VICTIMS OF FRENZY TO CONVICT

JOHN Francis Tyrrell walked free from jail last week, an innocent man ruined.

Yet another Catholic priest falsely convicted.

Just last December, another Catholic, former Adelaide archbishop Phillip Wilson, was also freed. Also wrongly convicted, said a judge.

Two such cases in just three months should make many media commentators pause.

Could Cardinal George Pell be the third victim of what seems a frenzy to convict accused Catholic priests for the sins of their church?

In Pell’s case, his defenders — like me — pointed out that his conviction for sexually abusing two 13-year-old boys in an open sacristy just minutes after presiding after Mass, and when witnesses agree that he and the boys would still be in the processional, seemed so unlikely that it could not meet the test of “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Not when one of the boys, now dead, told his mother he wasn’t abused.

In response, I was widely abused.

But let me tell you about Tyrrell. He, too, was unanimously convicted by a jury of sexual abuse on the word of a single accuser, using his memory of what allegedly happened in a Geelong school some 50 years earlier.

The Court of Appeal last week ruled that verdict unsound.

The judges said there were “serious discrepancies” between what the accuser had claimed and “the facts that were objectively established by the evidence”.

For a start, the accuser claimed he’d confronted Tyrell at the school in early 1969, yet Tyrell had left in 1966.

So why was the jury apparently so eager to convict Tyrell?

Wilson might have a clue. He was convicted last May in Newcastle of not reporting paedophile priest Jim Fletcher to police.

One of Fletcher’s victims claimed he’d told Wilson in 1976 he’d been abused, but Wilson said he had no memory of it.

He was convicted anyway and resigned as archbishop.

But last December, Judge Roy Ellis overruled the conviction, saying it did not meet the test of “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Wilson had seemed an honest witness, and his accuser’s evidence was inconsistent. When he’d allegedly told Wilson was unclear.

The judge, too, wondered why Wilson had nevertheless been convicted, in this case by a magistrate, and suggested “the potential for media pressure to impact judicial independence”.

If the media helped to damn Wilson, what might it have done to the far more vilified Pell?