George Pell: A good priest, falsely accused through a politically motivated investigation and unfair trial

Apr 8, 2020 by

by Miranda Devine, Daily Telegraph Australia:

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.

Read here

Cardinal George Pell is the victim of a shameful miscarriage of justice by Damian Thompson, Spectator (£)

LifeSite presents a round-up of reactions to Cardinal George Pell’s acquittal.

All of the senior officers in the George Pell taskforce ‘need to resign’from Sky News Australia

Do conservative Catholics get fair trials? by Niall Gooch, UnHerd

 

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