Posted on 08/20/2019 4:00:50 PM PDT by naturalman1975
It is 9am Australian Eastern Standard Time on the 21st August 2019. In approximately 30 minutes, the Victorian Court of Appeal will hand down its verdict in the appeal of Catholic Cardinal George Pell against his conviction for historical child sexual abuse. There has been considerable discussion on this on FR and elsewhere as a significant number of people believe there has been a miscarriage of justice in this case for various reasons.
I will be monitoring various Australian media as the verdict is delivered and thought I would post here to keep people informed and updated.
Thanks for the update.
Pell has arrived at the Court from the Melbourne Assessment Prison where he has been held since his conviction approximately six months ago.
I am just adding in below a post I wrote yesterday trying to outline why I - along with many others - have doubts about this case. I do not deny that there have been many cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, and there have been many cover ups, but there are aspects in this case that give me real and specific concerns about the possibility of a miscarriage of justice.
“There are many people (including myself) who feel this may well be a case where the jury got it wrong. George Pell has been the ogre, the bugbear of the left in Australia since the mid 1990s when, as Archbishop of Melbourne, and then of Sydney, he stood up for Catholic teaching over homosexuality - people wearing rainbow sashes kept approaching the altar attempting to take Communion, and he refused to administer it, offering them a blessing instead. And TV cameras watched on. He was also Australia’s most prominent Catholic leader at the time, the scandals involving historical child abuse and cover ups became public and for that reason, a lot of people associate him with those cover ups - but the fact is, these were historical events - while he was in charge when they became public, he wasn’t in charge when they were happening. In fact, if you look at Pell’s record, he was the first senior figure in the Australian Church to take action against such things, and part of the reason they became public just after he took over is because he took action - here in Melbourne (where I live) he set up a program of compensation and support for victims within months of becoming Archbishop in 1996, reversing the policy of coverups and denials that had existed under his predecessor, Archbishop Sir Frank Little.
Unfortunately for Pell (and for justice), two Australian Bishops - Archbishop Sir Frank Little of Melbourne and Bishop Ronald Mulkearns of Ballarat, died, and became seriously ill respectively, before they could be required to give evidence before Australia’s recent Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse - these two men (and others as well) did cover up sexual abuse in their Archdiocese and Diocese, but because they could not be interrogated, Cardinal Pell (who had been a consultor to Mulkearns as a Priest, and who had been an Assistant Bishop under Little) was called to give evidence of what had happened while they were in office. This meant that Pell was the face that kept appearing on television news over and over and over again, as the media discussed the historical coverups - and a lot of people really don’t understand that just because a man is talking about what happened in the 1970s or 1980s before a committee in 2015, that doesn’t mean he was the one responsible for it - what he was, was the man who had access to the records in the 1990s (and again, the evidence really is that when Pell found out what had happened, he took action swiftly).
It is not unreasonable to say that by the end of this process, Pell was one of the most hated man in Australia.
Added to this, the Victorian Police (who are themselves implicated in historical coverups of sexual abuse, including in some cases, aiding and abetting coverups within the Catholic Church) seems to have gone on a fishing expedition to try and find somebody to accuse George Pell of abuse. The sole witness at his trial, the alleged victim, did not come forward to say he had been abused - the police went looking for somebody to say it. There was no evidence at all that Pell had committed any crime - except this one witness said he had. Normally, people cannot be convicted of a crime on the uncorrobated evidence of a single witness, but exceptions are made for sex crimes because of their special nature - but even so, the testimony this witness gave doesn’t seem realistic in a lot of ways - in essence, he alleges that then Archbishop Pell forced him and another choirboy (now dead - having always told his mother he was never molested) to give him oral sex while he was dressed in his full Archbishop’s vestments, having just celebrated a High Mass, and this happening in a room that would have been filled with people going in and out at the time cleaning up after a major Cathedral Mass. A number of witnesses said that they would have been in the room at the time, and saw nothing. Others said that choirboys would have been noticed if they’d been absent from the choir at the time. For this crime to have happened, Pell would have had to be willing to risk dozens of witnesses walking in and seeing what was happening, and to have got away with it. It doesn’t seem likely.
Then we come down to the issue that Pell’s trial - well, his trials - were held in secret. The Australian media was not allowed to report on them, or even that they were happening - which meant that while those trials were underway, people couldn’t read any of the evidence and make a judgement for themselves if it seemed likely. And I said trials - because there were two. The first ended in a hung jury - according to some reports (which do seem reliable in many ways), that jury voted 10-2 Not Guilty - in most of Australia, that would have been a Not Guilty verdict, but Victoria is one of the few places that requires 11-1 or unanimous jury verdicts. So a second trial was held - again, all in secret.
The Court of Appeal will deliver its verdict tomorrow. If they decide that despite all this, the jury verdict was sound - well, all right. I cannot be certain Pell didn’t do it.
But I hope you can see why a lot of people here think that in this case, the idea of reasonable doubt really might apply.”
Pell’s divisive persona
Let’s not forget that if George Pell is released, it will unleash one of the great culture wars.
Pell has been pursued relentlessly for decades for his conservatism and positions on issues like climate change. There has never been a more controversial leader in the Australian Catholic Church.
MY COMMENT: Again, this connects as to why some people have doubts about this case - there has been, for decades, a witch hunt atmosphere surrounding Pell in Australia. He is the bogeyman of the Australian left and has been since the 1990s, and there have been people since then constantly throwing mud at him over and over and over again, in the hope something would eventually stick.
It is now 9.30, the scheduled time for the Appeal to begin being handed down but nothing is actually happening yet. Like many other things, times are not always precise.
In the original account, as reproduced in Louise Milligan's book (I will be interested to see if it is edited out in the second edition) the witness said that Pell had locked them into the sacristy. That, at least, made the offence more explicable. But then, when evidence appeared that the Sacristy was not locked after services, and that the doors were wedged open, the story changed to an assault before an open door, but no one looked in and noticed.
The live stream from the court has begun, but it keeps crashing due to so many people watching, so I can’t really follow it. Monitoring other news sources though.
The appeal has failed. Cardinal Pells conviction stands.
I would expect further appeal to the High Court.
Disgusting... and now the fascist judge is calling for unity despite the fact she has signed off on something that was impossible.
Rats
Thank you for bringing us this sad news so quickly, I will continue to pray that true justice is done in this case. In the meantime, the cardinal will make many converts among his fellow inmates.
Not surprising to hear that a prominent Catholic Church official is put up as the definition of evil...whether deserved or not.Hopefully he'll be found innocent if he is,*in fact*,innocent.
OTOH...if he's truly guilty..."render unto Caesar..."
When you say "tomorrow",I thought it was supposed to be Wednesday.Isn't it Wednesday Down Under right now?
Two of the three Judges found the case proven. One dissents.
Yes, it is.
Yikes!
Well,his Creator knows the truth. If he is,in fact, innocent one could say that the Cardinal's experiencing what the nuns used to tell us was akin to "a baptism of fire".
Sorry...mixup on my part.
He has been baptized, this is 'white martyrdom' (no blood).
Disgusting... and now the fascist judge is calling for unity despite the fact she has signed off on something that was impossible.
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I have to repeat: SOMETHING THAT WAS IMPOSSIBLE :(
This child molesting piece of garbage needs to rot in prison until he starts his permanent rotting in Hell.
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