From the Anglican blog, Quadrant Online
Cardinal George Pell’s appeal against his conviction of historical sexual abuse of two choirboys will be heard before the full High Court of Australia on March 11. Pell’s conviction in a Melbourne county court in December 2018 was affirmed by the Victorian Court of Appeal in August 2019. The conviction was for two incidents of abuse that allegedly occurred in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, in December 1996 and February 1997.
As several writers in Quadrant have recorded over the past twelve months, the conviction of Pell is one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Australian history. This is not just because of his status at the time as the most senior figure in the Catholic Church in this country, but also because it breached the fundamental legal principle that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not how George Pell was treated either at his trial or in his first appeal. The jurors did not make their decision on the weight of evidence by more than twenty witnesses, who demonstrated that Pell could not possibly have done what the complainant said. Instead, the jurors accepted the sole evidence of the accuser, given in camera, with his identity shielded, and without corroboration of any kind. A two-to-one majority of judges in the Victorian Court of Appeal confirmed both the process and the decision…
[After detailing the Prosecutor’s – Gibson’s – retraction, the Quadrant Online report continues…]
Now, Gibson must be a Crown prosecutor with a short memory. He seems to have forgotten all about this retraction. Because on January 31, 2020, the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions, Kerri Judd, submitted a response to the appeal to the High Court by Pell’s lawyers, Bret Walker and Ruth Shann. One of the four signatories to the DPP submission was Mark Gibson, signing himself as Victoria’s Senior Crown Prosecutor. In paragraphs 59 and 60 of this submission there is a version of what the altar servers supposedly did after they entered the priests’ sacristy. It is written as if the rebuke from the defence at the trial never happened, as if Judge Kidd had not told Gibson to retract what he said, and as if his retraction had never been made to the jury. End of extracts. To read entire report click here
Comment…
The above article arrived in my inbox yesterday, courtesy of a reader of this blog, named Patrick. He wrote:
Dear Editor,
I have contacted you previously regarding the ‘kangeroo court’ verdict on Cardinal George Pell. Hopefully you will find time in your busy schedule to have a read of the [above] article. As far as I am concerned, the so called Catholic media should be shouting this from the rooftops.
It is sad that only two prominent commentators (and none outside Australia) are highlighting this satanic injustice perpetrated against a Prince of our faith. As far as I know neither of them are Catholic which should make us hang our heads in shame End of email.
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Why is it, that journalists who purport to be keen to report injustices, miss something this big? I wonder what possible reason might explain their failure to cover something as serious as a Public Prosecutor admitting to false evidence while going on, later, to repeat it? This is what I look like when I’m “wondering”…
As for the legal profession – least said, soonest mended…
CitizenGO’s Campaign Director for the UK and Ireland, Caroline Farrow, could find herself in prison for nothing more than telling the truth about male and female!
On May 12th, Cardinal Konrad Krajevski, Pope Francis’s Almoner, reactivated the electricity in an illegally occupied building on Via Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, in the centre of Rome. In order to do this, he had to break the seals put there by the Public Electricity Corporation (ACEA) which had disconnected the electricity because of the occupants’ unpaid bills (more than 300.00 Euros) over the last five years, .
(hailed by La Repubblica as a new Robin Hood) the former-Mayor of Riace, Mimmo Lucano (welcomed like a star at the La Sapienza University), or the leader of the “disobedients” Luca Casarini (recently under investigation for favoring illegal immigration) have in common, is disdain for State laws, in the name of a political ethic which has little or nothing to with the Christian ethic. 
