On April 7 the seven justices of the High Court unanimously found that there was “no evidence” to support the accuser’s narrative beyond his own perceived credibility by the jury, and that, “acting rationally on the whole of the evidence,” the jury could not have avoided reasonable doubt about Cardinal Pell’s innocence.
“Plainly they did,” the justices concluded.
“Making full allowance for the advantages enjoyed by the jury,” the High Court said, “there is a significant possibility in relation to [the] charges... that an innocent person has been convicted.”
The process against Cardinal Pell began in 2013, when police in Victoria opened Operation Tethering, an open-ended investigation into possible crimes committed by the cardinal, despite there being no accusations or criminal complaints against him at that time.
The following year, in 2014, senior police officers in Victoria discussed via internal email how developments in the Cardinal Pell investigation could be used to deflect media scrutiny and criticism from an unfolding corruption scandal in the force.
The operation was given a more formal footing the following year and charges were announced in 2017. Cardinal Pell repeatedly denied all the accusations and left Rome for Melbourne insisting that he would clear his name in court.
During pre-trial committal hearings, several of the accusations, related to his time as a priest in the town of Ballarat, were dropped by prosecutors owing to lack of evidence.
In 2018, Cardinal Pell arrived in court to face the first of what was originally meant to be two trials. That trial proceeded to a deadlock under a court-ordered media blackout in the early autumn of 2018. A five week retrial, also subject to blanket reporting restrictions, convicted Cardinal Pell in December of that year, and he was sentenced to six years in prison.
The second trial collapsed before it could begin when, in January last year, prosecutors conceded they did not have enough evidence to proceed to trial.
Cardinal Pell’s initial appeal of the verdict was rejected in 2019 by a court in Victoria, before the case went to the High Court which quashed the conviction.
While Cardinal Pell has been, for many, the face of Catholicism in Australia, and was much maligned after an Australian government enquiry revealed decades of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and other institutions, he insisted that his ordeal should have been limited to the allegations against him.
“My trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church; nor a referendum on how Church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of peadeophilia in the Church.”
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“The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes and I did not.”
Finn told the Catholic Weekly, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Sydney, that there had been “a massive miscarriage of justice against a good man.”
“You don’t have to be Catholic to be concerned about this,” he added. “If this can happen to Cardinal Pell it can happen to anyone and it clearly reveals a major flaw in Victoria’s so-called justice system.”
