Acquittal of cardinal as opaque as trial
SYDNEY — Cardinal George Pell walked out of prison Tuesday after Australia’s highest court reversed his 2018 conviction for molesting two choirboys decades earlier — liberating the most senior Roman Catholic cleric ever to face trial over child sexual abuse.
The world may never be able to assess whether the court’s reasoning was sound.
The panel of seven judges ruled that the jury lacked sufficient doubt about the accusations against Pell, the former archbishop of Melbourne and treasurer for the Vatican. Jurors, the court argued, ignored “compounding improbabilities” caused by conflicting accounts from the cardinal’s main accuser and other witnesses.
But no one outside the court case can test that comparison. The central evidence — the testimony of the main accuser, on which the case “was wholly dependent,” the judges wrote — has never been released, not in video, audio nor even redacted transcripts.
It is just one glaring example of the secrecy and lack of accountability that have shaped the Pell prosecution from the beginning. No criminal trial in Australia’s recent history has been as highprofile nor as hard to follow and scrutinize.
The case has been a model of opaque operations, starting with judges who dismissed related allegations early on, followed by gag orders preventing media coverage and a refusal to release evidence — even when a jury verdict is dismissed as unreasonable.
Legal experts said that the case made clear just how much power judges in Australia have to suppress public oversight and overrule jury verdicts, raising questions about whether the system adequately values citizen participation. At every stage, critics argue, Australia’s courts exhibited a penchant for secrecy and insular decisionmaking that resembled the Catholic Church’s flawed and damaging response to sexual abuse within its ranks.
“It’s endemic to various areas in the landscape of Australian governance,” said Jason Bosland, a law professor at Melbourne University. “We have this approach of ‘Well, you just have to trust us.’ It’s a problem.”