Cardinal Pell’s last-chance appeal allowed
George Pell will get one last bid to overturn his child-sex convictions and restore his reputation after the High Court announced that it would hear his appeal.
Australia’s highest court said yesterday it had granted the disgraced Cardinal special leave to appeal his convictions on the five child sex abuse charges he was found guilty of last year.
Pell lawyers will now need to lodge a formal appeal, which could be heard as early as this summer. It is the 78-year-old’s only remaining legal avenue to clear his name.
Immediately after the decision, Pell’s lawyers held a meeting with him at the Melbourne Assessment Prison.
The decision means the Vatican will likely delay taking any action against Pell, who retains his title of Cardinal.
It will also delay the release of any findings against Pell made by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
To date, the commission’s findings about Pell remain redacted.
Pell was jailed earlier this year for raping one choirboy and sexually assaulting another at St Patrick’s Cathedral in East Melbourne more than 20 years ago.
He is currently isolated from the general prison population, serving a six-year jail term and will not be eligible for parole until he has served three years and eight months.
Pell was unanimously convicted by a Victorian County
Court jury last December of sex offences against two children when he was Archbishop of Melbourne.
The case against Pell was heavily reliant on the testimony of a former choirboy who described how Pell assaulted him and his friend after he caught them drinking altar wine in the cathedral sacristy after Sunday mass. His conviction was upheld by a 2-1 majority decision of the Court of Appeal in August.
At the heart of Pell’s appeal to the High Court is the question of whether the evidence of a complainant in a sexual abuse case, no matter how compelling and believable, can eliminate all reasonable doubt raised by other witnesses.
Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Court of Appeal President Chris Maxwell found that Pell’s accuser was neither a liar nor a fantasist but a compelling witness of truth.
Pell’s appeal to the High Court hinges on the argument that the majority decision of Justices Ferguson and Maxwell failed to properly weigh the evidence of other witnesses who testified to the unlikelihood and in some cases near impossibility, of Pell being alone in the sacristy with two choristers.
The Cardinal’s legal counsel, Brett Walker, SC, submitted that although the choirboy was compelling and believable, this other evidence created reasonable doubt about Pell’s guilt.
According to Walker, the dissenting judge, Justice Mark Weinberg, got it right.
‘‘The majority’s erroneous judicial method prevented them from recognising that, even on their own incomplete analysis of the evidence, doubt was raised and left,’’ Walker submitted.
In response, Kerri Judd, QC, Victoria’s director of public prosecutions, said there was no error in the Court of Appeal’s majority decision and no important question in law raised by Pell’s legal team.
Pell was once Australia’s most senior Catholic and rose to become the Vatican’s treasurer, which at one point made him the third-most powerful man in the church and an adviser to the Pope.
Rowville parish priest Father Kevin Dillon, who founded victims’ advocacy group Lifeboat, said the law must take its course.
‘‘The victims I speak to, and I speak to many, do not really see that [High Court announcement] as being a key issue,’’ he said. ‘‘What hurts them and damages them is that they are still being treated with hair-splitting legal niceties, whereas what they are looking for is a recognition that as children or teenagers they were treated terribly by a person they thought they could trust.’’ – Nine