Tag Archives: VicPol

Australia, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, The Left

Need for one more royal commission

On previous standards – standards for calling a royal commission – there would be a royal commission into Victoria’s Police. The Andrews government is negligent of the demands of justice in refusing an official investigation into VicPol. Does Andrews have something to fear?

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George Pell saga makes case for one more royal commission in Victoria

Chris Mitchell, The Australian, 20 Decemb er 2020

In the wake of Vicpol’s pursuit of Cardinal George Pell and the failings of the two court cases and a Court of Appeal hearing to withstand a unanimous 7-0 verdict in favour of Pell in the High Court, a broadbased inquiry could also examine changes to the state’s sexual offences laws. When Mr Andrews tweeted after that High Court decision to alleged victims of sexual assault — “I see you, I hear you, I believe you” — what was he really saying? This ­newspaper’s former legal affairs editor Chris Merritt argued on April 7 that changes to the state’s laws effectively reversed the presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

“Victorian legislation meant the Pell jury was denied the full story about the man who claimed to have been assaulted by the cardinal. Relevant evidence about the complainant was kept from the jury by virtue of legislation that was put in place with the clear intention of protecting those who claim to be victims of sexual assault,” Merritt wrote.

Victims’ stories are to be believed by police, and defendants’ ability to challenge those stories in court has been curtailed. The High Court found this was at the heart of the Pell matter. Experienced journalists already knew this.

The Age’s John Silvester wrote on February 27 that Vicpol must have relished the opportunity to reverse years of mishandling of clergy abuse cases: “Now police are told to come from a mindset of believing a person who says they have been sexually assaulted.”

In the case of Pell’s alleged assault of two choristers (one of whom had died but had denied ever being molested) at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in late 1996, Silvester wrote: “Pell was found guilty beyond reasonable doubt on the uncorroborated evidence of one witness, without forensic evidence, a pattern of behaviour or a confession … it is rare to run a case on the word of one witness, let alone gain a conviction.”

Read the rest here …

Culture, Law, Media, Religion

More about the Choirboy

Information about Cardinal Pell’s accuser continues to trickle out – the perfidy of VicPol (Victoria Police), as well. It is a farce that no official investigation into VicPol’s actions in this legal abomination has taken place.

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The Commissioner and the Choirboy

Keith Windschuttle, Quadrant, 14 November 2021

The anonymous former choirboy, Witness J, who falsely accused Cardinal George Pell of sexually abusing him in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, after Mass on a Sunday morning in December 1996, has now made some revelations of his own that shed new light on the case. He has put his Curriculum Vitae up on the online employment networking site LinkedIn. At Pell’s trial in 2018, Judge Peter Kidd put a suppression order on publication of the complainant’s name but many in Victorian legal and media circles know his real identity and will find the CV contains an intriguing tale.

While much of the public debate among Pell supporters prior to his acquittal pointed to the strange determination of the Victoria Police’s hierarchy to pursue such an improbable case, the focus was on the two most recent commissioners, Graham Ashton and Shane Patton. Their efforts to persuade both the Victorian Parliament’s inquiry into child sexual abuse and the national news media that Pell was guilty of such a crime was anything but the pursuit of justice. It looked like a stitch-up from the start.

The choirboy’s CV reveals, quite inadvertently, that as well as having these two members of the police hierarchy on side, he enjoyed the support of a third one as well, someone who has so far avoided any place in the overall picture.

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Australia, Catholicism, Law, Media, Political correctness

Anatomy of culpable police and legal incompetence

In the 3 September edition of the Catholic Weekly, Fr Frank Brennan provides a lucid summary of his book Observations of the Pell Proceedings. One should read this book and Keith Windschuttle’s even more penetrating The Persecution of George Pell, but this article is enough to demonstrate convincingly the abject police and legal failure that locked up an innocent man for 404 days.

One wonders how deep Marxist Daniel Andrews had his fingers in this legal abomination. Evidence is his fury at the news Tony Abbott visited an innocent man in prison and his angry public declaration after the High Court 7-nil decision that WE SEE YOU, WE HEAR YOU, WE BELIEVE YOU. With this, the premier of Victoria gave his finger to the centuries-old foundational legal principle that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. Daniel Andrews is totally unfit for any executive government office, let alone that of heading a state.

As for the claim, uttered by ABC giants such as Barrie Cassidy, that Cardinal Pell was freed on a legal technicality, that is absolute rubbish, grasped at by the bigoted who would say anything rather than face the truth. Fr Brennan’s article shows the High Court quashed the verdict on the blaring evidence that the absurd case against the cardinal could not be sustained.

The Catholic Weekly deserves praise and credit for publishing two articles about the Pell injustice.

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Fr Frank Brennan: Anatomy of a travesty

A case that should never have happened

It’s time to declare that George Pell is innocent of the preposterous charges he faced in the County Court of Victoria and to move on for the good of everyone, including bona fide complainants and victims of child sexual abuse in institutions.

Because of the suppression orders put in place by the County Court, you were unable to follow the trials of Cardinal George Pell day by day. That’s why I was asked to attend the proceedings. That’s why I have published a book, Observations on the Pell Proceedings – so you can make your own assessment of the evidence.

My book is dedicated ‘to those who seek truth, justice and healing and to those who have been denied them’. Having followed the Pell proceedings closely, I am convinced that the case did nothing to help bona fide complainants, victims, and their supporters.

I write in the introduction: “The failures of the Victoria police, prosecution authorities, and the two most senior Victorian judges in these proceedings did nothing to help the efforts being made to address the trauma of institutional child sexual abuse. As a society we need to do better, and the legal system needs to play its part.”

I am convinced that light and healing can be more readily sought and hoped for if appropriate steps are taken to correct the errors made in the Pell proceedings. The compounding errors resulted in the unanimous judgment of the High Court of Australia which placed the Victorian criminal justice system in a very poor light.

I was left in no doubt. Cardinal Pell was innocent of these charges. He should never have even been charged.

Read the rest here…

Australia, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media

Cdl Pell and the appalling failure of Victoria Police

Marilyn Rodrigues of the Catholic Weekly recently reviewed Fr Brennan’s book on the Pell Affair, Observations on the Pell Proceedings, and commented on a 40 minute interview with him. Ms Rodrigues focuses on the staggering failure of Victoria Police to do their job without fear or favour. Indeed, it is clear, as it is in other examinations of VICPOL’s prosecution of Cardinal Pell, that they were out to get him. Either that or they were guilty of an ineptitude worthy of the most primitive tinpot dictatorship. I go for the former. One wonders how those senior VICPOL officer are not too ashamed to hide their faces. The 40-minute interview with Fr Brennan comes at the end of the review.

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The sting operation that came apart

By Marilyn Rodrigues -August 27, 2021

Victoria’s policing and criminal justice systems erred so seriously in relation to Cardinal George Pell that it shows that not even victims of abuse or bona fide complainants, let alone an accused person like the cardinal, could rely on them, says Australian legal expert Fr Frank Brennan SJ.

The law professor and rector of Newman College at the University of Melbourne attended key parts of Cardinal Pell’s trials and appeals and had access to court transcripts.

He became convinced that the cardinal was innocent of the historical sexual abuse charges brought against him, and that he should never have had to face them.

Read the rest here…

Australia, Catholic Church, Law, Media, Religion, The Left

Mad Marxist Andrews and his failed state

The Coronavirus: How did Victoria get so much so wrong?

Gerard Henderson, The Sydney Institute, 11 August 2020

Around two months ago I walked up a one-way street in the Sydney CBD. A young man, wearing a mask approached me and asked, firmly but courteously, if I would use the opposite footpath. I did so.

On looking around, I noticed two parked police cars and a bus. After passing the bus I looked back and saw a member of the Australian Defence Force ushering passengers into a hotel. I realised that this was a group of people returning from overseas and going into 14-day quarantine. There was an air of quiet authority about the process.

This contrasts with the apparent mayhem in some of the hotels used for quarantine in Melbourne. For reasons currently unknown, the Victorian Labor government did not put Victoria Police in charge of quarantine and did not accept the commonwealth government’s early offers to provide the ADF’s assistance.

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Australia, Catholic Church, Law, Media, The Left

Call for investigation – it’s overdue

CNA Staff, Jun 27, 2020 / 02:02 pm MT (CNA).- A member of the Parliament of Victoria has urged that there be an inquiry into the treatment of Cardinal George Pell by the state’s police and judiciary, months after Australia’s High Court unanimously overturned his conviction for five alleged counts of sexual abuse.

Victorian politician calls for inquiry into investigation of Cardinal Pell

Bernie Finn, a member of the Victorian Legislative Council from the Liberal Party, said June 18 that “the integrity of the justice system in this state is very much on trial.”

“There are major questions that are desperately in need of answers. I would like to see an inquiry that is at arm’s length from Victoria Police, arm’s length from the judiciary and arm’s length from the government.”

Finn asked that Jill Hennessey, Attorney-General of Victoria, launch an investigation into former Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police Graham Ashton and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to discover “how we can avoid trial by media in future, how did the Court of Appeal get it so very wrong and how could an innocent man in this day and age in Victoria be jailed in the way that Cardinal Pell was”.

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Australia, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, Political correctness, The Left

Probing Victoria Police and the Royal Commission

Douglas Drummond, former Queensland Special Prosecutor and a judge on the Federal Court of Australia, has written a powerful piece, fearlessly probing the record of Victoria Police (in particular about the Pell jailing) and the Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse. He is to be commended.

The frightening bias of VicPol and the commission continues to unfold. Australia needs a thorough investigation into the background of the country’s worst ever miscarriage of justice. What happened to Cardinal Pell could happen to anyone.

I have added a tab on Victoria Police to the Cardinal Pell section of my website.

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The Unexplored Shame of Victoria Police

by Douglas Drummond, Quadrant, 3 July 2020

The Catholic Church and its bishops have been subjected to a lot of deserved criticism by the Royal Commission, the media, survivors and others for their failures to deal with the sexual abuse of children by priests, particularly over the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s. Victoria Police has largely escaped criticism, though it made similar failures during this same period.

At the first public session of the Commission in August 2015, it said that, as well as religious institutions, were police force were one of the types of institutions it would be investigating.

Catholic Diocese of Ballarat

In its Final Report in Case Study 28, the Royal Commission said: “The scope and purpose of Part Two of that case study involving the Ballarat Diocese was to inquire into:

1. the response of the Diocese and of other Catholic Church authorities in Ballarat to allegations of child sexual abuse against clergy or religious

2. the response of Victoria Police to allegations of child sexual abuse against clergy or religious which took place within the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat”.

The Commission made a full inquiry into the first item. But its inquiry into the second item was in a number of respects surprisingly deficient.

Gerald Ridsdale

Ridsdale (right) was probably the worst of the many paedophile priests in Victoria, if not Australia. Much of his offending took place in parishes in the Ballarat Diocese. The Commission noted Ridsdale was convicted in 1993, and later, of sexual offences against a total of 65 children as young as four which occurred from the 1960s until the 1980s. This was only part of his criminal activities: according to The Age report of June 14, 2002, [“Ballarat’s good men of the cloth”] just before his first trial in 1993, Ridsdale told his family of his crimes. One family member asked: “How many, Gerald. Four, or five?” “Hundreds,” was his reply.

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Catholic Church, Law, Media, Religion, The Left

Facing the rot in Vicpol (2)

This is the second part of an in-depth essay by Paul Collits on the stinking swamp of bigotry in which Daniel Andrews’ police force is mired.

Reforming VicPol in a Post Pell Environment – Part Two

Written by Paul Collits

Accepting that the Victorian institutions involved in getting Pell need reforming, this two part essay explores the uncanny parallels between the Pell case here and similar cases in the UK, and draws lessons from these in charting a course towards reform.

The Henriques Report on Operation Midland in the UK

The second UK case study which has an almost creepy resonance with the Pell case is the Carl Beech affair and the UK Met’s infamous Operation Midland (2014 to 2016).  To recap, a complainant known initially as “Nick” and subsequently revealed to be one Carl Beech alleged all sorts of horrendous crimes supposedly committed by a very high profile British political and other figures.  This was the paedophile ring’s paedophile ring.  He named names.  Big names.  And the Met simply “believed him”, trapped as it was in the moral panic associated with the sex abuse of children that followed the Jimmy Savile revelations and the various legal changes that had occurred in Britain, many driven by the Tony Blair Government.  Beech is now serving an 18 year prison sentence after his fabrications were revealed as such. 

A good summary of the relevance of the Beech case to Cardinal Pell can be found here, at Damian Thompson’s UK Spectator podcast, Holy Smoke.

Just as police trawling found its grim way from Britain to Victoria, so too did MeTooism and the treatment of all complainants as “victims”, flipping the presumption of innocence in the process.

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Catholic Church, Law, Media, The Left

Facing the rot in VicPol

This is the first part of an in-depth essay by Paul Collits on the stinking swamp of bigotry in which Daniel Andrews’ police force is mired.

Reforming VicPol in a Post Pell Environment

Written by Paul Collits

Accepting that the Victorian institutions involved in getting Pell need reforming, this two part essay explores the uncanny parallels between the Pell case here and similar cases in the UK, and draws lessons from these in charting a course towards reform.

Since the Australian High Court’s legal exoneration of George Cardinal Pell, debates have taken off in many directions.  The baying mob has spoken through graffiti and on social media.  Media pundits have had their say.  The Cardinal’s supporter groups online have been overjoyed but are still angry.  International observers have suggested Australia’s justice system has dodged a bullet in having its reputation for the rule of law saved by the bell.  Politicians and others where perennially grieve for victims of abuse have mumbled and grumbled.  “We still believe you, indeed now, more than ever we believe you”, they chant.

Many want answers to the question – how did this happen in Australia?  There are now increasingly audible demands for an inquiry, or inquiries, into the key arms of the legal system in Victoria.  These demands are growing by the day.

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