The Case of George Pell by Melissa Davey

Author:Melissa Davey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC060000, TRU009000, REL108000, SOC051000, SOC047000, LAW027000, LAW052000, HIS037080, REL108000, REL081000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2020-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Retrial: part I

‘At the time all of these things took place, I wasn’t in a position to tell anyone as I feared I wouldn’t be believed. Priests had so much respect from parents and the like, Catholic families at that time almost idolised the local priest.’

– Survivor testimony to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

The prospect that we would be facing the same witnesses, questions, and evidence all over again was clearly tough for everyone, including Pell, the journalists, and the two legal teams. It must have also distressed the complainant, although he was not at the court. The journalists had spent five weeks on a case they could not write about, returning to their newsrooms with notes unable to be transformed into stories that could be run. The legal teams had spent months preparing their cases, dealing with an agonising wait as the jurors deliberated, and they would now have to go through the entire process again.

While journalists knew that the suppression order would eventually be lifted, it offered little comfort to them or their editors in the immediate aftermath of the mistrial. It did not change their feeling that weeks of work had been for nothing. If the prosecutors decided that it would be too expensive to run the trial again and dropped the case altogether, we would still be unable to report on the Cathedral mistrial until after the Swimmers’ trial had occurred, because of the suppression order in place. Reporting on the mistrial risked prejudicing the jury chosen for the Swimmers’ trial.

If the legal teams decided to delay the Swimmers’ trial – due to commence in November 2018 – in order to run the Cathedral trial a second time, the public would be much more interested in the result of the second Cathedral trial once the Swimmers’ trial was over, and only a few details of the mistrial would be reported. Jurors in a retrial are not told that a previous jury could not reach a verdict. A retrial is considered to be an entirely new trial, run independently and without prejudice from previous cases. So the big news from a retrial, once we could report it, would be whether Pell had won or lost the Swimmers’ trial and the second Cathedral trial; not the fact that, months earlier, a mistrial had been held, resulting in a hung jury. While, of course, we would still report the fact of the mistrial, no news program, publication, or website would have the space or airtime to run the full details of all three trials once the suppression order was lifted.

There is no doubt that almost everyone in the media who was present from day one, and who stayed the course of the mistrial, believed this was Richter’s case to lose because of the sheer passage of time that had elapsed since the alleged offences and the prosecution’s reliance on just one witness, the complainant. We were much less informed than the jurors when

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.