Court to deliver decision on Pell

DISGRACED Catholic cardinal George Pell has spent more than 400 days behind bars for the sexual abuse of two choirboys in the 1990s.

They are crimes Pell maintains he didn’t commit and the outcome of his final appeal bid will be revealed today.

Australia’s highest court will hand down its judgment in Brisbane, revealing whether it first grants Pell permission to appeal his five convictions and, if so, whether to grant his ultimate appeal.

He was convicted in 2018 and jailed for six years last March after a jury found he raped a 13-year-old choirboy and sexually molested another at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1996.

He lost a bid for freedom in Victoria’s Court of Appeal last year, when the two-thirds majority found there was enough evidence for the jury to find the 78-year-old guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

But Pell’s specialist appeals barrister, Bret Walker SC, says that’s not the case. “We’re not here to prove anything ... except to show, to demonstrate, that there was unexplored possibilities that meant it was not open to the jury to convict,” Mr Walker told the High Court last month.

Over two days, some of Australia’s top legal minds grilled Mr Walker and Victoria’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Kerri Judd QC.

The appeal bid is based on two grounds – firstly that Chief Justice Ann Ferguson and

President Chris Maxwell made an error in requiring Pell to prove the offending was “impossible” in order to raise reasonable doubt. Secondly, his lawyers have argued the judges erred in concluding the guilty verdicts were not unreasonable, because of findings there was reasonable doubt as to his guilt.

Pell’s convictions should be quashed and he should be immediately released from prison, Mr Walker argued.

The trial focused on five or six minutes after Sunday Mass in December 1996, when Pell caught the boys sneaking wine from the priest’s sacristy.

The jury found he molested the two boys then and, some time later, molested the first boy again.

“At both trials ... the evidence of the complainant was the only evidence to the effect that the offending had occurred,” he said.

He said the complainant’s evidence couldn’t stand if that of Sacristan Max Potter and Monsignor Charles Portelli – which included that Pell was never alone after Mass – was accepted.

THE EVIDENCE OF THE COMPLAINANT WAS THE ONLY EVIDENCE TO THE EFFECT THAT THE OFFENDING HAD OCCURRED

BARRISTER BRET WALKER