The wheels of justice grind, as ever, with tortuous patience. Cardinal George Pell, convicted for historical child sex offences, has been granted leave to appeal to the High Court, Australia’s highest court and ultimate court of appeal – next year. The stakes in this challenge could not be higher: if the conviction is upheld, Australia’s most senior clergyman will be forever disgraced. If the conviction is overturned, it is some of the state of Victoria’s most senior judges, and indeed its entire justice system, which will be humiliated.
It is probably the most consequential appeal heard in the High Court since Lindy Chamberlain.
Melbourne barrister Daniel Gurvich QC said if the High Court chose not to hear the appeal or ultimately rejected it, it was likely to be the end of the road for Pell.
He said it would be difficult to predict the outcome of the hearing but “there was always hope” when the Court of Appeal was split 2-1.
Mr Gurvich, who chairs the Criminal Bar Association of Victoria, said Pell could potentially make a petition for mercy if the High Court upheld the verdict, but would need some sort of fresh evidence…
In next year’s hearing the High Court can reject the Cardinal’s special leave to appeal application or grant him leave to appeal.
If the court grants Pell leave to appeal, it will then determine whether his appeal case stands up.
If the court grants the appeal, it can order a retrial, an acquittal or send the case back to the Victorian Court of Appeal for consideration.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/high-court-throws-george-pell-sex-abuse-appeal-lifeline
There is also the potential for Pell to spend at least the next few months out of jail.
George Pell will consider whether to apply for bail after the High Court today agreed to examine his child sex offence convictions…Melbourne Law School professor Jeremy Gans said Pell could have applied for bail from the moment he was found guilty.
“You can seek bail at any time,” Professor Gans said. “And he thought about doing it in the Court of Appeal but didn’t.”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/high-court-decides-whether-to-hear-george-pells-appeal-against-child-sex-conviction
The case has extraordinary ramifications for the justice system of Australia’s second-most populous state. The Victorian police force is currently the subject of a royal commission which has so far uncovered the jaw-dropping saga of “Lawyer X”: former gangland lawyer Nicola Gobbo, who was a paid informant of the police at the same time as she was representing some of Australia’s most notorious gangsters.
The special leave application drawn up by [Bret Walker SC] and barrister Ruth Shann leads to an unstated but obvious conclusion: two of Victoria’s most senior judges utterly botched the cardinal’s case, not just on the facts but on the law…
Walker is widely regarded as one of the nation’s greatest lawyers. Yet his signature appears at the end of a document that accuses Ferguson and Maxwell of effectively reversing the onus of proof, engaging in “unorthodox reasoning”, “circular reasoning” and “erroneous judicial method”…The stakes are staggeringly high. This affair now concerns not just the freedom of a cardinal but the continued public standing of Victoria’s top judges and the man who might well be the nation’s greatest lawyer…
Whoever loses this argument will forever be damaged goods.
But as things stand now, Walker and Shann have the better argument.
It does look as though the cardinal has been the victim of a shocking miscarriage of justice.
In order to succeed, Pell’s legal team merely needed to show there was a reasonable doubt about the prosecution’s case.
The onus of proof was up to the prosecution; it was not up to the cardinal to prove his innocence.
Yet the special leave application asserts that the Court of Appeal majority decided the cardinal’s fate on the improper basis that it was up to the defence to prove that the prosecution case was impossible.
If this is what happened — and a conclusive ruling is up to the High Court — it will devastate Victoria’s system of criminal justice.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/a-states-system-of-justice-put-on-trial/