Well, de triosus Christos and welcome to GloriaTV News.
Seventy-seven-year-old Trevor Sparratt, a former maths teacher in Melbourne, Australia,
was freed in early February after his convictions were squashed.
A court had found him guilty of nine counts of indecent assault, dating back to the 1970s,
against four male teenagers.
One accuser said, Spirit abused him in class while he sat next to a friend who told the jury he never saw anything happen.
A second accuser claimed he was assaulted in full view of the whole class.
A third said he was assaulted at a camp between 1969 and 1971.
But there was only one camp in 1971 at which Spurritt didn't participate.
He spent almost 12 months in prison after having received an 11-year sentence.
Commenting on the case, Andrew Bolt, one of the last honest journalists in Australia,
wrote on heroldson.com.au.
Stop unfairly jailing old men over child rape claims.
Bolt asks, how many elderly Australian men must be unfairly jailed for raping boys
before we call this hysteria? Spirit was the fourth man in four years to be freed.
Bolt quotes a lead detective who said that it's incumbent on us to believe what complainants tell us.
He rewrote the accuser's story 15 times to make it fit the facts, only to still have it crumble in court.
This detective was also involved early in the investigation of the falsely accused Cardinal George Pell.
Bolt remembers patrician brother Peter Higgins, who was jailed for raping a student in 1976,
but a court of appeal quashed his conviction last year.
The court said that the female judge who'd convicted Higgins misstated his evidence,
falsely claimed his accuser's allegations were corroborated, made findings against the evidence,
and wrongly rejected the powerful testimony of seven witnesses saying Higgins was a good man.
The judge claimed their evidence was colored by the fact that they knew him.
There was the case of the frail and partially blind Christian brother John Francis Tyrell,
who was jailed for 11 years on the word of a single false accuser, trying to remember
what happened in a Geelong school some 50 years earlier.
Two years ago, Victoria's Court of Appeal freed him.
His accuser told the court that he was raped by Tyrell during a time when Tyrell wasn't even at the school.
Finally, Balt recalls late Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson, who was convicted on a charge
so shaky that an appeal court freed him three years ago.
His accuser had claimed that 40 years earlier he told Wilson he'd been abused by another
priest.
Wilson's crime was in not reporting this alleged conversation twenty-eight years later
to police, then investigating that priest for other sex offenses.
Wilson insisted he couldn't recall being told, and the appeal court judge listed fourteen
reasons to doubt the accuser's evidence, calling it inconsistent.
This was Gloria TV News.
Thanks for being with us today and God bless you!