With the exception of two or three of our tastier fish species, I doubt if anything in Australia has taken a more comprehensive battering in recent years than our criminal justice system. It would be nice to say that the wrongful imprisonment of Kathy Folbigg is a rare blot on a nation’s otherwise exemplary judicial record. But I suspect most of us were less shocked by her acquittal last week than we were by her conviction twenty years ago. It wasn’t always thus. Ned Kelly may have a certain Robin Hood allure for modern Australians, but few of his contemporaries would have questioned the integrity and competence of the police who arrested him or the judge who hanged him. And even 100 years later, the faith of most Australians in the courts was still strong enough to withstand the reversals of the Lindy Chamberlain case – with even those who still think she did it conceding that the discovery of new evidence damaged the prosecution narrative. But the miscarriages of justice which have done most to undermine our confidence in our legal system in recent times were not exposed by the discovery of new evidence or, as in the Folbigg case, overturned by advances in science. The decision to charge Cardinal Pell was always, and by any evidentiary measure, ludicrous, and the fact that it was eventually adjudged to be so by the High Court, after the man had spent more than a year in prison, should reassure nobody. It was obvious from the get-go that what was really on trial was not so much an elderly man as a global patriarchy – of which Cardinal Pell just happened to be a figurehead. And what became clear as the case progressed first through the criminal and then the appeal courts was that a substantial proportion of the Victorian judiciary were also of this opinion, and were determined that the verdict which had already been delivered across the tables of Toorak dining rooms, and amplified by an overwhelmingly left-leaning local media, should not be gainsaid by due process – at least, not on their watch. It is hard not to see parallels between the Pell acquittal and the decision of the Director of Public Prosecuter to abandon the prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann. And in the latter case the publication of all those texts and emails and the making of all those speeches raises even more glaringly obvious questions about the ability of public servants and senior legal figures to conduct themselves with integrity and objectivity. It is now a matter of public record, for example, that ACT police never thought there was enough evidence to convict Mr Lehrmann, and that they advised Shane Drumgold, the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions, not to press charges. Mr Drumgold has yet to give an adequate reason for ignoring this advice, and until he does, it will be hard not to conclude that he was motivated by the same fear which presumably motivated Scott Morrison to publicly apologise (on our behalf) to Brittany Higgins weeks before the trial even started, and which persuaded the Federal Attorney-General and Federal Finance Minister to sign off on Miss Higgins’s $2m+ Commonwealth compensation package within three days of her claim being lodged. That is to say, it is hard not to conclude that all these respected figures were more concerned about being seen to believe a woman’s claim to have been sexually assaulted than being seen to believe in habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence. The systemic failure which led to Chris Dawson not being convicted of the murder of his wife for 30 years, it must be said, was not the result of the divided loyalties of lawyers and officials. It was mainly just the incompetence and laziness of NSW police, and it’s no exaggeration to say that if it hadn’t been for the endeavour of a single journalist Dawson would still be a free man today. As free, indeed, as all the murderers and rapists who we may assume have escaped justice in Queensland in the past few years because the evidence with which police and prosecutors hoped to convict them was deemed insufficiently strong by a pathology lab whose boss, as we now know, had raised the admissibility bar to cut costs. If there are any aspiring Ned Kellys in Australia today I cannot imagine them being greatly deterred by the men and women in uniforms, white coats and wigs.