I was watching BBC Parliament during lunch today and it was live coverage of the debate around this Bill.
Some very interesting stuff. Several members expressing concern about the way the police, CPS and media treat suspects. They used Cliff and Paul Gambaccini, and the couple who were wrongly arrested in the drones over Heathrow affair as examples.

They were not mixing their words. There seems to be genuine desire to change things for the better.

Words are hardly enough, but it's a start.

I don't like it because it's just a way to make things worse for those who are charged and/or convicted. The only people who are really in a position to fight back against the State and show the public its wrongs are those who aren't convicted. Once you are convicted for most people it's a case of either committing suicide or blowing yourself up to make a point.

I tend to agree with Holocaust 21.

I think the more people expose the underbelly of this whole rotten system that encourages false accusations, the more vested interests will fight back and get really really nasty.

I might harp on it but I've watched with the George Pell matter how intelligent clever people have conducted a viscous Witch Hunt against the man for decades and are almost salivating now they have got their man.

Couple with police mendacity.
The endlessly corrupt Victorian Police will dig their heels in now they might be exposed over their shocking anti-Pell tactics.

At least people are fighting back but will they triumph?

catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/201...fair-trial-possible/

The trial of Cardinal Pell may come to be seen as another dark chapter in legal history

The last thing a raging fire burning out of control needs is for a jet of petrol to be sprayed on it.

But Cardinal George Pell’s defence counsel, Robert Richter QC, did exactly that at his client’s sentencing hearing on Wednesday. If Cardinal Pell was guilty, it was of a “plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating,” he told the court.

Richter has since apologised for his inexplicably tasteless choice of words, which were seized on by the media to suggest – wrongly – that Pell’s own lawyer was conceding his guilt. But the damage was done.

He might as well have incinerated the cardinal himself. Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic churchman now faces a lonely old age in the unforgiving environs of a maximum security facility, a prospect that fills sections of the Australian public, intoxicated by primitive emotions, with the sort of thrill their ancestors would derive from a public execution.

The Australian public’s bloodlust for Cardinal Pell was on full display at the beginning of the week. Pell emerged slowly from an Australian court on Tuesday convicted of child sex offences and into a scrum. He had been found guilty after two trials, the first of which resulted in a hung jury. His conviction came despite the historicity of the allegations against him, in the absence of any forensic evidence supporting the charges and in the teeth of witnesses who attested to their impossibility.