded to YouTube by a witness who testified during the trial, this case hinged on a single anonymously uploaded photograph.

It shows a police officer without a name tag, his face partially obscured by a visor. The officer has his baton raised and appears to be about to hit Bettencourt-McCarthy.

The Crown expected that a police officer would be able to identify the officer in the photograph as Andalib-Goortani during a trial, prosecutor Philip Perlmutter told the court. But since the photograph — uploaded anonymously to website g20justice.com — could not be authenticated, Superior Court Justice Gary Trotter declared it inadmissible at trial in a pre-trial ruling last month.

In the ruling he noted that Bettencourt-McCarthy was unable to identify the person who hit her.

So after a trial lasting all of two minutes, in which the Crown presented no evidence, Superior Court Justice John McMahon acquitted Andalib-Goortani of assault with a weapon.

McMahon noted that the Crown has the option to appeal.

Andalib-Goortani declined to comment following his acquittal. Bettencourt-McCarthy also declined to comment when reached by the Star.

A two-day hearing was held in May to determine whether the photograph would be admissible at trial.

In his decision Trotter noted that “materials taken from websites and offered as evidence in court must be approached with caution, especially in a case such as this where no one is prepared to step forward to say: ‘I took that photo and it has not been altered or changed in any way.’ ”

A forensic video analyst with the OPP concluded that there was no evidence to indicate the image had been tampered with or manipulated.

Crown expert Tracy Peloquin found that while the image was reduced in size when it was uploaded, the depth of field, lighting, shadowing and digital compression remained consistent throughout the image.

However, she also noted that the original version of the photograph has never been obtained and could not determine where the photo was first uploaded.

The photograph had also been largely stripped of its metadata, which can include information like the type of camera and lens used to take it.

Martin Musters, a computer forensics expert called by the defence, raised the possibility that the image was edited using Photoshop — for example, by adding facial hair — and the evidence of any alterations lost when the metadata was stripped.

Trotter found that while the observable changes to the photograph may at first appear innocuous “there is a lingering concern that it has been manipulated in other ways, ways intended to distort the true state of affairs that the image purports to capture.”

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Andalib-Goortani was one of two officers criminally charged following the 2010 G20 protests marred by riots, vandalism and unprecedented mass arrests. The second officer, Const. Glenn Weddell, was acquitted last year.

Andalib-Goortani is currently on bail pending an appeal of his assault conviction, for which he was sentenced to 45 days in jail.

The appeal is expected to be heard in November. He faces internal disciplinary hearings once the criminal proceedings are complete.