AUSTRALIA
The Saturday Paper
March 15, 2020
By Rick Morton
The final bid for George Pell’s freedom began with a test of faith.
Addressing the full bench of the High Court in Canberra this week, the cardinal’s silk, Bret Walker, SC, drew his line in the sand: believing the surviving victim was not enough to convict Pell to six years in prison for historical child sexual abuse. Faith can be wrong, he argued. Faith is slippery.
“It does not mean that all of us when we say, in or out of court, that we believe something are therefore also saying, let alone making true, the fact that we cannot be wrong in that to which our belief leads us,” Walker told the court. “The belief does not drive from the field the possibility of reasonable doubt.”
This was the scaffold upon which Pell’s defence would rest.
The credibility of the victim was not in question, Walker argued, but was he reliable? In asking the court to dismantle the faith placed in the survivor of abuse, he urged them to look elsewhere, at the “whole of the evidence”.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.