George Pell: A good priest, falsely accused through a politically motivated investigation and unfair trial
Thank God. George Pell has been exonerated. Justice has been done at last. A good priest, falsely accused and railroaded through a politically motivated investigation and an unfair trial, can walk free, in Holy Week.
Opinion
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Thank God. George Pell has been exonerated. Justice has been done at last.
A good priest, falsely accused and railroaded through a politically motivated investigation and an unfair trial, can walk free, in Holy Week.
An innocent man persecuted as the reviled scapegoat for all the sins of the Catholic Church, is free of the most disgusting and implausible charges of child sexual assault.
This was Australia’s Dreyfus Affair, an egregious miscarriage of justice that has destroyed the reputation of this country’s justice system.
The case that he sexually assaulted two choir boys after Sunday mass in 1996 in a crowded St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne was patently implausible from the start.
He was convicted and imprisoned over the most heinous of all crimes on the word of one anonymous complainant, whose testimony was unsupported by any other witnesses, or any forensic evidence. The same fate could befall any Victorian.
The media lynch mob and the entire Victorian legal system stand condemned. The unanimous decision of the High Court is a conclusive repudiation of everyone involved in the false imprisonment of Cardinal George Pell, every politician, every cop, every lawyer, every journalist, every coward who naively trusted the system and vilified as “paedophile protectors” those who maintained Cardinal Pell’s innocence.
His false conviction raises urgent questions about the jury system, for so long the bedrock of our criminal justice. But that system was perverted by politicians pursuing ideological outcomes, who created legislation in Victoria that altered the balance of justice, so that defendants in sex trials now have to prove their innocence, turning the onus of proof on its head.
The people of Victoria must demand an independent inquiry of their criminal justice system, from top to bottom. The Victorian police commissioner Graham Ashton needs to stand down immediately and any police involved in trawling for complaints and rigged the inquiry must account for their actions, their repeated insistence that prosecutors accept their flimsy case. The jury was not told the whole truth, including about the mental health of the complainant.
At every step of the way there were terrible failures.
Convicting innocent people does not help the victims of child sexual abuse. Quite the opposite. It allows the guilty to go free and creates doubt over genuine cases
The High Court has restored our faith in Australian justice, but it utterly condemns Victoria.
Mark Weinberg, the sole dissenting judge on the Victorian Court of Appeal, has been vindicated. His 204-page dissenting judgment last year formed the basis for Pell’s appeal to the High Court.
As the High Court said in its judgment today the Court of Appeal did not leave open the reasonable possibility that the offending did not happen.
The Jury assessed the complainant’s evidence as reliable but they should have entertained the possibility of reasonable doubt.
Every person every system that allowed Cardinal Pell to be jailed for 404 days should be held to account.
In a statement today, after the full bench of the High Court quashed his conviction, Cardinal Pell said: “I hold no ill will toward my accuser, I do not want my acquittal to add to the hurt and bitterness so many feel; there is certainly hurt and bitterness enough.
“However my trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church; nor a referendum on how Church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of paedophilia in the Church.
“The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes, and I did not.
“The only basis for long term healing is truth and the only basis for justice is truth, because justice means truth for all.”
During 404 days in prison he was buoyed by his faith, his innocence, and the thousands of letters and prayers of the faithful.
He also said he was praying for everyone affected by the coronavirus.