Posted on 02/01/2021 6:59:46 PM PST by marshmallow
CNA Staff, Feb 1, 2021 / 06:30 am MT (CNA).- Australian prosecutors announced on Monday that they were dropping charges against individual journalists accused of breaching a gag order over the trial of Cardinal George Pell.
Prosecutor Lisa De Ferrari told the Supreme Court of Victoria on Feb. 1 that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had decided to drop the charges against the individuals after all 12 Australian media outlets accused of breaching the order agreed to plead guilty.
The media companies also signaled that they would pay part of the DPP’s prosecution costs.
“Each corporate respondent has indicated that it will plead guilty, in respect of each publication for which they are charged, to contempt by breaching the proceeding suppression order,” De Ferrari said, according to The Australian newspaper.
She explained that the DPP had decided that it was no longer in the public interest to pursue the other charges.
The County Court of Victoria imposed a sweeping injunction in June 2018, at the request of the prosecution, preventing the media from reporting on two trials involving Pell until the jury agreed a verdict in the second trial.
While the order applied legally only to Australian media, it also extended, in effect, to international media that published or broadcast in Australia.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicnewsagency.com ...
Color me confused.
Maybe because this excerpt you posted provides no real context?
From an article excerpted here at Free Republic back in November of 2020:
Such suppression orders are common in the Australian and British judicial systems. But the enormous international interest in an Australian criminal trial with global ramifications highlighted the difficulty in enforcing such orders in the digital age. Pell was convicted on Dec. 11, 2018, of sexually abusing two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral when he the city’s archbishop in the late 1990s.
The trial of Pope Francis’s former finance minister and the most senior Catholic to be charged with child sex abuse had not been reported in the news media because of a suppression order that forbid publication of details in any format that could be accessed from Australia. Details were suppressed to prevent prejudicing jurors in a second child abuse trial that Pell was to face three months later.
Everything clear, now?
Regards,
Oh, I know the backstory. And it’s a fair point that it’s unfair and pointless to put a gag on media in Australia, when the rest of the world can report on it all they want - and accessed by Australians. But why drop charges after a guilty plea? Why not just drop charges, or, fine them $1 or something?
When you paste an excerpt such as the above, it should also be mentioned the Supreme Court reversed, and the charges were made up political prosecutions.
Cardinal George Pell will be freed from jail after Australia's highest court overturned his convictions for child sexual abuse.The ex-Vatican treasurer, 78, had been the most senior Catholic figure ever jailed for such crimes.
In 2018, a jury found he abused two boys in Melbourne in the 1990s.
But the High Court of Australia quashed that verdict on Tuesday, meaning the cardinal will immediately stop serving a six-year jail sentence.
The Australian cleric has maintained his innocence since he was charged by police in June 2017.
A full bench of seven judges ruled unanimously in Cardinal Pell's favour.
It was his final legal challenge, after his conviction was upheld by a lower court last year.
True, of course!
I wanted to merely provide some coarse context to the more-recent article - but yes: It is important to also note that the Cardinal was later exonerated.
Regards,
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