Fantastic news from Australia:
Cardinal George Pell will immediately be released from prison after the High Court ordered his child sexual abuse convictions to be quashed “and judgments of acquittal be entered in their place”.
The most senior Catholic in the world to be convicted of child sexual abuse today learnt his final appeal bid to the High Court had been a success.
The full bench of seven judges were unanimous in their decision, finding that the jury, acting rationally on the whole of the evidence, ought to have entertained a reasonable doubt as to Pell’s guilt.
The news has just broken, so I don’t have anything else. This is such a relief — notice the unanimous nature of the decision — because it was so clear that the guilty verdict was a put-up job. The cardinal can now go free.
In all the bad news we have had to deal with, finally, some good news. On Holy Week, at that.
UPDATE: Two Australian commentators, both with good points:
The problem always with the Pell case was he represented a system that had hurt so many. To the extent that whether he did the aforementioned crimes seemed almost irrelevant, as he was standing in place for a guilty institution. But that’s not how this works
— The Phantom Menace (@AusPhantom) April 7, 2020
The truth is, the Australian Catholic Church was repulsive in how it treated abuse victims. But that does not make Cardinal Pell guilty of molestation. If you have followed the case against him at all, it was shockingly clear that he was being scapegoated for the failures of the entire institution.
UPDATE.2:
Just as France once charged an innocent man of treason on scant evidence amidst a poisonous culture of anti-semitic frenzy, so did Australia charge an innocent man amidst the poisonous culture of anti-Catholic frenzy.
Cardinal Pell is Australia’s Dreyfus Affair.
— C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) April 7, 2020
Australian columnist Miranda Devine takes the same line:
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.
More:
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.
Amen. Read the whole thing. To call the case against Pell tissue-thin would be an insult to tissues.
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