Here's a brief recap of the facts so we're all on the same page.
Cardinal George Pell was the third highest ranking Catholic in the world, and then he was charged with child sexual abuse in two seperate cases.
These are colloquially the priest's sacristy case, and the Ballarat swimmer's case. As these cases involved child sex abuse, and were very similar, a lot of the proceedings were conducted in closed court and there were numerous suppression orders.
The original trial for the priest's sacristy case resulted in a hung jury (up to 10 jurors voted against him, and 2 for him). Subsequently the case had to go again and have a retrial (which resulted in him being found guilty).
However, the Ballarat swimmer's case was going to trial and thus the Court ordered a very widespread suppression order to prevent the media from reporting on the outcome of the priest's sacristy case. In addition, there was geoblocking on Australia on anything to do with the Pell case, so Australians could not even find out about it from overseas sites unless they looked hard. These reasons for the suppression orders were to protect Pell from unfair prejudice that may arise if the jurors in the swimmer's trial knew he was guilty of one offence, AND to ensure that the Crown would be able to prosecute the case fully, without worrying that the defence could argue that there was unfair media reporting or stuff like that. The prosecution were the ones who applied for the suppression order.
However, shortly after Pell was found guilty for the priest's sacristy case, various Australian newspapers had headlines that hinted that something very big had gone down, but they were forbidden to talk about it. This resulted in the Crown taking criminal proceedings against 36 newspapers, editors and journalists for breaching the suppression order.
34 of the 36 journalists/newspapers were said to have "had a tendency to interfere with the due administration of justice in the prosecution of Pell" and of having "aided and abetted the overseas media's contempt".
16 of them were also accused of having "scandalis[ed] the court" in publications that were critical of the court.
Eventually the second trial was dropped, and so were the suppression orders. Thus Pell was sentenced in open court, and news crews were allowed in court to film it, and he received 6 years in jail, with a non-parole period of 3 years and 8 months.
So we finally come to the crux of the matter. What are your thoughts on these suppression orders, and on the charges being laid against journalists for hinting at Pell having been found guilty?
Were the suppression orders justified to ensure Pell got a fair trial, and that the prosecution's case didn't go to waste because the jury were obviously biased against him, or is any infringement on free speech whatsoever evil?
Extra info thats not important to this debate