The rejection of Cardinal George Pell’s appeal against his convictions for child sexual abuse appears to have prompted two quite different responses from his supporters: utter silence from some, and a doubling down from others.
For the centre-right, who made noises about culture wars and easily swayed juries, it’s as if Pell had never existed. No surprises there, since extending such an attack means arguing that two of three appeal judges could be swayed by public opinion, which could not help but raise wider doubts about how a court system is constituted. Pell wasn’t worth it for them to go there.
But the harder right have been willing to go all the way, with Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine and Bettina Arndt leading the charge. They didn’t have much to work with, so far as the appeal went. No smoking gun, no twist of legal paradox. The majority judgment was that the sole witness and surviving victim was a “witness of truth”. Justice Mark Weinberg’s dissent suggested he embellished and “clutched at straws” when challenged on inconsistencies.
That simply reproduces the division that occurred in public when the jury verdict was announced, so the hard right have had to develop the novel idea that a split appeal decision is itself unsafe. It isn’t, obviously; that’s why there’s a multi-purpose appeal panel, odd-numbered. Essentially, Pell’s supporters now have to attack the entire fabric of the justice system, to defend their man. That has the air of banana republic junta politics about it.
The legal system acted as it was supposed to — and, from a critical left perspective, it usually doesn’t — and in the process damaged a parallel pillar of the establishment, the Catholic Church. Beyond the impact on Pell the man, this is the real biggie. As the NSW abortion debate shows, the right increasingly uses Catholicism as an absolute buttress for their culture wars, because liberalised Anglicanism no longer provides a “capital stock” of cultural value. The rejection of Pell’s appeal has shaken the cathedral spire once again, here and around the world.
But the appeal result has drawn progressives and leftists even tighter into an embrace with a justice system they would and should be suspicious and critical of at every level of its operation.
The inevitable gap between a legal justice process and certainty is on display every day in courts all across the land, and usually not in the defendant’s favour. The usual single witness is a cop in a magistrates’ court, never challenged on whatever they’re reading out of their notebook. The incarceration mill for Indigenous, Islander- and African-Australian youth relies on such inherent credulity and the material support of such — via the lack of legal aid defence funds to challenge a prosecution — to function at the rate it does, across the country.
But in this case, progressives felt that justice was served by the crediting of single-witness testimony, since to disregard it due to lack of corroboration would be to reward the very abuse of institutional power — isolate and discredit — that abusers in the Catholic church have relied upon to operate. They also rightly, and uselessly, pointed out that the right doesn’t have much trouble with the many single-witness plea bargains/convictions running through the court everyday.
Fair enough on both counts. But the mix of judicial endorsement and sheer power-political “we got a win” has utterly swapped the polarities: the right is using the language of institutional critique — courts are influenced by ideology, expressive of wider power relations etc — while the progressives are identifying a lower court verdict and a two-to-one appeal as an expression of the judicial system’s truth-defining powers.
If the High Court takes an appeal from Pell, then a final upholding will confirm this crossover absolutely, while a quashing of the conviction will drive everyone nuts.
What the great Pell crossover shows is the degree to which defined progressive v conservative struggles have collapsed as battles of ideas or principles. The right simply wants to maintain the concrete power of interlocking institutions, based on the privileges of a very small power-elite, legitimised by claiming to speak for excluded masses. Progressives and the left are in the business of extending and enforcing knowledge-class power and ideology, and desperate for every win, that they will abandon earlier, more radical institutional critique.
That is not to put in a plea for Pell, who has now been convicted and that conviction upheld. It’s true that the focus on this case, given the vast amount of injustice in the system lower down, is as irritating as it is politically inevitable. If anything, it should spur on radical lawyers and law firms here to develop a more visible Innocence Project — there is a suspicious lack of overturned convictions in Australia, compared to the US and UK — and for more pro bono work to mount real defences for those, especially youth, being railroaded to guilty pleas on the base of a single-witness case. But, above all, it’s to remember that legal justice is neither truth nor moral right, and we on the left/progressive side of things will have to be arguing that case forcefully in the years to come, for the sake of others, and ourselves.
“especially youth, being railroaded to guilty pleas on the base of a single-witness case.”
Once upon a time you could only be convicted on the basis of accounts of “two or three witnesses”.
The frustrating thing about the Pell case is that it is serving as a distraction from the core issue, which really about the nature of the institution, not the individuals within it. It seems to me that those within the organisation who should really be doing a lot of soul searching right now are using the endless and basically unresolvable ‘did he/didn’t he’ discussion as a way of delaying or avoiding the deeper soul searching that the broader sexual abuse history demands. For those of us outside the organisation, the moral standing of an organisation that has knowingly protected paedophiles perhaps needs to be re-evaluated, along with its entitlement to engage in other ethical debates, such as abortion rights and euthanasia. I think these are the things that the Left should be focussing on, not the validity or otherwise of a single legal case.
It’s a good point Graeski.
“…that legal justice is neither truth nor moral right.” Exactly. A single witness from how long ago? Children make for very poor witnesses but scores of years later, as an adult, somehow the evidence is beyond reasonable doubt? Surely we, the public, have been denied some information here because, whether you back Pell personally or not, this smells a little rotten.
Well that’s yr opinion, but not really what I’m saying. My suggestion is that legal justice and Truth aren’t the same thing. Pell has had a scrupulously fair judicial process
Hear, Hear! There are none so deaf and blind as those who switch-off their hearing and sight in support of their prejudices. Thank God for an independent judiciary!
Good article Guy, except for your misinterpretation of the right as wanting to maintain the power of interlocking institutions. The central story of the last 30 years in the Anglosphere is the undermining of public institutions by the hard right – using as its playbook Buchanan’s public choice theory. The public service has been politicised (not exclusively, but most egregiously, by right wing governments), public education has been discredited, the judiciary has been undermined, gatekeepers like Auditors-General and Directors of Public Prosecution have been attacked, public broadcasters pilloried. Institutions, imperfect as they are, are the bulwark of social improvement. Like Kaiser Soze, the Right’s great trick has been making ‘institutional’ a pejorative.
Guy says: “My suggestion is that legal justice and Truth aren’t the same thing. Pell has had a scrupulously fair judicial process”.
Funny definition of “fair”, wouldn’t you say?
Well that rules out almost every sexual assault allegation. In almost every such case, there is only one witness of fact for the prosecution and one witness of fact for the defence. Then, the adversarial system licences a character attack on the complainant by the defence. That is inevitable because you cannot prove a negative. In Pells case at least the complainant was shielded from the conventional character assassination. Pell obliquely argued that the complainant had to be a liar because what he was alleging could not have happened, as close to trying to prove a negative as one can go. But a jury of 12 and now 2 Supreme Court judges determined it was not impossible and the complainant was credible.
It makes one wonder: Would protecting he complainant in other sexual assault cases from the conventional character assassination result in a greater proportion of findings of guilt?
The witness was nor shielded from scrutiny.
Pell’s legal team and private investigators, went over this brave man’s personal history looking for a character flaw or transgression that could be used to discredit him.
They found none.
This is a very common legal technique, and, is usually very successful, because survivors of sexual abuse usually turn to drugs, alcohol, promiscuity or other self destructive behaviors including becoming sexual predators themselves.
It gives a background for why so many accusations and allegations regarding Pell could be so easily dismissed, as the only witness to each event, could be impeached as unreliable. The Melbourne response was the most cynical abuse of power, that I have ever examined at length. With the benefit of hindsight, it is nauseating.
Consider this, as a background, the absolute bravery and determination and moral courage, required to come forward from your safe life and happy home, risking it all, to level a charge of sexual assault, with no supporting witness, against the most well connected, socially astute, highly regarded, Catholic Archbishop in Australia, who has the open purse of the Catholic Church at his disposal.
Well done, you have given all survivors of sexual abuse, the understanding that surviving is only part of the equation.
You have demonstrated that going on to lead a good life is also possible.
I wonder, how many more people, like you, are out there, also with that locked box.
‘Children make for very poor witnesses’. I doubt a young teenager would ever forget such abuse.
I detect no rotten smell; not the one you’re alluding to at any rate. Been Around has probably said it all, but I’ll ask if you’ve read the Summary of the Royal Commission Report, which says, below the heading ‘Identifying child sexual abuse and understanding disclosure’:
“Many victims do not disclose child sexual abuse until many years after the abuse occurred, often when they are well into adulthood. Survivors who spoke with us during a private session took,
on average, 23.9 years to tell someone about the abuse and men often took longer to disclose than women (the average for females was 20.6 years and for males was 25.6 years). Some victims never disclose.”
https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/final_report_-_volume_4_identifying_and_disclosing_child_sexual_abuse.pdf
Also recommended is this 2015 article from The Conversation:
https://theconversation.com/why-does-it-take-victims-of-child-sex-abuse-so-long-to-speak-up-46412
Many of the sex abuse prosecutions brought against clergy have been based on evidence of crimes committed ‘long ago’, if not ‘scores of years’. In Pell’s case it was 21 years before his being charged, not such a long time anyway.
You said: “Children make for very poor witnesses”. As pointed out by Bref, although child memory may be unreliable in the long term, the actual abuse would never be forgotten. The question then is: did he correctly identify who did it? Since he was in choir, he would certainly know who Pell was, I would think.
The lose of credibility for the Catholic Church from this case, is the reasons so many diatribes have been written regarding the soundness or not of the verdicts.
The hand wringing “suffering like Christ”, bell ringing noise, regarding Pell, is really only masking the horror, that the institution is feeling in contemplating the diminution of the credibility and authority exercised by the Catholic Church in our, and the broader community of civilized countries.
The Catholic Church has been the most publicly silent and yet formidable power, in support of the conservative right. Quietly undermining and effectively robbing, the state school system, to fund its own expansion, the catholic churches power is expanding along with its doctrine. The Jesuits used to say give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man. Unfortunately, I have come to the understanding that they too, now hold with the ideas of the Alt-Right.
Along with a number of my family, we have converted to the Anglican church, as it now more represents our views on the broader issues. I add a rider to this, all the parishioners of my sister’s and my parish were not impressed with the Archbishop of Sydney wasting money on the no vote for SSM. The money could have been better spent on providing food for the poor, of which we all see the number rising.
Thank you Robert.
It is a pretty well known fact, particularly in psychology circles, that very early memories are most likely of traumatic situations. These memories unfortunately stay with individuals hence most therapies go back as far as possible with clients as adult problems often have a root in the past.
BTW that’s not pointed at you Robert.
All the best to you and all of us who have been treated badly by adults when we could not defend ourselves.
Thanks and good on you for sharing this Robert
Agree, along with whether these institutions should be able to receive and use secular money (public funds and tax holidays) to discriminate against women and people’s sexual orientation, martial status etc in employment, in the provision of health or other services or to advocate that their particular practices be imposed on others.
I also agree with Guy that attention should be focussed on improving the justice system, though I disagree with his hypothesis that wrongful guilty verdicts should be the main focus for reform (though it is an issue). I’d argue increasing victims’ rights to participate in proceedings, and doing something to decrease the overall incarceration rate highlighted recently by Andrew Leigth are more important.
A “man” who thought the price of stock standard commodore was appropriate redress for being anally raped as a child is now a convicted Pedo … its enough to strengthen ones faith..
Can there be some consensus that offence is a different thing to illegal?
It is what Pell represents, rather than the man himself, that is at issue?
What chance of auto de fe?