Fr Raymond J. d Sousa has demonstrated how corrupt Australian justice has become. Nobody is safe anymore.
Anomalies Abound in Cardinal Pell’s Abuse Trials
COMMENTARY: According to prosecutors, the very implausibility of the cardinal’s alleged crimes is an indication of their truth.
Does the very improbability of an accusation mean that it is more likely to be true?
That is the argument advanced by prosecutors in the case of Cardinal George Pell, and it indicates a dangerous dynamic in trials for some cases of historic sexual abuse. Convincing evidence leads to a guilty verdict; unconvincing evidence also leads to a guilty verdict.
Cardinal George Pell’s appeal of his convictions for sexual abuse was heard last week in Melbourne, and the proceedings illustrated how sex-abuse trials are different from other sorts of criminal trials. Those anomalies had a role in the false convictions of Cardinal Pell, which I have outlined previously in these pages.
The point here is not that there are wrongful convictions. The world learned that about Australian justice decades ago in the “dingo” case, dramatized by Hollywood, where parents were falsely convicted of killing their own child. Those false convictions resulted in part from public frenzy, a frenzy in which the religious beliefs of the family — Seventh Day Adventists — played a role.